RTI’s multi-country study examines a range of instructional support packages that include a variety of designs for coaching and communities of practice across all of RTI’s existing programs in order to determine what modes of coaching support are most effective. This includes coaches at both the school level and external to the school, as well as government officers compared with project hired coaches. This research is able to compare the relative effectiveness of coaching approaches with educational support provided by communities of practice meetings held at the school or the school cluster level. These findings have provided existing and future programs with best practices for how to more effectively implement coaching support structures at scale.This presentation was delivered by RTI at CIES (April 2020) as part of a panel focused on how literacy improvement efforts work at scale, and what types of coaching designs and behaviors impact teacher pedagogy more effectively than others.

This presentation summarizes qualitative data from user observations and semi-structured interviews with teachers and coaches, as well as Kenyan education officials on their use of Tangerine:Coach (previously Tangerine:Tutor) data for decision-making and teacher support. Tangerine:Coach is open-source software developed by RTI International that has been deployed in support of over 25,000 schools nationwide in Kenya since 2015, and is currently being introduced or scaled up also in Cambodia, Jordan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, West Bank, and Uganda. In Kenya, a typical coach visit to a school includes taking stock of classroom conditions, observing teacher practice, appraising student ability, and providing pedagogical support to teachers. Tangerine:Coach is designed with the intent of supporting this process - the software applies logic to combine data from surveys, classroom observations, and student assessments into a feedback report tailored for each coaching conversation. Coaches regularly upload their data to a central server which are then published to an online dashboard and sent by email to education officials. In theory, this data-sharing enables ongoing monitoring of coach activities and student progress and allows for timely targeted support (e.g., through additional school visits or professional development) to schools, teachers, or coaches as needed. Yet, how are these different actors actually using the data and dashboards? What changes are they making in their coaching or resource allocations? What data format is most accessible to actors across the different levels of the education system?   This prevention was developed by Lucy Wambari, Timothy Slade, and Carmen Strigel for the 2018 mEducation Alliance Symposium.

This presentation summarizes the findings from Occasion 2 of the Uganda/Literacy Achievement and Retention Activity longitudinal study of the impact of the Journeys intervention that aims to reduce SRGBV, strengthen student's SEL, and improve school climate. The presentation focuses on qualitative findings. According to these findings, both teacher and pupil social and emotional competencies are strengthened in schools participating in Journeys. Teachers interact with their peers more often than in the past and their relationships with their pupils are more welcoming and positive. The prevalence of corporal punishment has declined. Pupils are free to open up to their teachers, report issues they encounter in school and express themselves more in the classroom. Pupil relationships have improved, resulting in less bullying and fighting on the school grounds.

This presentation was held by Carmen Strigel during the second webinar of the Basic Education Coalition EdTech working group on April 27, 2020. The presentation is about using Tangerine for student self-study and self-assessment as well as family outreach. The presentation also introduces a new tool developed by RTI on considering access, user engagement, and content in making the right technology choices for your audience.

Literacy instruction programs have arguably had limited success because they focus on the technical – but not the social – aspects of literacy instruction. Reform efforts in sub-Saharan Africa have regularly failed to shift pedagogy away from teacher-led whole-class direct instruction to activities that are more effective for learning. In part, the failure is due to a lack of recognition of the social nature of classrooms where teacher-child interactions are conditioned by cultural predispositions. New research from Tanzania identified such challenges to pedagogical reform and points to potential solutions. One approach focuses on the child - to develop their social and emotional competencies. Teachers in Mtwara, Tanzania - but not parents – think that confidence and curiosity are important for student learning and report that interactive teaching activities are less effective in rural areas where students lack these competencies. Evidence suggests that building students’ confidence to participate in class is achievable relatively quickly. A second approach is to adapt teaching activities. Teachers in Tanzania report reluctance to implement teaching activities that undermine the social goals of instruction, such as avoiding embarrassment and promoting a sense of fairness and togetherness in the classroom. Instruction would be more effective if activities are co-designed with teachers to achieve both the social goals and the cognitive/learning goals of teaching.

The presentation summarizes a paper by Tim Slade and Luis Crouch on the measurement of learning inequality before and after a successful reading project. The paper concludes that at least for the case studied, the project improved not only the averages but also reduced the inequality. The paper was prepared under the auspices of a conference on "Learning at the Bottom of the Pyramid" organized by IIEP and Dan Wagner of U Penn. This is the presentation that was delivered at vCIES 2020.

The Malawi National Reading Program (NRP) is the country's flagship education program aimed at improving the reading skills of all Malawian learners in Standards 1 to 4. USAID supports the NRP by providing finance and technical assistance through several activities including MERIT: Malawi Early Grade Reading Improvement Activity (MERIT), Yesani Ophunzira (YESA), Strengthening Early Grade Reading in Malawi (SEGREM) and Reading for All Malawi (REFAM). MERIT focuses on teacher professional development and support, YESA on continuous assessment and remediation, REFAM on inclusive education, and SEGREM on materials development. Since 2016, the NRP has reached over 56,000 teachers and 4.6 million students in all public schools in Malawi. In addition, results from the 2018 Early Grade Reading Assessment shows that the NRP has had some success in improving reading skills of students in Chichewa and English, and especially for those students in the Standard 4. Implementing successfully at a national scale requires that all partners have had to coordinate and collaborate with each other, with the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST) in the lead. This panel includes representatives from the MoEST and NRP implementation partners discussing their roles in supporting the NRP and sharing lessons around their approach, achievements, and challenges as they collaborate to get all children learning. The combined experiences of the different partners will be useful for other projects, organizations, and governments who are looking to make a wide-scale change in their education systems.

Presentation for the 2019 ICERI conference (Seville, Spain.)

This presentation was delivered to a team of researchers who participated in a "Data Deep Dive" convened by the XPRIZE Foundation after the announcement of the Global Learning XPRIZE award.

The USAID-funded Uganda School Health and Reading Program (SHRP), implemented by RTI International, has been training teachers in Early Grade Reading (EGR) methods since early 2013. Up until 2018, all SHRP program in-service teacher trainings had been conducted through large-scale, residential trainings hosted at primary teacher colleges (PTCs). In May, 2018, SHRP piloted smaller scale teacher refresher trainings which were non-residential by conducting the trainings at coordinating center (CC) schools where teachers could travel to and from the training site to home each day. In order to learn the effect of these smaller, closer trainings compared to the traditional residential model, the SHRP team designed action research to determine if the smaller trainings held closer to the schools at CCs are more effective, or at least as effective, as the larger trainings in terms of teacher attendance, content coverage, teacher learning, and teacher satisfaction. This CIES 2019 presentation shares major findings and recommendations to action.