Scaling education innovations: Lessons from the 2023 HundrED Innovation Summit
Education innovations hold huge potential to address the global learning crisis. However, there is still much to learn about effectively implementing these innovations at scale. During this year’s HundrED Innovation Summit in Helsinki, Finland, Results for Development (R4D) and other members of the School Action Learning Exchange (SALEX), a Jacobs Foundation-supported learning network of education organizations, convened a diverse group of innovators and social entrepreneurs to further learning on this topic. This interactive session invited innovators to not only discuss the barriers they face in adapting innovative ideas across contexts but also explore tried and tested strategies to overcome those challenges.
Participant discussions were organized around three key themes – cultivating champions, leveraging learning labs for ongoing adaption, and empowering educators throughout the scaling process – all of which have been identified in previous research as key drivers for successful scaling but are often difficult to put into practice. Below are key takeaways from those discussions including perspectives from SALEX member organizations who attended and led sessions — Global Schools Forum, International Baccalaureate, Luker Foundation, Schools2030, TaRL Africa, Teach For All, and Youth Impact — which we hope can serve as a useful set of lessons for similar education system actors going forward.
Cultivating champions and forging strategic partnerships
Scaling education innovations requires active participation and coordination among diverse stakeholders – including policymakers, practitioners, funders and researchers. However, cultivating these champions and strategic partners is often not straightforward. The following challenges were most frequently cited by Summit participants:
- Bureaucratic culture and a resistance to change within governments
- Policymaker concerns around sustainability of the innovation
- Limited awareness and information gaps between innovators and potential partners, including a lack of advocacy channels
To address these issues, it is crucial to identify and engage early adopters who can become advocates for the innovation. Building a community of champions also involves fostering relationships with teachers, school leaders, and other stakeholders through co-creation practices and peer networks. When it comes to building long-term partnerships with government officials, incorporate coaching and mentorship approaches, which can play a key role in instilling a sense of ownership in the scaling process. And try to identify regional and local level champions to support adoption and expansion of the innovation. These individuals likely experience less turnover in government positions and are closer to the communities in which the innovation is being implemented, so are often better placed to support successful integration into the broader education system.
Spotlight on Youth Impact
Youth Impact recognizes that while the literature on the role of champions in scaling is vast, few examples illustrate how champions are identified, cultivated, and supported in practice. As such, Youth Impact deploys the following strategies to identify, cultivate, and maintain relationships with champions to scale their education initiatives:
- Select champions who are committed to investing their time to co-design the scaling plan;
- Pursue a “follow the leader”, demand-driven approach to expanding to new contexts;
- Amplify and leverage existing champions to create new champions;
- Connect the energy of potential champions to visible impact and real-time data to build enthusiasm and foster new champions.
To learn more, visit: Youth Impact
Spotlight on TaRL Africa
TaRL Africa acknowledges that a singular approach to cultivating champions may not be universally applicable to all. Champions exist across different levels (national, state, districts, communities, etc.) and may require different engagement strategies.
TaRL Africa adopts different engagement approaches for different champions:
- At the highest government levels, they strive to build alignment on the need for foundational skills and TaRL as a possible remedy through needs assessment, discussion on data, and learning journeys. These international learning journeys enable officials to understand the approach better before adopting it in their specific context.
- Targeting mid-level officials, they facilitate deep engagements to make them “Leaders of Practice”. One effective method involves having them lead practice classes for 15-20 days, providing firsthand experience with the TaRL methodology.
To learn more, visit: Teaching at the Right Level – Foundational skills for a better future
Leveraging evidence for continuous adaptation
Generation and use of high-quality data and evidence is crucial for successful scaling, as innovations need to be continuously adapted when they are introduced into new contexts. But innovators often face challenges in this process, such as:
- How to design systems to measure impact and effectiveness, including the development of precise metrics and evaluation frameworks
- Limited awareness regarding the optimal use of various types of evidence at different stages, and the selection of appropriate methods to generate this evidence
- Navigating different donor requirements for measuring specific outcomes and generating data and evidence that is useful for decision-making on program implementation and iteration
- Lack of sharing across the sector on approaches to testing education innovations with sufficient detail that methods can be adopted by other innovators
To address these challenges effectively, partners can incorporate learning labs, typically comprised of schools or partners in different contexts, designed to provide dedicated spaces for in-depth problem-solving around leveraging evidence. Or organize routine collaborative meetings among organizations operating within the same locale. This collaboration can encourage open dialogue and help alleviate pressure related to donor expectations and competition. It is also important to utilize mixed methods approaches to evidence generation, including considering process data to support program implementation decision-making and rapid testing approaches. Finally, consider innovative ways to overcome capacity constraints related to evidence generation, including partnerships with academic institutions and students, to increase evaluation and research resources available.
Spotlight on Teach for All
Teach For All perceives a set of problems in global education that need to be addressed: Education systems are oriented to an outdated purpose of focusing on a narrow set of academic outcomes. And there are too few global learning efforts in education whose purpose is to convene educators to advance knowledge and influence policy on how to best support students to grow as leaders of a better future.
Teach For All’s Global Institute for Transforming Education answers the global need to develop the purpose, leadership, and technical capability of a movement of tens of thousands of educators worldwide in order to generate the quality and commitment to transforming education locally, nationally, and globally. The Global Institute comprises three interrelated ways of engaging educators with insights and evidence:
- an Academy to develop classroom, school, and system leaders;
- a Resource Hub to share the latest knowledge, insights, tools, and resources;
- and the Research and Learning Lab to learn from the classrooms, schools, and systems making the fastest progress globally
The Research and Learning Lab is the mechanism by which the Global Institute measures, tests, and learns about what it takes to develop students as leaders at the classroom and systems levels. The Lab uses a variety of participatory research and learning methods to observe transformational educators in classrooms, schools, and systems working to develop students holistically, surface their promising innovations, and co-design, test, and measure new programs to transform educational ecosystems.
To learn more, visit: Teach For All | Teach For All
Spotlight on Global Schools Forum
Global Schools Forum is a collaborative community, innovation accelerator, and partnership builder for non-state organisations working to improve education at scale for underserved children in low- and middle-income countries. Through the Impact at Scale programme, they support promising solutions with potential to scale with expert coaching and funding. Through their first round of the Labs, they have found that implementing a design, test, learn approach to iterating an innovation to scale is a challenge for education organisations set up with a more traditional MEL approach.
As part of the Impact at Scale programme they have:
- Supported organisations to structure their approach through a Theory of Change exercise, and to develop their MEL framework aligned to this
- Encouraged organisations to think strategically to identify priority research questions to enable them to progress their innovation and journey to scale
- Established connections and partnerships between organisations to share learning on rapid testing approaches to support uptake across the sector. For example, Youth Impact and Educate! have supported Dignitas to develop A-B testing of their teacher coaching innovation.
To learn more, visit: About Us | Global Schools Forum
Empowering educators and incorporating community expertise
Directly involving teachers and educators, who possess a deep understanding of the local context and student needs, can help ensure that innovations are relevant and tailored to the specific characteristics of the community. Yet, innovators sometimes face challenges in doing this effectively and in a non-tokenistic way. This may be due to:
- A general resistance to change at the school level
- A lack of understanding about the innovation process, and/or insufficient capacity to support it, among teachers and other educators
Innovators and other partners can begin to address these challenges by empowering educators and community experts in the decision-making process around how and when innovations are scaled, which can lead to a higher likelihood of support for the innovation and integration into classrooms. This can also ensure that the innovations are culturally sensitive and promote inclusivity. Generating school-level evidence and providing platforms for educators and school leaders to share this evidence with other stakeholders can also support buy-in of the scaling process. And finally, it is important to remember that integrating educators into the innovation scaling process sometimes means supporting teachers to be innovators themselves.
Spotlight on Schools2030
One challenge that Schools2030 faces is how to package and communicate the impact of school-driven innovations to policymakers and other education system influencers. For example, a question they are asking themselves is how to most effectively select the most promising innovations? Secondly, how might they classify evidence that is generated at the school level by teachers so that this is easily understood and able to be taken up by education systems?
One way that they seek to overcome this challenge of communicating school-level evidence up and across education systems is by actively connecting teachers and school leaders with their peers as well as with policymakers at different levels, and supporting them to showcase their evidence-driven classroom innovations at opportunities such as at the Schools2030 Global Forum events.
To learn more, visit: Schools 2030 – Catalysing School-Driven Holistic Learning Innovations to Achieve SDG4 by 2030 – Schools2030
Navigating the challenges of scaling promising education innovations requires a strategic and holistic approach, involving collaboration, ongoing assessment, and a commitment to addressing the specific needs of the educational ecosystem in which the innovation is being scaled. While much progress has been made, there is still considerable insight to be gained on effective scaling strategies, presenting a valuable opportunity for partners to engage in shared learning and further enrich the collective understanding of this dynamic landscape.
To learn more about SALEX, please visit: School Action Learning Exchange (SALEX) – Jacobs Foundation
