Chapter 1: A Guides to the Resoruce Book

Overview of the resource book

The Resource Book is organized into five parts and eleven chapters. The first part, Chapters 1 and 2, provides a general introduction to TAMAM as an educational reform movement in the Arab World, covering its theoretical foundations, framework and strategic goals as well as its student profile. The second part, comprising Chapters 3 and 4, presents the theoretical foundations of TAMAM’s Capacity Building Program, mainly the effective approaches for building leadership capacity for improvement as well as the organizational characteristics that promote self-renewal. The third part includes Chapter 5 and offers an overview about the coaches’ profile in TAMAM along with their roles and responsibilities. The fourth part includes Chapters 6, 7 and 8 and details the steps needed for initiating TAMAM at schools and forming lead teams. This part also gives an overview of the targeted learning outcomes of the TAMAM Capacity Building Program that these teams are expected to acquire, the job embedded learning experiences and the competencies required as part of the TAMAM School Improvement Journey as well as the evaluation procedures to assess the effectiveness of the program. The final part consists of Chapters 9, 10 and 11 and highlights the coaching process in TAMAM. It presents guidelines for setting the stage for initiating and planning the TAMAM Capacity Building Program as well as an overview of the tools available for coaches to document and manage the knowledge generated through the on-going action research. Throughout the book, general tips for coaches are also incorporated within the chapters to guide their work of building capacity for school improvement.

In addition, the resource book contains a prologue outlining the emerging expansions within TAMAM, namely, those related to adding new components to the existing Capacity Building Program that target students, parents and the community as a whole, establishing a professional network of educators, preparing the training of trainers modules and developing research partnerships.

The Resource Book also includes several appendices with training modules. TAMAM training modules are independent units of instructional guides that can be used as resources for coaches to construct their job-embedded activities. The book also offers tools and templates that can be used by coaches and school improvement teams to document their experiences and to elaborate on the progress of their acquisition of the conceptual understanding adopted in TAMAM for each of the main competencies and skills targeted in the Capacity Building Program. This documentation is also a major source of data that feeds into the  on-going research in TAMAM, specifically evaluative research that examines the effectiveness of the TAMAM Capacity Building Program in reaching its desired and targeted outcomes.