BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Session Submission Summary

Champions, Environments, & Incentives: Emerging Lessons from Research on Scaling the Impact of Education Innovations around the World

Mon, February 20, 4:45 to 6:15pm EST (4:45 to 6:15pm EST), Grand Hyatt Washington, Floor: Independence Level (5B), Franklin Square

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Few would disagree that education is crucial for the cultivation of successful individuals, healthy communities, robust societies, strong economies, and healing our planet. Yet, while most available education measures show impressive improvement in low- and middle-income countries over recent decades, there remains a heartbreaking gap between educational outcomes in high-income countries versus low- and middle-income ones (Winthrop, 2015; Sengeh and Winthrop, 2022; Nestour et al., 2022). This is partly because while access to school has increased, the quality of learning still often languishes. Many would argue that national and global attempts at upgrading educational systems seem to perennially fall short. As a result, there are constant calls around the world for education reform or wholescale systems transformation, and thousands of new education innovations and empirical studies are released every year.

While there is this growing interest in innovations to effect systemic change, we know from research (Winthrop, Perlman Robinson & McGivney, 2016; McLean & Gargani, 2019) that effective scaling is not just about designing and delivering the innovations - it is also about embedding them in thoughtful, multifaceted ways to ensure that they grow, deepen, and have lasting impact.

To support and better understand how to scale effectively, in 2020 the Millions Learning project at the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings joined the Global Partnership for Education’s (GPE) Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX), a joint partnership between the GPE and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), to facilitate a cross-national, multiteam, design-based research and professional support initiative called Research on Scaling the Impact of Innovations in Education (ROSIE). ROSIE brings together 15 teams of researchers and practitioners working in 29 low- and middle-income countries to study the process of scaling education initiatives for impact.

Eighteen months in and we are learning a great deal about the complex but essential relationship between the scaling object (the innovation), the scaling strategy (the plan for scaling), and the enabling environment (broader predictable and unpredictable forces, processes, and populations). Considering the interplay between these three domains, three key recommendations from the first cycle of action research have emerged:
(1) Scaling in education should strategically consider ALL stakeholders as potential champions;
(2) Scaling practitioners, researchers, and donors should consider both the complicated (difficult but at least predictable) and the complex (both difficult and unpredictable) aspects of the enabling environment in their adaptivity;
(3) The broader field of education scaling must keep pushing incentive structures toward long-term scaling for lasting impact.
This panel will bring together scaling practitioners and researchers from across the ROSIE project, including CUE, the IDRC and three different ROSIE teams, to share findings and evidence from their work that relates to these three recommendations.
First, the UNICEF Innocenti and UHAITI teams will discuss what it means to treat stakeholders as champions by focusing on two different levels of champions: government policymakers and teachers. The UNICEF Innocenti team will share insights from their work with government stakeholders through the Data Must Speak (DMS) project, which is focused on adapting and scaling a UNICEF-led proven innovation on data use in the education sector to generate knowledge and improved practices by using increasingly available education data to expand and elevate school-level performance in eight countries. Then, the University of Haiti team will discuss their findings; the UHAITI team works directly with teachers in Haiti and St. Lucia to identify and understand concrete educational challenges, devise and test pedagogical solutions, and share results with broader peers and decision-makers. Related to the second recommendation on the enabling environment, the team from World Vision will share how they have adapted their Unlock Literacy intervention to respond to complex environmental conditions in Nicaragua. Finally, to discuss current work around restructuring incentives, a team from IDRC will share their donor perspective on what it takes to nudge incentive structures toward long-term scaling for lasting impact. Following these discussions, there will be a facilitated opportunity for questions and discussion between the panelist and audience members.

Sub Unit

Chair

Individual Presentations