Learning, pivoting and adapting a reading program in response to COVID: Lessons from the Honduras Reading Activity

• In Event: Adapting theories of change in the time of COVID

Proposal

Since 2017, the USAID Honduras Reading Activity (HRA - also known as the De Lectores a Líderes project) supports the efforts of the Government of Honduras (GOH) in collaboration with civil society, and private sector donors to provide technical assistance to improve reading instruction and outcomes for Honduran students from first to sixth grade of primary education. HRA’s initial theory of change (TOC) captured a set of behaviors that measured the actions required to improve reading outcomes for primary school students. The TOC postulated that:
- If the Ministry of Education’s capacity to implement evidence-based reading approaches improves
- And if improved classroom materials to enhance reading instruction are accessible
- And if the trained teachers provide quality reading instruction to students
- And if strengthened parental participation leads to improved learning
- Then quality of reading instruction in grades 1-6 will improve, resulting in improved reading outcomes for students in grades 1-6.

This TOC was based on three key assumptions:
- That the school system would continue to remain relatively stable and functioning, and
- That education officials and teachers would share the need to improve reading and
- That teachers would adapt their teaching in the classroom based on HRA’s methodology.

Until March 2020, these assumptions held, and tests conducted by the MOE and HRA in 2019 showed promising progress in reading outcomes. Then in 2020, the entire Honduran school system, including project schools, went into full lockdown due to Covid-19 and the existing TOC and its assumptions had to be revised. With classrooms closed and teachers not able to teach reading in person, the project had to quickly adapt its approach to delivering distance learning directed to parents and their children at home. The COVID emergency became an opportunity to evaluate the project’s initial TOC. The process of reviewing the TOC took into account the need to adapt and pivot towards a new set of working assumptions such as:

1. A Ministry’s with institutional capacity to provide continuity in learning with a distance-learning program
2. Access to learning materials at home especially for the majority of children without connectivity
3. Teachers trained to support children’s learning remotely using technology

This presentation will examine how the existing TOC served as starting point to adapt its response to the circumstance on the ground and planning its adaptation to remote learning. It will show how it helped integrate the separate project results into three core milestones to continue supporting the key outcome to improve reading in light of the need to work with children learning at home, and where parents and their families became an essential factor for children learning remotely. Furthermore, the presentation will illustrate how monitoring of impact was adapted to track new indicators using its tablet-based data collection tools to verify the use of the daily reading materials and learning at home.

Author

• Sergio Ramírez Mena, EDC