Strengthening the Capacity of School Leaders for Learning Recovery in Indonesia

• In Event: Leadership for a Brave New World PART 1: Empowering school leaders for educational resilience in Indonesia, Lebanon, and Kenya.

Proposal

In Indonesia, schools were closed for most of its 62 million students for over 19 months during the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to a significant loss in learning. The Indonesian Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology (MoECRT) adapted Pembelajaran Berdiferensiasi (Differentiated Learning), where teaching and students’ learning are adjusted to students’ levels to address learning loss. However, while in theory, these reforms should enable teachers to adopt Differentiated Learning, it is not clear how schools can implement them at scale.
While effective, most of the Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) and Differentiated Learning interventions have targeted teachers as the key lever of change. An often-underinvested area with a potentially high return is training school leaders to mentor teachers and support implementation (Global School Leaders, 2024). We conduct a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) design to evaluate the impact of strengthening the capacity of school leaders in improving foundational numeracy for Grade 4 students in 300 public primary schools of Bekasi and Subang districts in the West Java province.
We compare two interventions with a control group, each group has 100 schools. In treatment 1 (100 schools), teachers participate in the entire training, while the school principals only join in the first training session to get an overview of the intervention. The training covers differentiated learning in math, methods to teach math, and growth mindset. In treatment 2 (100 schools), in addition to teachers, school principals also participate in the full training. Treatment 2 school principals also receive training in scheduling sessions, conducting classroom observations, providing feedback, and joining an online professional learning community to share best practices, discuss questions, and address challenges.
The program used a Digital Learning Ecosystem (EkoPeD) to create an ongoing and scalable learning environment for teachers and school leaders. EkoPeD incentivizes and collects real-time data from implementing the interventions. It also serves as a testing ground for motivating and retaining participation throughout the nine months project implementation.
At baseline, a total of 7,669 Grade 4 students, 49.5% girls, participated in the learning assessment. The student numeracy assessment at baseline found that the average score was 27%. This provides a bleak picture of student numeracy levels and reaffirms the need for remedial learning for the students in these schools. There is no statistically significant difference between the performance of boys and girls across the three groups and two districts. The endline assessments are complete, and we are currently analyzing the data.
We will be presenting the learning from the program implementation as well as the preliminary results from the impact evaluation at the CIES 2025 Conference. The findings will be helpful in understanding the role of school leaders in implementing a school-based program at scale, will add to the evidence base, and have implications for policy on school leadership in the Global South.

Authors

• Gautam Anand, Global School Leaders

• Dewi Susanti, Global School Leaders