Sustainability and Scale: Two Sides of the Same Coin

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday III)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Scaling up and sustainability in education

Proposal

In September 2015, world leaders attended a special summit at the United Nations in New York to adopt Agenda 2030, including the Sustainable Development Goals (or SDGs). The SDGs provide a holistic framework, applicable to all countries, aiming to eradicate poverty and deprivation, but also to grow economies, to protect the environment, and to promote peace and good governance. In this context, sustainability is defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (UN, 2015). Within each of the 17 goals and across them there is the tacit assumption that knowledge will be generated and shared. The Sustainable Learning Framework is Dr. Diana Woolis’s response to this call. It provides a conceptual and practical pathway to assure that the SDG aspirations are realized.


The Sustainable Learning Framework is grounded in established learning and change models, drawing on elements which have been empirically proven to improve outcomes. Thus, its elements are not new. What is new is the weaving and integration of these proven strategies into a new fabric, one that might be reliably used to accomplish critical objectives at scale.

As Wong, Zlotkin, Ho, & Perumal (2014) have noted:

We in the global development community ... have viable solutions. We have set up pilot projects and done field experiments. We have collected the data. And we’ve created an industry of frugal innovation. But we have not done nearly as good a job at extending the reach of those innovative solutions as far as possible; we have failed, generally, to bring solutions to scale.

This is precisely why we need a sustainable learning framework. Sustainable Learning enables practitioners to develop effective practice through collaborative reflection on their experience, and, thereby, to develop actionable data – data that enables them to see and if needed course-correct in real time, to local conditions.

To scale up innovative practices,

implementers must replicate only those aspects of a proven solution that others can replicate in different settings—the efficiency core. But importantly, the core of the solution must adapt and undergo minor modifications to fit local contexts well enough so that people will actually use it. It is not about custom design, but about making a replicable intervention… suitable for a given context. (Wong, et al., 2014)

The Sustainable Learning Framework enables learning facilitators to identify and implement the “efficiency core” of their target intervention – be it for good health, quality education or any other goal – and to do so through a process of collaborative, evidence-based learning.

The Sustainable Learning Framework is informed by three essential guiding principles which will be clarified in the presentation:
Principle 1: Sustainability and scale are two sides of the same coin
Principle 2: Practice mastery matters most
Principle 3: Deep learning—reflection on practice and on actionable data—is essential to informed action

Key features of the Sustainable Learning Framework—Processes, Building Blocks, and Discovery—will also be described through real-world application of the framework to Sustainable Development Goal #4: Quality Education. The Refugee Educator Academy is a response to the global crisis in preparing refugee educators in an intensely accelerated and inclusive way. Within an 18-month time span, the Carey Institute for Global Good has identified and engaged thought leaders and master practitioners around the world to develop an integrated system of courses, activities, certifications and practice communities focused on serving refugee educators. Through deliberate application of the Sustainable Learning Framework, we have designed online tools and templates that enable learning designers to easily create their own activities that are both sustainable and scalable. A brief examination of this application will help us bridge the conceptual and actual to imagine what is possible through Sustainable Learning.

Author

• Diana Woolis, Carey Institute for Global Good