The purpose of this field guide is to introduce concepts, tools, and group activities that can be used to guide educators in co-creating locally defined prototypes of future learning spaces that will not only enhance social, emotional, and academic learning for all Filipino learners, but will ensure that learners flourish and develop a sense of agency, proactive citizenship, and work readiness for a successful future. The guide was created from selected content, exercises, and group processes that were introduced in the Leaders in Futures of Education (LIFE) course (June 20–July 19, 2022) and the Prototyping Future Learning Spaces Workshop (August 15–19 2022), which were attended by DepEd central office representatives, representatives from three regional offices (i.e., Region III: Central Luzan; Region VI: Central Visayas; and the Cordillera Administrative Region), and prototyping teams consisting of representatives from five SDOs—Tanauan City, Tuguegarao City, Pasig City, Caloocan City, and Quezon City—and at least one cooperating school in each SDO. This field guide provides a framework for DepEd partnerships across the country to begin their prototyping journey for co-designing future learning spaces for Filipino students.

This paper brings together two promising intellectual trends in development: Doing Development Differently (DDD), and whole-system reform. In addition, it provides a framework for evaluating system reforms, as rigorously as possible. This paper adapts some concepts from the paper “A Practical Approach to In-Country Systems Research” written for the Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) Programme. This version turns more toward the Doing Development Differently movement rather than education systems reform. The original paper was presented at the first RISE conference in Washington, DC, June 18–19, 2015.

Case studies of RTI's work on strengthening institutional capacity in Nepal, Jordan, Malawi, and Uganda focusing on three core functions: (1) setting and communicating expectations; (2) monitoring against expectations; (3) providing targeted support to struggling schools.

Due to increasing rates of COVID19 infection in Cambodia, primary schools were closed from March 2021 through the end of the school year. In Kampong Thom, Kampot, and Kep, the USAID-funded and RTI-implemented All Children Reading-Cambodia project rolled out comprehensive activities to support learning at home. While these interventions were implemented successfully, students had still missed nearly an entire year of explicit reading instruction. When schools reopened, they, and their teachers, would need intensive and targeted support to help make up for lost learning and to sustain gains under the National Early Grades Reading Program, Komar Rien Komar Cheh. To help inform this support, All Children Reading conducted a “temperature check” study with the aim of understanding teachers’ current status, well-being, concerns, capacity gaps, and plans for reading instruction when schools reopen; as well as measurement of students’ levels of reading proficiency, vis a vis where they are expected to be reading according to the curriculum. This study sought to better understand teacher’s perceptions around returning to school after prolonged closures, and how they plan to support students, in order to strategically target support that is both in line with best practice and responsive to where teachers are. A purposeful sample of 100 schools was drawn from two provinces, Kampong Thom (50 schools) and Kampot (50 schools). Schools were randomly sampled, proportional to each district. Data will be presented from 200 phone-based interviews conducted with grade 1 and 2 teachers, 100 in-person school director interviews, and 1,600 levelled student assessments conducted with grade 1 (800) and grade 2 (800) students. Findings are presented on the following: •Teachers’ levels of confidence returning to school and implementing the national Komar Rien Komar Cheh reading package, and specific areas where they still struggle •Teachers’ concerns and priorities for students’ learning in the coming year •Teachers’ plans to help students catch-up on missed content and skills, vis a vis their approach to curriculum coverage •Students’ reading levels in grade 1 and grade 2 at the end of a protracted school closure for most of the year, relative to where they should be per the curriculum

The All Children Reading–Asia (ACR–Asia) Return to Learning Cambodia Case Study was designed to research the Cambodia Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport’s (MoEYS’s) response to the disruption in learning created by the COVID-19 pandemic during different phases of school closure and reopening in the 2019–2020 and 2021 school years. The study used qualitative interview methods to study the education system’s response, from the central ministry level down, to how school directors and teachers implemented expectations communicated to them. Forty-four participants were interviewed, including central MoEYS personnel, school directors, teachers, and caregivers. Participants were asked about the phases of MoEYS response to the pandemic and what procedures, implementations, and subsequent outcomes occurred The presenter will present findings that positive changes were implemented in the participating schools. Many stakeholders within the education system and its stakeholders act and react to an education crisis in ways that would not be typical of the system functions and individual behaviors experienced in a regular school year. Fundamentally, the education system and its actors showed that during COVID-19, they could carry out a set of core functions (RTI International, 2018). These core systems functions were to set and communicate expectations, monitor progress, provide targeted support to facilitate students’ access to continued education during school closures, and make stakeholders accountable for meeting the expectations.

“Agent based modeling: A method for understanding individual, social, and environmental influences on learning and equality in the classroom.” Learning science in the past decade has provided considerable evidence that learning is at once emotional, social, and cognitive (MH Immordino-Yang, et al 2018). As we seek to improve social, emotional and learning outcomes in schools around the world, it is important to better understand how individuals adapt to and influence each other and their environments as they connect and interact daily in and outside the school and classroom. Furthermore, it is important to develop a better sense of how local interactions shape education. How do individual interactions shape the patterns of learning outcomes in a school or at a larger scale such as a district? How do they shape the nature of the learning environment and in turn, how do differential learning environments shape the patterns of interactions and relationships in a school? This information holds enormous potential to inform international education programming that may hold promise for improved uptake of innovations and education outcomes. How interactions locally shape education – in schools, administrative offices, or higher education institutions – is not well understood or studied extensively. Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a technique that can be applied to better understand the link between local dynamics of individuals in a school or community and certain aggregate characteristics of a school or emerging school changes. ABMs are based on the application of algorithms or simple rules representing the lower-level interactions of individuals (or system components) that give rise to higher level system structures or changes, providing a tool to understand bottom-up influences on education outcomes. (See M Macy & R Willer, 2002; M Jacobson, et al, 2017). In this presentation we present an agent-based model to show the potential impact of teacher feedback on student participation in the classroom and the relative impact of students who are more or less vulnerable (e.g., have lower/higher ability levels and are from more/less marginalized backgrounds). The model was informed by student data from primary schools in Uganda and Tanzania. The model demonstrates that over time, when met with repeated experiences of negative feedback, more and more students will quit participating entirely and some will dropout, especially children who are more vulnerable. On the other hand, when teachers are increasingly positive, more and more students participate more actively, even among the most vulnerable children. Thus, the nature of teachers’ responses to students when they answer questions in class can powerfully impact student participation and shape equality in participation. To extend, this would seem to impact student learning. The objectives of this presentation are: 1. To introduce the agent-based modeling method. 2. To present an application of ABM in international education 3. To demonstrate the utility of ABM in research, policy dialogue, and programming.

Social network analysis methods for international development: Applications in higher education development. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a promising yet underutilized tool in the international development field. SNA entails collecting and analyzing data to characterize and visualize social networks, where nodes represent network members and edges connecting nodes represent relationships or exchanges among them. SNA can help both researchers and practitioners understand the social, political, and economic relational dynamics at the heart of international development programming. It can inform program design, monitoring, and evaluation to answer questions related to where people get information; with whom goods and services are exchanged; who people value, trust, or respect; who has power and influence and who is excluded; and how these dynamics change over time. This brief advances the case for use of SNA in international development, outlines general approaches, and discusses two recently conducted case studies in higher education development that illustrate its potential. It concludes with recommendations for how to increase SNA use in international development. Key research recommendations advanced by this paper include: • Incorporate SNA into monitoring, evaluation, and learning processes. SNA can be conducted at various points of a project to inform program design, adaptive management, learning, and evaluation by considering network structure and network changes over time. • Demystify the use of SNA. Increased use of SNA tools and clear presentation in widely read publications are needed to bring the analytic approach into the mainstream of international development. • Build capacity to conduct SNA. The capacity to conduct and interpret SNA is lacking across actors in international development. Efforts by some organizations to build capacity in the community are well noted and should be built upon. • Build understanding of relationships between social networks and development outcomes. SNA will be useful only to the extent it helps users understand the relationship between networks and development outcomes that matter. • Establish norms for data collection and identity protection. Data about individuals and their interactions with others are inherently sensitive data. As a part of standard research ethics protocols, SNA practitioners must make carefully considered decisions about how or if to anonymize data when reporting it.

In the past two years, the COVID 19 pandemic and the ensuing and repeated school closures has caused an unprecedented upheaval to the education of children world-wide. With the onset of the pandemic, actors in education systems responded in myriads of ways to ensure children continued to learn while at home and when schools reopened. The purpose of this case study is to explore how educational stakeholders in the federal and provincial governments in Pakistan – Balochistan, Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT), Kyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), and Sindh, responded to school closures and re-openings during the COVID 19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. As such, the research questions for the study are 1. How did actors in education respond to the COVID 19 pandemic in Pakistan? 2. What types of resilience capacities did actors in education exhibit? To answer these questions, the case study delves into how the education actors - communities, parents, teachers, federal and provincial government education officials, private schools, non-governmental organizations, and international development partners responded and collaborated to support children’s learning, psycho-social support and well-being. The case study draws on resilience, and social ecological frameworks to explore the response of Pakistani education system to the pandemic. A social ecological lens enables the examination of the interaction and relationships of the individual, the community, the learning environment and educational systems and policies (Bronfenbrenner, (1986). Resilience frameworks explore the practices of education actors which promote resilience during and after disasters. (Reyes, 2013; Shah, Paulson, Couch, 2020; Shah, 2019). A qualitative case study method was best suited for this research study as it allows for an in-depth, descriptive and analytical study of how these education stakeholders responded to the challenges of the pandemic (Merriam, 1998). Data collection comprised semi structured interviews with purposive sampling of 34 individuals and 11 focus groups with public and private school teachers and parents. Emerging themes include the digital divide, strength in community, parent engagement and a lack of focus on marginalized populations. The emerging themes give examples of resilience capacities of stakeholder responses and illustrate positive, and promising practices as well as areas which need considerable reflection, and change in and implementation of federal and provincial policies. References Bronfenbrenner, U. (1986) Ecology of the family as a context for human development. American Psychologist.32:513–531. Merriam, S. B. (1998). Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education. Revised and Expanded from" Case Study Research in Education." Jossey-Bass Publishers, 350 Sansome St, San Francisco, CA 94104. Reyes, J. (2013). What matters the most for education resilience. A framework paper. World Bank Shah, R. (2019). Transforming systems in times of adversity. White Paper, USAID Education and Conflict Network.

The Learning at Scale study was designed to identify existing early grade reading programs with demonstrated impact on basic skills at scale and to conduct in-depth investigations of these programs to determine what makes them successful. After an extensive search, eight programs (spanning seven countries) were selected for inclusion in the study. Research on these programs has been conducted in order to answer the three overarching research questions, focused on understanding the components of instructional practices, instructional supports, and system supports that lead to effective instruction. Learning at Scale data collection activities for some of these programs were delayed due to COVID-19. However, with demand for information about how to implement effective interventions at large scale at an all-time high, we believe that the timely sharing of findings from Learning at Scale is essential. Accordingly, this interim report provides preliminary findings from our study to date, highlighting key high-level findings across all eight programs, as well as quantitative and qualitative findings from primary research for select programs. The Learning at Scale study is led by RTI International, as part of the Center for Global Development (CGD) education research consortium, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Government of Malawi, through the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST) with financial and technical support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is implementing a National Reading Programme (NRP) aimed at improving the reading skills of Malawian students in Standards 1–4, nationwide. USAID is supporting the NRP by providing technical and financial support through three activities: (1) MERIT: The Malawi Early Grade Reading Improvement Activity; (2) SEGREM: Strengthening Early Grade Reading in Malawi; and (3) YESA: Yesani Ophunzira Activity (Assess the Learners). The funding for all three activities will end between 2018 and 2021, and one of the objectives of MERIT is to ensure pathways for sustainability of reading outcomes are instituted such that gains made under the NRP are sustained after USAID support ends. As a first step, MERIT conducted a capacity assessment of the education system in Malawi to determine the extent to which the system is performing a set of core functions that have been shown to promote and sustain learning (Crouch & DeStefano, 2017). These are: (1) setting and communicating expectations; (2) monitoring against expectations; and (3) providing targeted support to schools and teachers. The goal of the capacity assessment exercise was to identify the key areas and opportunities to strengthen the education system’s capacity for producing and sustaining learning outcomes. The capacity assessment exercise involved extensive research and participatory consultation processes at national, district, and school levels, and under the guidance of an Institutional System Strengthening (ISS) Taskforce convened by the MoEST. The assessment exercise reached 13 of 34 educational districts and included focus group discussions (FGDs) with district and school-level personnel and community members and interviews with key leaders at MoEST central office. The assessment team also reviewed key policy documents and plans. The assessment exercise was undertaken between March and May 2018 by MERIT staff with support of members from the ISS Taskforce.