VVOB on board LEGO Foundation’s global partnership for Learning through Play

Play-based pedagogies are proven to help children gain a breadth of skills, thus fostering critical thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving competencies that are crucial in today’s fast-changing world. For teachers to effectively integrate Learning through Play (LtP) in their classrooms, the LEGO Foundation’s global partnership will work with partners and government systems to provide effective, ongoing teacher professional development to integrate the use of play-based learning in teaching.

“By focusing on teachers, these partnerships bring LtP approaches directly into children’s classrooms", says Sarah Bouchie, head of Global Programmes at the LEGO Foundation. "Working with stakeholders across the system, these partnerships can help to create an enabling environment that supports and sustains the use of play-based pedagogies in achieving improved learning for millions of primary school learners.”

The LEGO Foundation is teaming up with organisations across Africa and Asia to support primary school teachers’ use of LtP. The organisations will work with their respective Ministry of Education teacher professional development systems to promote LtP pedagogies in alignment with ongoing curriculum reforms. For Vietnam, VVOB has keenly accepted to take on the challenge with 'iPLAY'.

Vietnam is changing rapidly. To reach their future potential, primary learners need a breadth of skills, including cognitive, social, emotional, physical and creative skills. To transform the knowledge-focused education system into an education system that equips learners with 21st century skills, the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) is rolling out a new, competency-based curriculum.

VVOB’s iPLAY project (‘Integrating Play-based Learning Activities among Young learners’) supports MOET to achieve the objectives of the new curriculum by integrating LtP pedagogies into its in-service primary teacher professional development (TPD) system.

“By introducing play-based learning methods and teacher professional development roadmaps to support them, iPLAY will contribute to the transformation of the school culture in Vietnam into an education system that is able to comprehensively develop each learner’s qualities and capacity, ethics, intelligence, physical health and help all students reach their full potential”, says Le Thi Bich Hanh, iPLAY Project Manager.

The project will develop pedagogical materials for teachers to learn how to embed playful learning activities in their teaching of the new curriculum, and for school leaders and district education officials to create an enabling environment for LtP. In combination with large-scale in-service trainings and school-based TPD, it will develop teachers’ attitudes, knowledge and skills to incorporate LtP-pedagogies in the classroom.

Applying a 3-step scaling strategy in Vietnam, iPLAY will reach 14,695 schools and more than 150,000 primary teachers in the country by end-2023.

What VVOB does in Vietnam, other organisations will do elsewhere. VVOB is proud to stand alongside them in integrating LtP in education systems. We look forward to learning from the experiences of:

• the Aga Khan Foundation in Kenya
• BRAC in Bangladesh
• Right To Play in Ghana
• UNICEF in Rwanda

The partners receive approximately $4 million each of the $24 million partnership. Collectively, the LEGO Foundation’s global partnership will benefit an estimated five million children aged 6-12 years, 190,000 teachers and three million parents and community stakeholders.

Through the partnership with RTI International, the LEGO Foundation will study the outcomes of scaling LtP in teacher professional development across the five countries. Findings from the research spanning five years will be broadly shared with the global education community to help inform ways forward to foster a breadth of skills among primary school learners through LtP.