VVOB had a strong presence at The CIES 2023 Annual Meeting, participating in and contributing to various sessions on school leadership, blended learning, learning through play, foundational and transferable skills and many more!
VVOB’s trailblazing research at CIES
Colleagues from five offices (Uganda, Zambia, South Africa, Vietnam and Belgium) presented their research. Kakula Wandi shared her reflections on implementing socio-emotional learning (SEL) methods in Adjumani, one of the 13 districts in Uganda that host refugees, during a panel organised by the Harvard EASEL Lab. She also presented a preliminary analysis of classroom observations conducted during the first phase of our pilot programme to evaluate the suitability of SEL strategies in real classroom situations. Additionally, she raised questions and concerns for the panelists and audience to consider regarding the balance between bottom-up, ethnographic approaches versus more rapid contextualisation efforts.
During a joint session with FAWE and Plan International, Hanne Huysmans shared how our gender-responsive pedagogy for early childhood education (GRP4ECE) toolkit has been used and contextualised to support the professional development of early childhood practitioners, teachers, and school leaders in South Africa, with particular focus on their experiences with online courses.
In a highlighted session on blended continuous professional development (CPD) for educators, Jef Peeraer shared our research in implementing conversational learning in CPD programmes in Rwanda by using a WhatsApp bot system. Findings show that conversational learning support helps educators to move through the courses, positively influencing their motivation to participate in a blended CPD.
You could also catch Jef at the Launch of the 2024/5 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report concept note on school and education leadership as he was invited to join this presidential session as a discussant. The GEM Report is an editorially independent report, hosted and published by UNESCO with the aim to monitor progress towards achieving the fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4) on education. The invitation to Jef was a great recognition of our work on promoting school leadership as part of VVOB’s flagship on effective school leadership!
During another highlighted session, VVOB’s Huong Nguyen Thi Lan explained how our iPLAY project diversified capacity development training on learning through play and effective teacher professional development. These efforts led to significant changes in teachers' approaches to learning.
Last up was Michael Phiri in a session focused on pedagogies and promoting holistic education. He provided a first look at the promising results from his study on the role and impact of the Catch-Up remedial programme on socio-emotional learning (SEL) outcomes for children in grades three to five in Zambia. The findings show that Catch Up has the potential to improve SEL outcomes among primary school students in Zambia, showing significant positive effects on two SEL competencies: conflict resolution and empathy.
Strengthening education through collaborative partnerships
We participated in the “Education systems transformation symposium: Collaborative work, local contexts, and false dichotomies”, organised at the Center for Universal Education at Brookings. We have collaborated on various occasions with the CUE at Brookings, including for the purpose of creating the Education Scalability Checklist and for the review of the upcoming Blend ON! Guide. As a celebration of its 20th anniversary, the Center organised the symposium to launch its new 10-year strategy focusing on systems transformation for holistic education, locally defined priorities, and collaboration in bringing research to practice across education ecosystems.
We joined a reception organised by NORRAG, a global network of over 5,000 members for international policies and cooperation in education and training. During the reception, we learned more about their global equity campaign titled #TheSouthAlsoKnows, which aims to promote underrepresented expert knowledge from the South to audiences globally. We greatly appreciate this campaign and it comes at the right time given VVOB’s clear ambitions as set out in our Learning Unlimited. strategy to rely on research and evidence in our decision-making and promote locally embedded solutions.
We also had the opportunity to participate in a breakfast event hosted by HundrED. Our innovation, process-oriented child monitoring (POM), was selected for the HundrED Global Collection 2023, and was also featured in their Spotlight on Formative Assessment: Improving Learning for Every Child. At the event, we discussed education implementation in relation to the HundrED Implementation Centre for Education Innovation launch.
VVOB’s breakfast event on teacher professional development
The icing on the cake of our fruitful week in Washington DC was our breakfast event in collaboration with some of our key partners such as the LEGO Foundation, the World Bank, the Center for Global Development and the Education Finance Network. We teamed up to share best practices and tools emerging from Coach by the World Bank and BLEND by VVOB, projects that are making strides in effective teacher professional development by working collaboratively within government systems. Keynote speaker David Evans captured the essence of our event perfectly in the following quote:
This was the ideal opportunity to introduce Blend ON!, a guide to help professional development providers create successful blended CPD programmes. Have a look at the teaser video.
The event was well attended by many of our other key partners and friends, including representatives of the governments of Belgium and Cambodia, USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Mastercard Foundation, Aga Khan Foundation, UNESCO, Pratham, Plan International, RTI International, Aflatoun, Trevor Noah Foundation, NISSEM and Rotary International.
When like-minded organisations come together to share knowledge, expertise, and resources, they create a more sustainable approach to improving education. Building and maintaining quality partnerships is key in any successful education initiative, and we are grateful to the leading organisations that joined us last month in Washington DC.
Until next time!
