Designing for Context and Scale: Integrating Professional Dialogues and Teacher-Led Innovation for System Change in Small Island States

• In Event: Scaling effective teacher professional development in low-and middle-income countries:Choosing the right model, identifying scalability, and fitting the model to the location

Proposal

The Full Potential Program works in Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Dominica to strengthen gender-responsive and inclusive teaching and learning through a whole-school, systems-oriented approach to teacher professional development (TPD). Designed in collaboration with Ministries of Education, the program integrates sustained, multi-format capacity building with teacher-led innovation and targeted system-level scaling strategies. This model aligns professional learning priorities with national education goals, ensuring both contextual relevance and institutional commitment to scale.

The foundation of the program is a multi-layered TPD structure that moves beyond one-off workshops. Teachers, principals, and administrators participate in professional dialogues on gender-inclusive pedagogies, inclusive education, and human-centered design, followed by small-group reflection sessions, principal Communities of Practice, and quarterly strategic meetings for administrators. This iterative design sustains engagement, allows time for mindset and practice change, and generates real-time feedback to refine content and delivery for each country context.

An integral aspect of the TPD is teacher-led innovation. Educators apply understanding and evidence to identify barriers to equity and inclusion in their classrooms and schools, then prototype and test context-appropriate solutions. Ministry staff set annual innovation priorities informed by baseline data and system maps, and each ministry works with the program team to co-develop a scaling pathway. This is a decision-making process for selecting and expanding promising teacher-generated solutions within and across education systems and even the region.

By integrating professional development, innovation, and scaling research, the Full Potential Program addresses several key questions in TPD scaling: What is the minimum viable dosage of training to produce measurable changes in teacher practice? Which follow-up formats (ongoing coaching, Communities of Practice, cross-school collaboration) yield the greatest sustained impact? How can Ministries of Education in small states create low-cost, high-trust systems for sharing and adopting teacher-generated innovations?

Preliminary findings highlight the importance of aligning PD content with system-endorsed priorities, balancing in-person and virtual modalities to maintain engagement, and embedding teachers in active problem-solving roles rather than positioning them solely as recipients of training. The program’s approach offers practical insights for other low- and middle-income countries seeking to adapt and scale TPD models: namely, that scaling success depends as much on building the architecture for innovation and knowledge exchange as on refining the content of professional learning itself.

Through this presentation, we will share our methodology, emerging evidence, and lessons on adapting and scaling TPD in ways that are deeply rooted in local priorities, responsive to cultural context, and sustainable within resource-constrained education systems.

Authors

• Angel Caglin, Caribbean Innovation & Leadership Lab

• Carrie Wright