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This chapter discusses collaboration between a UK university and an Ethiopian College of Teacher Education in supporting the introduction of pre-primary schooling into the Government schools of a large Ethiopian town. The project recognised the limited effectiveness of Minority World training programmes imposed upon a Majority World context, so it was designed in full collaboration with the local community’s educators and closely linked to indigenous practices and knowledge about schooling systems and child-rearing.

The UK university ‘expert’ deliberately did not ‘manage’ or ‘control’ the Project Team of Ethiopian teachers and teacher educators but supported them in designing and implementing a programme of professional development for local pre-primary teachers, based upon a cycle of observations, workshops, feedback visits to participants’ settings and formative evaluation to shape new initiatives.

The chapter discusses the inevitable challenges and difficulties encountered, resulting from different educational perspectives, from very limited resourcing and from gender and status issues within the Team. The project, now in its second year, is having impacts upon local pre-primary schooling, and confirms the empowering effect of a collaborative and sustainable model of Minority World support for Majority World educational initiatives.

The chapters in this book focus on how university-school-community (USC) partnerships are implemented in colleges, universities, school systems, and community organizations around the world. The purpose of these multi-disciplinary programs is to reform teaching and learning experiences for all participants. Using case studies and other empirical research, this volume presents a broad and in-depth overview on a variety of USC partnerships to assist educators in the process of transforming organizations using innovative approaches to improve community and school system development. This chapter will provide an overview to this volume and establish a framework for better understanding the nature of university partnerships to enhance community and school system development.

This study aimed at exploring mathematics teachers’ reactions, learning, school leaders’ support, and the use of the lesson study for transformative assessment (LSforTA) program ideas in practice.

The LSforTA program was new and therefore, a local and grounded approach was needed to examine teachers’ knowledge and their skills acquired using LSforTA. A design-based research approach was therefore selected to evaluate and refine the LSforTA approach.

The program affected teachers’ practices of transformative assessment and enhanced their knowledge and skills in assessing students transformatively in a positive way. The paper concludes how LSforTA procedures were adapted in response to this evaluation and provides suggestions for future development and research.

With its original combination of conceptual and theoretical lenses, the research contributes to the academic literature by linking transformative assessment, lesson study and school context. This connection provides new opportunities for teachers to develop strategies to create meaningful assessment practices embedded with their instructional process in the context of their schools.