These Success Stories were prepared by the project team for the USAID Renforcement de la Lecture Initiale pour Tous program in Senegal in Calendar year 2022. SS001 : "Fifty resource persons from the MEN and the implementing partner put in place, together, the mechanisms for implementing RELIT." Describes the collaborative and locally-led co-launch of the program in 2022. SS002: "At Boly Diaw elementary school in Saint Louis, the RELIT program mobilizes a community of parents around reading and bilingual education." Describes a school that created a community-wide celebration for the launch of the RELIT program in 2022. SS003: "Innovations in the teaching of early grade reading: RELIT designs early learning materials for three new national languages" Describes the process and outputs of the first Grade 1 materials in 5 national languages that were developed in time for the new school year in Senegal. SS04: "A participatory approach to assessing the institutional capacity of Senegal’s education system" describes the approach to capacity assessment using the "Core Components" model of System Strengthening.

The LQAS methodology has a number of objectives in the education sector, including: Holding schools greater accountability; Increasing implementation fidelity and credibility; Identifying schools or regions (field directorates) that needs extra support to assist them; Identifying areas for improvement to conduct reforms contributing to increase the effectiveness of the initiative; Providing an assessment methodology that enables the ministry to assess the students’ outcomes with high credibility and is used at all administrative levels in the ministry; and Providing relevant, reliable, and timely data.

Title: Philippine local governments using local solutions to tackle literacy and numeracy through the Education Sector Mechanism Presenter: Mayor Krisel Lagman of Tabaco City Launched under USAID funded Advancing Basic Education (ABC+) in the Philippines, the Education Sector Mechanism (ESM) brings stakeholders (private sector, government units, teachers, school leadership, parents and community) together at the local level to assess the education landscape using data and evidence. This process is led by local governments, but includes all stakeholders and aims to identify key issues and their underlying causes, agree on effective strategies to tackle these challenges, and translate the solutions into well-defined programs, projects, and activities. This process puts local leadership and ownership at the forefront of problem solving based on data, investment programming and results-based monitoring and evaluation. The local governments of Victorias City and Tabaco City in the Philippines lead the way in utilizing ESM, bringing private sector, local government units, and community together to look at education issues. This presentation will discuss the ESM process based on their experience and the results they are seeing, highlighting locally led and locally funded solutions and commitments.

The twin crises of high dropout rates and weak foundational skills risk a lost generation of youth in Guatemala and Honduras. To respond to these crises, RTI is working with the Ministry of Education to support students to complete their education by strengthening system capacity to use data to identify students at risk of dropping out, to provide psychosocial support, and to address barriers to accessing secondary school. Motivating this effort is the belief that improved education outcomes will lead to secure employment and steady incomes in the future, weakening the primary drivers of irregular migration. Building on past efforts in dropout prevention (World Bank 2021; Unesco 2022), we have developed and deployed an open-source mobile application to teachers’ devices that will both facilitate data collection and display easily understandable information on the three pillars of dropout prevention: Attendance, Behavior and Coursework (ABC). The application enables teachers to track daily attendance, behavior and track and import coursework performance including test results and class grades. The data are used by the teacher to inform the need for additional intervention. Anonymized and aggregated data are shared at the school, municipal and ministry level, which we expect will reduce teacher fears of punitive accountability. The application works offline and syncs to the cloud once a WiFi or data connection is made. Free community Wi-Fi and school-based internet connectivity will improve teacher’s ability to access the application and other education data, resources and tools while also improving digital inclusion for students to access online learning opportunities and resources. At CIES, we hope to respond to Sub-theme question 3.3: How can school systems be better prepared to adapt to and to combat disruptions such as natural disasters and the COVID pandemic? The ongoing experience of both Guatemala and Honduras in managing COVID has been characterized by extended school closures, limited access to online materials, and increased dropout and irregular migration. We hope to learn from current and past NGO and Ministry experiences in creating digital tools that support teachers but can also be used to identify and respond to system-level challenges and improve system resilience. How have these digital tools helped teachers and system leaders to understand gaps in student learning and risk of drop-out? What level of anonymity has proved sufficient to overcome teacher accountability fears but adequate to inform system-level needs? Can improved digital inclusion and access to online learning help systems to become more resilient to disruptions? We anticipate a lively discussion on the potential and limitations of data-driven dropout prevention systems, several of which have been piloted by Ministries of Education in Latin America with the support of the World Bank, USAID and other organizations. By the time of the CIES presentation in March we expect to have piloted the tool in schools in 12 municipalities and have initial feedback from teachers and school leaders as to the user experience, feasibility and desirability of the tool.

The theme of CIES asks our society of academics and practitioners to confront the ways in which education is a space of debate and contestation, and how stakeholders both internal and external to education systems seek to effect change (or maintain the status quo). The behavioral science perspective is not new to international education. It has often been presented from different research perspectives, including teacher mental models of teacher beliefs (Saberwal et. al., 2018), and the social aspects of educational change (Fullan, 2015). However, recent interest has shifted focus on the understanding of education systems change using a behavioral science lens (Ajani 2022). This perspective is important as education systems programming is frequently designed without a true understanding of how individuals will respond to change (Jeevan and Hwa, 2022). The presentations present studies which examine teachers, caregivers, and instructional practice and change within an education system. What new insights do we have and how might they influence policy and implementation for education systems change? This deck includes the following presentations and authors: From access to learning to nudging: Why behavioral science might be the next new best thing in education improvement programs (Amber Gove, RTI International), More of this and less of that: How a behavioral science lens suggests alternative approaches to education program design & implementation (Simon King, Creative Associates), Peer-to-Peer Learning: The Power of Social Networks in Adoption of New Pedagogies (Elizabeth Marsden, RTI International), and Supporting Caregivers of Young Children in South Africa to Engage in Play (Carolina Better, Ideas42).

We are indeed dealing with a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment. The Philippines suffers natural and man-made vulnerabilities such as typhoons that occur throughout the year, earthquakes, and more recently, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. These challenges necessitated the establishment of the Education Futures Program. While the Philippines Basic Education Continuity Plan in response to the pandemic, DepEd recognized at that time the urgent need to “future proof” education. Nationwide education in futures thinking and foresight planning was needed to address the future learning needs of all children and building education resilience in times of crisis. This presentation provides an overview of the "Co-creating Learning Spaces for Improved Early Language Literacy and Numeracy in the Philippines" activity, under the USAID funded All Children Reading (ACR) - Philippines. Following a brief introduction to futures thinking and foresight planning, this presentation describes how school-level teams in the Philippines developed prototypes of learning spaces for the future that addressed anticipated needs of learners. We present the prototyping process centered on human centered design thinking, the way that school teams collected feedback on their innovations from teachers in the region, parents, and learners themselves, and a snapshot of the prototypes developed, and the benefit of the prototyping process to school teams and the relative success they had in realizing their future learning spaces innovations after two years.

The presentation summarizes findings from the Rapid Education Risk Analysis for Lebanon

In Year 2 (October 2020–September 2021), the Program designed and implemented a Status of Instruction Study (SIS) to shed light on teachers’ knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, skills, and behaviors; the resources available at the school level and for the targeted subjects; and how these resources are used. The Program also designed a Teacher Support System Study (TSSS) to examine the existing teacher support system and identify teacher support challenges and opportunities. The TSSS results will be used to create a Program TPD approach. The TSSS data collection process was integrated into the second phase of the SIS data collection process, which occurred in mid-2021. This was done because both studies targeted the same respondents: teachers, school directors, and methodologists. The TSSS, like the SIS, was originally intended to include in-person interviews. However, because of the prolonged difficulties caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, data collection was done remotely. This report presents the TSSS methodology and findings from online surveys administered to more than 4,100 teachers, 183 school directors, and 131 methodologists from all regions of Uzbekistan, including the Republic of Karakalpakstan and Tashkent City.

The Status of Instruction Study (SIS) aims to shed light on teachers’ knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, and skills and behaviors; the resources available at the school level and for the targeted subjects; and how these resources are used. The SIS was designed to inform the customization and development of student textbooks, teacher guides, and TPD approaches. Originally, the SIS was to have a school-based data collection component that would include classroom observations and parent and teacher interviews. Given the protracted challenges resulting from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, data collection was conducted remotely and focused on garnering feedback directly from teachers. As such one limitation of this study is that all data are self-reported without additional means of triangulation or confirmation at this point in time. This report presents the SIS methodology and findings from online surveys administered to more than 9,400 teachers from all regions of Uzbekistan, including the Republic of Karakalpakstan and Tashkent City.

This study is Phase II of a two-part Teacher’s Guide Uptake Study (TGUS) for ICT and EFL. Phase I was conducted in December 2021 and field tested the above-referenced ICT TGs and the addendum to the EFL TGs to determine, within a short period of time, what changes and adaptations in terms of content, instructional strategies, and design needed to be made before revising the books and submitting them to MoPE for nationwide printing and rollout at the end of Year 3 of the Program (beginning of 2022/2023 school year). TGUS Part I also served to test TGUS data collection tools, built team capacity to use Tangerine, RTI’s opensource data collection platform, and determine the current level of use of student-centered instructional strategies by ICT and EFL teachers. The purpose of Phase II of this study, conducted in May 2022, was to continue to track teachers’ use of the new TGs and their application of selected student-centered teaching strategies in the classroom. Findings from Phase II also informed the overall design of the ULA and Mathematics TPD approach employed to support teachers during the pilot of the ULA and Mathematics TGS and STBs in the 2022/2023 school year. For comparative purposes and to show levels of uptake over time, this report combines select Phase I findings with Phase II findings.