Continuous quality improvement: Integrating improvement science into remedial support

• In Event: Global Literacy SIG Highlighted Session: Supporting the needs of all students in the classroom: Remediation in a variety of contexts

Proposal

Achieving a high level of program quality is the ultimate aspiration of all practitioners, but improvement is too often slow, inconsistent or undocumented. Improvement rarely relies on evidence, or such evidence takes years to result in implementation. When it is implemented, the quality of implementation may differ so drastically from the design as to render it ineffective. Meanwhile, our teachers strive to provide the best education to their students, but too often without the tools that could help them turn their ambition into reality.

To improve program quality by activating all levels of the system and by better understanding the gap between design and implementation, the IRC piloted the integration of improvement science methodologies into how we support remedial teachers in Lebanon. The intervention was eight months long and consisted of training IRC coaches in improvement process and tools, as well as building the teachers’ capacity to use the tools. Teachers, in collaboration with their coaches, created theories around what they believed would improve student learning outcomes in a specific subject where students struggled (second language) and developed “change ideas” to test in the classroom. We also provided evidence-based teaching practices that teachers could try in fast, safe-to-fail cycles. Teachers collected data in order to test their theories more rigorously and determine which changes resulted in improvement. Teacher Learning Circles were adapted to become the space where teachers could share their findings as a community.

We varied the intervention by region to better understand which approach as most effective. We collected teacher feedback throughout the process and also did focus group discussions at the end to determine how to adapt the approach. Combining robust professional development with the methodology of CQI strengthens our potential to achieve high program quality on a continuous basis through empowering all actors in the system, especially teachers, by giving them the tools they need to be agents in improvement through experiential learning. In this presentation, Autumn Brown (Technical Advisor with the IRC) will show the results of the pilot and how we plan on integrating the approach into how we support all teachers in Lebanon.

Author

• Autumn Brown, International Rescue Committee