This is Part 2 of a four-part comprehensive evaluation of the public textbook procurement system in Morocco. It documents the Ministry of Education's textbook procurement system processes and presents the results of a survey of supplemental early reading materials in Arabic available in the Moroccan market. It also offers recommendations on how to increase the use of supplemental reading materials in the classroom.

Cultivating Dynamic Educators: Case Studies in Teacher Behavior Change in Africa and Asia responds to growing recognition by international education professionals, policy makers, and funding partners of the need for qualified teachers and interest in the subject of teacher professional development (also referred to as “teacher behavior change”). The book responds to important questions that are fundamental to improving teaching quality by influencing teaching practice. These questions include: How do we provide high-quality training at scale? How do we ensure that training transfers to change in practice? What methods are most cost-effective? How do we know what works? The book includes case studies from seven countries--Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Nigeria, Philippines and Zambia--describing different approaches to teacher behavior change and illustrates how specific implementation choices were made for each context. Individual chapters document lessons learned as well as methodologies used for discerning lessons. The key conclusion is that no single effort is enough on its own; teacher behavior change requires a system-wide view and concerted, coordinated inputs from a range of stakeholders.

Chapter 7 of Edited Volume: Pouezevara, S. R. (Ed.) (2018). Cultivating dynamic educators: Case studies in teacher behavior change in Africa and Asia. (RTI Press Publication No. BK-0022-1809). Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI Press. DOI: 10.3768/rtipress.2018.bk.0022.1809 This case study explores the methods and implementation considerations of peer-learning approaches to changing teaching practice in the Indonesian context, where cluster-based training is deeply embedded in the education system. These clusters were leveraged by USAID/PRIORITAS to disseminate professional development through a structured lesson-study approach. To understand more about how teachers were learning to improve their practice through peer mentoring, data were collected through interviews and school visits in August 2016. The main purpose of the case study was to understand the scope and implementation considerations of school-based and peer-to-peer approaches to teacher behavior change, with particular focus on improving reading instruction. We particularly have tried to uncover the implementation factors that influenced the possibility of success of peer mentoring in Indonesia under USAID/PRIORITAS, including issues of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, readiness for self-directed learning, and the relative importance of the foundation laid by the preexisting school- cluster structure described in the Methodology section.

Background paper prepared for the 2016 Global Education Monitoring Report Education for people and planet: Creating sustainable futures for all With the adoption of the United Nations General Assembly’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), global education agencies are grappling with how quality can and should be measured for global reporting purposes. Several factors at the education system, school, and classroom levels shape education quality, including the limited information available at the global level about what is happening in the classroom. Such information can only come through observation-based measures that record teacher practices, either through routine monitoring conducted by system actors or through surveys. Classroom observation is used extensively in not only teacher education and professional development, but also in evaluation studies. However, there are fewer cases where classroom observations are used for system monitoring purposes—particularly in low- and middle- income countries. This paper reviews what has been learned from observation instruments in low- and middle-income countries and what opportunities (i.e., scope) there are to systematize these countries to that they can monitor quality at both the school and system levels.

Article published in the IJEDICT, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2017). Published Abstract: "Previous large-scale education technology interventions have shown only modest impacts on student achievement. Building on results from an earlier randomized controlled trial of three different applications of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on primary education in Kenya, the Tusome Early Grade Reading Activity developed the National Tablets Program. The National Tablets Program is integrated into the Tusome activity by providing tablets to each of more than 1,200 instructional coaches in the country to use when they visit teachers. This enables a national database of classroom instructional quality, which is used by the education system to monitor overall education quality. The tools provided on the tablets are designed to help coaches increase the quality of their instructional support to teachers, and deepen the shallow accountability structures in Kenya’s education system. Using results of a national survey, we investigated the ability of the National Tablets Program to increase the number of classroom observations done by coaches and to improve student learning outcomes. Survey results showed high levels of tablet program utilization, increased accountability, and improvements in learning outcomes. We share recommendations regarding large-scale ICT interventions and literacy programs.

This presentation was delivered by Wendi Ralaingita at the Open Learning Exchange (OLE) conference in Kathmandu, Nepal (November 2017). It provides an overview of RTI's evidence-based approach to ICT integration, based largely on the Improvement Science literature, particularly Edward Deming. Describes uses of Tangerine open-source software for teacher coaching (Tangerine:Tutor) and classroom continuous assessment (Tangerine:Class) as well as hearing and vision screening tools integrated with EGRA and EGMA assessments.

This is a presentation about Tangerine:Class, which was delivered at the 2016 Pacific Circle Consortium in Saipan.

This presentation summarizes the lessons learned from the global literature review on boys' underachievement in education.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) funded an investigation of the effective use of information and communication technology (ICT) in rural areas of Nepal, Bangladesh, Mongolia, and Samoa. In these areas, the multidimensional elements of poverty diminish access to and the quality of education for the poorest people. The study assessed the potential for ICT, combined with training, to improve these education factors for people whose educational opportunities are severely limited. In Bangladesh, the focus was on creating an opportunity for school-based in-service teacher training with the support of mobile communications technology. RTI equipped a cluster of 10 schools with mobile telephones that had advanced multimedia and communications features. A standard 2-week face-to-face training was converted to 6-weeks distance mode, and a pair of teachers from each school completed the course using print materials, practical school-level exercises, and communication on a regular basis with trainers and teacher trainees in other schools. The results show that the distance mode can be as effective as face-to-face training, and it is the strongly preferred mode by training participants.

Presentation delivered at the ICT4D 2017 Conference in Hyderabad. Taking successful pilot projects to scale should be the goal of any pilot program; yet often projects address scale only as an afterthought. The challenges of realizing large-scale impact, and of seeing that impact sustained, are not new to development. However, they are being approached with renewed interest and attention in the education sector. This presentation examines the issue of scale up in basic education programs in seven countries where interventions to improve early grade reading are being taken to scale--some with project support, some through government initiative. Management Systems International's framework for taking projects to scale, and the framework defined in the Brookings Institute's Millions Learning report are used to examine how scale has been and is occurring in selected countries, and we look at how scale is achieved in ICT projects. The presenter invites participants to be active discussants in this presentation, sharing their experiences and providing feedback on the relevancy of the proposed frameworks for ICT at scale