What does (and doesn’t) work for engaging multi-country partners in virtual, collaborative workspaces: Lessons learned from the Play Accelerator CoP

• In Event: Communities of Play: Learning Together to Improve and Scale Playful Learning

Proposal

The Play Accelerator program was designed to generate evidence on the implementation and impact of scaling up play-based interventions in primary school classrooms in five low and middle-income countries: Bangladesh, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and Vietnam. One of the most important aspects of this program’s success is ensuring that all implementation partners have the space and opportunity to regularly and openly discuss common obstacles and strategies with one another, as well as to review and learn from incoming data in a timely manner.

To achieve this outcome, a Play Accelerator Community of Practice (CoP) was established, comprised of representatives from the five implementing partners (including staff members in the five Play Accelerator countries, as well as from other countries implementing similar interventions), the donor, and led by the activity’s research partner and external evaluator.

Our primary objective as the CoP facilitator is to provide partners with a safe and supportive space to learn from one another and to support them in adapting their programs to produce improved holistic outcomes for all children. In line with the CIES theme of Pedagogies and Protest, this CoP has been a mechanism through which participants have learned from one another and built their capacity collectively and across contexts over the past four years.

The CoP operates largely as a virtual collaborative workspace with bi-monthly virtual meetings, a curated site designed to provide opportunities for consistent asynchronous communication and resource sharing, and face to face meetings, when possible. Initially, virtual meetings included longer presentations with dedicated time for group discussions but participant feedback has led to a revised approach that includes shorter, more targeted presentations by the research partner and/or implementing partners, with considerably more time for moderated breakout discussions across partners. Asynchronous communication consists primarily of a Teams’ site with various channels for discussing research, asking and answering technical questions, sharing ‘Play in my day’ stories, and open forums for getting to know one another personally and professionally.

In our presentation, we will provide an overview of the CoP platforms, share lessons learned for refining the CoP to better meet participants needs, and present examples of successful (and unsuccessful) approaches to engaging partners in constructive discussions of baseline and midline evaluation data collected from over 700 schools across the five COP programs.
While there are stark contrasts between the operating contexts of the five COP programs, identifying the common challenges shared across these interventions – and the successful approaches for addressing these challenges—generates important information around a potential “minimum required package” for achieving increased learning through play in classrooms. The process through which this information was shared and partners engaged – including its advantages and limitations – can inform future efforts to amplify local voices and increase cross-context learning in education communities of practice and beyond.

Authors

• Jonathan Stern, RTI International

• Rachel G Jordan, RTI International