Title: Strengthening blended learning approaches with teachers and school leaders
Location: Global; Vietnam (provinces of Thai Nguyen, Quang Tri, Da Nang, Ho Chi Minh City); South Africa (KwaZulu Natal province)
Timing: October 2021 – June 2023
Budget: $3,567,174
Donor: The LEGO Foundation
Sector: Primary education
Focus: Professional development of teachers (INSET) and school leaders; blended learning; learning through play
Challenge:
Across the world, school closures due to COVID-19 severely disrupted learning, disproportionately affecting learners from disadvantaged backgrounds. South Africa is particularly hard-hit: since the start of the pandemic, school dropout rates have almost tripled for 7 to 17-year-olds, to 750,000 cases in April/May 2021. In Vietnam, certain hard-hit provinces had to close their schools over a long period of time.
Amid intermittent school closures, many governments such as those of South Africa and Vietnam, shifted towards remote and online education and teacher and school leadership professional development. Often, school leaders and teachers were not well prepared for this transition. They found themselves lacking either the necessary digital infrastructure or the required skills to effectively facilitate remote and online learning and to participate in continuous professional development. In addition, providers of blended continuous professional development (CPD) struggled to engage and motivate participants to actively participate in and complete CPDs successfully.
Social distancing measures have made clear that the global education community in general needs to better support teachers and school leaders in uncertain times, from a distance when necessary.
Goal:
Through blended professional development trajectories that embed play-based learning approaches, school leaders and teachers are strengthened to provide continued responsive and engaging learning experiences to their learners in uncertain times.
Approach:
In South Africa, VVOB and partners develop and pilot new online learning modules on DBE’s learning platform for math instruction that take into account COVID-19-related challenges and strengthen teachers’ play-based pedagogies and math content skills in the foundation phase (grades 0-3).
In Vietnam, VVOB and partners develop and roll-out a new learning platform (on Moodle) where teachers have access to trainings and school-based professional development on learning through play pedagogies. This further builds on the iPLAY project.
- Both projects foresee pathways to scale using the Education Scalability Checklist, co-developed by VVOB.
At global level, VVOB and partners come together in a professional learning community (PLC) to distil lessons from past and ongoing blended CPD interventions, and co-create guidelines on how to support teachers and school leaders with effective blended professional development that does not only focus on technology, but also emphasises participant engagement, creativity, and play. The pilot projects in the South Africa and Vietnam test and iterate the draft guidelines, while the learning trajectory at global level uses insights from these pilots to finalise them.
By the end of the project...
... in South Africa:
- Foundation phase teachers have strengthened knowledge and skills to embed learning through play in mathematics; and take part in professional learning communities (PLCs) to discuss their newly gained knowledge.
- At least 5 South African CSOs have strengthened capacity to develop open resource materials for teacher professional development (TPD) purposes.
- Policymakers at national level are informed about the opportunities for scaling of micro-learning materials and blended learning approaches; and have encouraged educators nation-wide to sign up to their learning platform and access the materials.
... in Vietnam:
- School leaders and core teachers (i.e. teachers in charge of school-based TPD) have strengthened knowledge and (digital literacy) skills to integrate online learning in school-based TPD for their teachers, with a focus on learning through play; as well as strengthened knowledge and skills on facilitating online PLCs and online coaching.
- Policymakers are informed about the opportunities for scaling.
... at global level:
- The guidelines and associated resources are shared widely as a global public good within all VVOB teams, as well as with other partner organisations, ministries of education and regional and global education networks that support government education systems in low- and middle-income settings.
