Scaling and Adapting Tablet-Based Supplemental Learning in Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania: Joe Wolf and Kira Keane on the Evolution of Imagine Worldwide (Part 3)

Posted on January 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

In the third part of this three-part interview (see Part 1 and Part 2), Joe Wolf and Kira Keane discuss the role of teachers in a table-based supplemental learning model and the efforts to adapt the model to three different contexts in Africa. Part one described the evolution of Imagine Worldwide’s approach and part two discusses Imagine Worldwide’s approach to make the work sustainable by building partnerships with government officials and local community members. The tablet-based program at the center of Imagine Worldwide’s work, developed by software partner onebillion, serves as a supplement for regular instruction, with each child in a school spending a targeted 150 minutes per week working independently on problems related to reading and mathematics. Imagine Worldwide partnered with the Government of Malawi to rollout the program in 500 schools in Malawi in 2023-24, with the ultimate goal of expanding to all 6000 primary schools, serving 3.8 million learners in standards [grades] 1-4 annually. Joe Wolfis the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Imagine Worldwide, and Kira Keaneis the Director of Communications. (Photos/graphics are from Imagine Worldwideunless otherwise noted.)

Thomas Hatch (TH): What can you tell us about the work that has to be done with teachers to scale and sustain the tablet-based model? 

Joe Wolf (JW): The role of facilitator in the model is relatively straightforward. You don’t need a highly trained adult, and they don’t have to be a teacher. It can be a community volunteer or someone else, and that’s made it a very scalable model in terms of human capital. That’s important, because there just aren’t enough humans in these educational contexts. What makes this so scalable, in my opinion, is that when you have a single child and you have a single tablet, there’s an interaction between the child and the content that creates learning gains. When you move to one hundred kids, that linkage doesn’t change. When you move to a million kids, that linkage doesn’t change, you still have the relationship between the child and the content. Things do get more complex in that you have more equipment, and you have more schools, and you need to make sure that the equipment doesn’t get stolen. But when you have a model that depends on human capital, you need more and more and more teachers; and those teachers need to stay trained; and they need to show up every day; and they need to be able to engage one hundred children at the same time. It’s ten out of ten in terms of complexity when you have an inadequate number of teachers and you have to train those teachers to somehow be effective for those one hundred learners. 

[W]hen you have a single child and you have a single tablet, there’s an interaction between the child and the content that creates learning gains. When you move to one hundred kids, that linkage doesn’t change. When you move to a million kids, that linkage doesn’t change, you still have the relationship between the child and the content.

TH: This is definitely a critical problem – how can programs be effective if they depend on more qualified teachers than can ever be supported? But then there are legitimate concerns that programs that don’t rely on teachers are sending the message that teachers aren’t important and that we don’t need those adults. How do you address those concerns that you’re trying to replace teachers with technology? 

KK: That issue has really been top of mind for us, particularly as we think about our communications around the program.  One very conscious decision we’ve made is to go back into the community to report on our research results. This means going back to teachers and saying, “Look, this is how your students are doing. This is what we’re learning. This is how this work can support you. This is how it reinforces your instruction.” From the beginning, we’ve really tried to include teachers as well as parents and community leaders in saying that “what you’re part of has implications not only for your own children and your students, but for the country.” We’ve had to be very mindful of that and of making sure that we build in feedback opportunities for teachers. Now in our implementation research, we have researchers going out into the community, conducting workshops and creating opportunities to hear from teachers so that we can continue to improve that process. But so far, our early implementation results and qualitative information coming from teachers is that it’s highly, highly popular.

Photo: IRC

JW: I also think that we just have to be realistic and fact-based with the current situation. In Malawi, there are one hundred kids per classroom and the average age in Malawi is 16 or 17 years old. It’s one of the youngest countries in the world. That means the number of kids is going to go up dramatically, but the level of resources is not going to go up dramatically.  So you already have a problem, and the problem is going to get worse. You cannot build enough schools or hire enough teachers quickly enough or at low enough cost to solve this problem. That’s just the reality, and, in that context, many of these countries are eager to pursue innovative approaches. They’re not building bank branches. They’re going to mobile banking and now their mobile banking is so much better than ours. It had to be. It’s classic Clayton Christensen and his theories of disruptive innovation: where does innovation take root? It takes root in areas of non-consumption, where the status quo is not entrenched. The government of Malawi is really open about this and there is a real thirst for innovation. This is being well received by the government, by the communities, because what’s currently happening is not producing learning gains. 

In addition, we have purposely situated ourselves in a supplemental, complimentary part of the government school’s timetable. There is already literacy and numeracy on the timetable, teacher led instruction, and that stays the same. Then we have a complementary supplemental period where every student is learning adaptively, and what we’re finding is that some of the biggest fans of that model are the teachers, because they’re saying, I have a little bit of a break during the tablet program, because the kids are super immersed in their own learning. The kids are showing up more often. Attendance is going up. They’re learning more; their attitude toward learning is improving. The teachers and the parents are seeing a higher return on investment of keeping the kids in school.  There are just a lot of positive things that are happening for that teacher so that it isn’t in any way positioned as a replacement, as much as an aid that just makes their jobs easier and more sustainable.

“[W]e have purposely situated ourselves in a supplemental, complementary part of the government school’s timetable. There is already literacy and numeracy on the timetable, teacher led instruction, and that stays the same. Then we have a complementary supplemental period where every student is learning adaptively.”

TH: I think that’s so crucial. What a difference it might make for a teacher to have a period like that where they can see every student engaged. That’s just such a classic win-win. As we wrap-up, I’d love to hear more about scale-up. What have you learned from scaling across different contexts? 

JW: We’ve come up with what we think are the preconditions for success in partnership with governments. We want to find governments that are already committed to: 

  • Bringing technology into the classroom for teachers and students; 
  • Boosting foundational learning; and
  • Providing solar electrification for their schools. 

We want governments to be already moving on this journey. Then we’re helping them get there, as opposed to trying to convince them to do things. We are out of the convincing game. It doesn’t serve anybody. But we know we need strong government buy in, so we need strong leaders within the government that are committed. We also need a strong local ecosystem of partners that can execute. To help with that, we fill the position we call the “ecosystem coordinator.” That helps us act as a group that is solely dedicated to bringing together the disparate pieces and stakeholders and having them all march forward together to do this work. If you don’t have somebody who has this as their only job, the work will not happen because there’s too much else going on. The jobs are too overwhelming. 

“We want governments to be already moving on this journey. Then we’re helping them get there, as opposed to trying to convince them to do things. We are out of the convincing game.”

We also need a funding community that is interested in the places that we’re working. We need bold philanthropic capital that’s willing to go first and willing to do the things that need to be done to get the full government buy in. We need support to get to a critical mass of schools. We need evidence that’s generated specific to that context. We need the ecosystem to be organized in a way that you can create an executable plan. Nobody can make decisions on whether this should go to scale, whether that’s the government or whether that’s funders, without having that done first. And it’s the perfect role of philanthropy to be that risk capital early within a country. What we’re in the process of proving, is that if we do that well, the program is in a position to go to scale with government support and they government is also in a position to mobilize more international and multi-lateral funding. 

Organizationally, we’ve seen that the demand is everywhere. Every week, there are countries asking us work with them, but we’ve decided to focus on four countries of different sizes, with four different languages. We want to work in partnership with these government and prove that the model can, in fact, scale. Then at the end of that phase, we’ll just open source everything and try to bring in a lot more players beyond us. We’ve decide to hone in on what we’re calling our “scale portfolio” with Malawi, Sierra Leone and Tanzania being the first three countries that we’re prioritizing. Then we’ll also have a Francophone country in that portfolio. If we do this well, I think that will provide the evidence that’s needed to figure out how to scale this. At this point, adding a fifth or sixth or seventh country, that’s not what the world needs. We know the demand is there. It’s more important that we show how we can build a system, in partnership with a national government in different contexts. 

TH: Have you had to make adjustments or adaptations so that the model you developed in Malawi can work in these different contexts? 

JW: Absolutely. I think continuous improvement is the DNA of our organization. How do we make the procurement better? How do we make the training better? How do we make those community sensitizations better? How do we better collect data in super low-connectivity areas? How do we take that data so we can improve the software and the implementation model? Innovation is a messy game, and it’s filled with fits and starts, so every day there’s a whole bunch of challenges that come up and a whole bunch of solutions that make the model even better. We have to acknowledge that as much as we want to create standardization in systems, every place is different. Our model in Tanzania will look slightly different than our model in Malawi, and we have to allow for those bottom-up adjustments.  It’s back to that relationship between the child and the content. That relationship probably doesn’t change all that much. There are slight adaptations as you go from language to language or from national curriculum to national curriculum, but those are pretty minor. There’s a lot of overlap in the instruction. It’s really the behavior of the adults surrounding the program that may look different in Tanzania. Just as an example, one of the districts that we’re launching in Tanzania is bigger than the entire country of Malawi, so the logistics of working in smaller and larger countries have to be considered. In terms of other differences, in Sierra Leone, we’re working in standards one through six and in a context that is post- civil war and Ebola and everything else. That means there are a lot of overage kids that are way behind in foundational skills. In Tanzania, we’re only working in standards one through three, because that’s been a more stable place. Malawi is in between, as we’re working in standards one through four. That comes from very different realities in terms of number of kids that have to be served with that same tablet and that same content.

TH: Is there anything you’d like to add that you haven’t already mentioned?

JW: I just want to hammer home the importance of philanthropic capital. The governments do not have the early-stage capital. The Big Aid organizations are not going to be early – that’s not their job. Nearly half of the world’s youth will be African by 2030 – half!  Yet there’s not a single foundation that any of us can name that writes million dollar checks for primary schools in Africa. The disconnect between the size of the challenge and the amount of institutional capital focused on it is stunning. So I do think that when people say, “What can we do about this?” Providing capital has to be part of it. A big reason why the work in Malawi has advanced is because some of our supporters decided to make a big philanthropic bet. It wasn’t just, ”Let’s fund 10 schools and see what happens.” This was, “Let’s fund five hundred schools in a year and see what happens.” That made it a really different conversation, and we’re having success in finding other bold philanthropists that think about things the same way. But it’s not easy. There’s not a lot of institutions that focus on this. Under these conditions, I think part of the work is saying, “Hey, whatever you care about world, if it’s environment, if it’s economy, or if it’s global peace, foundational learning is directly tied to all of that, and we have to pay attention to the region that will have half of the world’s youth in a few years.” 

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

Building the Capacity to Improve and Sustain Foundational Learning Through Government and Local Partnerships in Malawi: Joe Wolf and Kira Keane on the Evolution of Imagine Worldwide (Part 2)

Posted on January 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

In the second part of this three-part interview, Joe Wolf and Kira Keane describe Imagine Worldwide’s efforts to develop a sustainable model for supporting foundational learning by building partnerships with government officials and local community members. Part one described the evolution of Imagine Worldwide’s approach and part three will discuss the role of teachers in the model and the efforts to adapt the model to three different contexts in Africa. The tablet-based program at the center of Imagine Worldwide’s work, developed by software partner onebillion, serves as a supplement for regular instruction, with each child in a school spending a targeted 150 minutes per week working independently on problems related to reading and mathematics. Imagine Worldwide partnered with the Government of Malawi to rollout the program in 500 schools in Malawi in 2023-24, with the ultimate goal of expanding to all 6000 primary schools, serving 3.8 million learners in standards [grades] 1-4 annually. Joe Wolfis the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Imagine Worldwide, and Kira Keaneis the Director of Communications. (Photos/graphics are from Imagine Worldwideunless otherwise noted.)

Thomas Hatch (TH): In the first part of our interview, when you talked about having the tablets delivered by the government trucks, that seems to me to reflect the idea that you’re trying to build capacity; you’re not just trying to get the equipment to the school. You’re trying to build a local infrastructure that makes it possible to sustain the supply and transportation of the necessary equipment. Is there anything you can add about that coordination and that effort to build capacity? Is it just that you have to be patient and maybe sometimes accept that things will go more slowly and it may take longer to build that kind of relationship with the government? 

Joe Wolf (JW): I think that’s a good question. There’s sort of a simple and beautiful framework that Malawi talks about where there’s an “I do,” and then “we do,” and then a “you do“ phase. The “I do” starts with Imagine and our local partners showing that this can be done. Showing that a certain number of schools have launched the program.  Showing how efficiently the school can be equipped for solar; that the tablets can get delivered; and that kids can get learning. In the “we do” period, where we’re working hand in glove with the government and establishing the different functions within the government. But we’re still providing a lot of support, acknowledging that some of these functions are new and that this is the phase that we’re in right now. Then there’s eventually the “you do” where the government is fully doing this on their own, because the functions have been fully built out. So yes, I think you have to be patient. I think you have to acknowledge that certain things take longer than if we could do them completely on our own all the time. You also have to be transparent in terms of the inevitable challenges that have to be faced. You have to talk about things like the recurring cost for governments. This is technology. It will eventually break, and we have to be in a position to fix it and get it returned into the schools, or else the learning will stop. These are crucial functions that have to be fulfilled for these solutions to be sustained over the long term. 

It’s not easy to get there, but I remember a moment when I was in Malawi and we were doing a co-creation workshop at the Ministry, and many people were saying, “Well, what about this, and what about this, and what about this?” At some point, the head of the program at the Ministry stopped the meeting and said, “Hey, everybody, you’re thinking about this the wrong way. This is not their program. It’s not their job to answer these questions. This is our program, and it is our job to answer these questions.” All of a sudden, the tone really shifted.  The head of ICT said “Oh, okay, let me brainstorm how this is going to work in Malawi.” The head of quality assurance said, “let me talk about how it’s going to work in our context.” So you have to find a way to really bring them in as co-creation partners. It’s saying, “Hey, we’ve got some knowledge. We have some experience here, and we’ll bring what we know to the table, but this is your program, and you have to want it.” In Malawi, it took us about seven years to have the right conversation with the right people about the right topics. But as we’re launching in Tanzania and other places the seven years of learning has been compressed a bit. Now, it’s a little bit easier because the starting point in Tanzania has included all the different departments within the Ministry of Education. It’s included the Ministry of Finance. It’s included the Ministry of Regional Administration and Local Government. 

Kira Keane (KK): In terms of sustainability, there was another lesson learned that I think was particularly important. At first, we were thinking that there would be ripple effects, like the creation of jobs for local fabrication or the development of training for local technicians to make repairs. But we quickly realized that these were far more than just ripple effects. We recognized that our government partners foresaw the impact of job creation, ICT training, digital skill training, bringing solar power into communities that hadn’t had it. So now we are trying to be more explicit about building the support for these into the communities and government systems. Now, countries like Sierra Leone and Tanzania are very interested in these additional benefits of the program. 

A close-up of a graph AI-generated content may be incorrect.

“At first, we were thinking that there would be ripple effects, like the creation of jobs for local fabrication or the development of training for local technicians to make repairs. But we quickly realized that these were far more than ripple effects. We recognized that our government partners foresaw the impacts of job creation, ICT training, digital skill training, bringing solar power into communities that hadn’t had it.“

TH: Those are great examples of some of the infrastructure and capacity that needs to be built to get the tablets into the school, what were some of sort of the key implementation challenges that you had to address at the school level to get the tablets into students’ hands for the right amount of time?

JW: First of all, data systems in many of the countries we are working in are really, really inadequate, so we first needed to answer a basic question: “How many kids are in this school?” Our model is predicated upon every child having a tablet every single day for up to an hour, and then that tablet rotates to many children. Just establishing how many kids are there drives the number of tablets, which drives the number of solar panels and lithium batteries needed. We’ve found that when the equipment goes into the school and the children start learning, enrollment spikes because kids that were out of school come to school. Then kids start moving to schools that have the tablets. Even low-fee private school kids are transferring back into the public systems. We have to anticipate that and have to make sure there are extra tablets available. We also have to have a buffer in terms of the solar capabilities: because sometimes the sun might not be shining. We have to do all these calculations to determine how much equipment each school needs. 

We also have to make sure the school is ready. It needs to have a watertight, secure, room to house all of this equipment, so sometimes we’ve had to do roof reinforcements and replace or repair windows and doors. It’s not a huge operational challenge in the grand scheme of things, and it’s not particularly expensive. But you do need to make sure that when the equipment shows up, you actually have a place where it can be securely and safely stored. That’s a process that has to be completed well before the equipment gets there. Then you have a logistical puzzle that stems from the fact that the solar energy and the tablets and the cabinets for charging and securely storing the tablets all handled by different entities. Someone has to coordinate everything to make sure the charging security cabinet is already there before the tablets arrive. Compared to the challenges of building a school, getting all the teachers to show up, keeping the teachers trained, and enabling them to teach effectively, these logistical things are fairly low on the complexity scale. But they have to get done on time and under budget. 

A table of information with text AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Imagine Worldwide Theory of Change

We also have to take into account what we call community sensitization. Very often, this is the first technology that has gone into a community, and there can be a lot of skepticism and concerns about the content on the tablets – “What is this?” “What’s this going to do to my child?” We’ve found that a really important first step is to enable the community leaders, religious leaders, the tribal leaders, the PTA leaders to experience what their children will experience. That helps them to feel comfortable with what’s happening and to take ownership. We use language like “this is your equipment;” and emphasize that they are the ones that will benefit and it’s their responsibility to help us make sure that it’s taken care of. We’ve seen surprisingly low theft rates, given the value of the equipment in some of these contexts, and a big part of that is that communities are owning it as their work for their children. These aren’t third party assets that are controlled by some distant NGO. 

TH: Has that community sensitization become a standard part of the model now?

JW: Yes, it’s a workshop we’ve developed, and it brings together the power centers within a community. That happens before a child gets anywhere near the equipment. We also do trainings for all of the teachers and administrators within a school. We do that so that if a teacher isn’t there one day, or a teacher leaves, there are others that can step in to be facilitators. The facilitator role is relatively straightforward. The children are autonomously using the content, but people need to be trained in order to be able to take care of technical issues and things like that, and having the entire school get trained has proven to be very beneficial. It’s also technology-oriented training that’s valuable to the teachers. A lot of them haven’t had a lot of exposure to technology, so it’s a positive professional development opportunity for the teachers themselves.

A group of people sitting on the ground with headphones on AI-generated content may be incorrect.
A community sensitization session in Malawi (CRECCOM)

KK: It’s also important to note that the people that are conducting these community sensitization workshops are usually from the community themselves. They’re trusted messengers. It’s either our implementation partners who are local and are known within the community, or teachers showing other teachers. 

TH: You’ve already talked about many of the key steps for implementation, is there anything else you want to highlight? 

JW: I think what we have on our side is that engagement is incredibly strong. When you walk into a classroom with 100 standard one learners, six-year-old and seven-year-old learners, it’s completely silent. Every student has the headphones on; they’re looking at the tablets; they’re completely immersed. 100% of the time when people come and see this work they tell me they’ve never seen a room with one hundred six- and seven-year-olds that’s completely silent with every kid totally on task. But the teachers have been very positive as well. Nearly 98% of teachers have said that the program has made them more effective; made their jobs more enjoyable and made their jobs more sustainable. Kids are coming to school more often. They’re paying more attention while they’re there. 

“Nearly 98% of teachers have said that the program has made them more effective; made their jobs more enjoyable and made their jobs more sustainable. Kids are coming to school more often. They’re paying more attention while they’re there.“

The tablets are also really good at helping with remediation, so kids are catching up faster, but it’s also good with acceleration for kids that are ready for harder content. That means you have stakeholders responding uniformly positively. We always ask, “what can we be doing better?” but it’s always “can you bring more?” “Can we do the older grades?” “Can you expand to the school next to us?” Once you make sure that you have enough equipment for all the kids, and once you do a good job of getting the adults to do what they need to do to get the equipment in the room and safe and secure, the rest of it kind of takes care of itself. 

Next Week: Scaling and Adapting Tablet-Based Supplemental Learning in Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania Joe Wolf and Kira Keane on the Evolution of Imagine Worldwide (Part 3)

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

Bringing a Tablet-Based Foundational Learning Program to all the Primary Schools in Malawi: Joe Wolf and Kira Keane on the Evolution of Imagine Worldwide (Part 1)

Posted on January 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

What does it take to scale a tablet-based foundational learning program to all the primary  schools in Malawi? In this 3-part interview, Joe Wolf and Kira Keane describe how Imagine Worldwide has approached that challenge and share some of what they have learned in the process.  The tablet-based program at the center of Imagine Worldwide’s work, developed by software partner onebillion, serves as a supplement for regular instruction, with each child in a school spending a targeted 150 minutes per week working independently on problems related to reading and mathematics. Imagine Worldwide partnered with the Government of Malawi to rollout the program in 500 primary schools in 2023-24, with the ultimate goal of expanding to all 6000 primary schools in Malawi, serving 3.8 million learners in standards [grades] 1-4 annually. Joe Wolf is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Imagine Worldwide and Kira Keane is the Director of Communications. (Photos/graphics are from Imagine Worldwide unless otherwise noted.)

TH: Can you describe for us some of the key steps or phases you went through as you developed your work to test and then to scale-up this tablet-based program in Malawi? 

Joe Wolf: The first phase of our work was all research oriented. We wanted to see if these learner-centric tablet models could work – were they really effective for children? – before asking under-resourced systems to spend time, energy, and capital on them. That meant we had a prolonged research phase that included nine randomized controlled trials. That was across different contexts, different languages, different implementation models, different countries – really exhaustively trying to prove that these solutions can, in fact, add significant value. 

The second phase was what we call “learning to scale:” What are the processes that need to be done repeatedly well to scale within these contexts? We purposely spread our work out across seven countries, with different implementation models, different implementation partners, different types of structures to really test what needs to be done repeatedly well so that these systems can adopt the work at scale. Then, only in the last three years, we’ve put the pedal down and said, “Okay, I think we’re ready to really think about scaling.” And we were only able to act on scaling thanks to the leadership of the government of Malawi, who saw the learning gains of our pilot programs and saw how this edtech intervention could support their national goals of improving foundational skills.  At that point in 2022, we served around 6000 children, but we increased it to about 700,000 children by the beginning of 2025. That’s a 100x increase in the last two years, which I think is a testament to the scalability of the model, the execution of the team, and the leadership of our government partners. 

A map of africa with a yellow circle AI-generated content may be incorrect.

TH: What’s the third phase? Implementation? 

JW: I would say it’s scale plus continuous improvement. Now, our research is less efficacy oriented and more implementation oriented. How do we make it better and better and better? To address that, we have four levers we focus on: 

  • Access: How do we serve more and more children and make the solutions easier and easier to implement? 
  • Cost-effectiveness: How do we bring down the recurring costs to be as low as possible? We’ve brought costs down around 75% in the last five years, and we think there’s still room to go. Our key inputs are all highly deflationary, so we’re getting better economies of scale as we grow. Right now, we’re at about seven dollars (USD) per child per year. We think we can get that under five dollars (USD) as we get better economies of scale. 
  • Advocacy: How do we use data to improve the implementation model in the software so that the efficacy of the program continues to go up and up and up? It’s one of the beauties of technology that it can iterate and improve. You’re not building a building and putting in books and then five years later it’s deteriorated. We actually have the ability to use data to continuously improve through this flywheel of innovation.

“It’s one of the beauties of technology that it can iterate and improve. You’re not building a building and putting in books and then five years later it’s deteriorated. We actually have the ability to use data to continuously improve through this flywheel of innovation.“

  • Sustainability. How do we work with our government partners to build operational and financial sustainability?  And how do we do it starting day one, where we’re building the “muscles” within the existing education system, as opposed to the classic approach of starting off outside the system and then trying to hand it off to the system. Too often, if you haven’t done a good job of building that internal muscle, and then things fall apart. So we’ve really taken the system strengthening approach, acknowledging that there are capacity and infrastructure gaps within the countries where we work and that there are key functions that need to be built that don’t currently exist within some of these systems. We’ve tried to give it time so that, by the end of the implementation phase, the system has already been doing the work for an extended period of time. That way, you don’t have this fall off as you try to hand-off everything to the system itself.

Kira Keane: I just want to underscore a couple of points that Joe made. For Imagine, this notion of the continuous improvement loop, it’s not like we did things, something went wrong and we’re like, “Oh, we have to fix this.” This was an intentional design element from the very beginning: How do we get continuous feedback to improve both the software itself and the implementation model? And the other point is that our key question is “How do we serve as many children as possible?” The need is so immense and the population growth will be so intense over the next 10-15 years so we really need to be focused on scale. That means working with our government partners to aim for generational impact, really looking at country-wide scale, and focusing on how we design for that.

“The need is so immense and the population growth will be so intense over the next 10-15, years so we really need to be focused on scale.  That means working with our government partners to aim for generational impact, really looking at country-wide scale, and focusing on how we design for that.”

JW: I’ll add two more things to what Kira said. The ecosystem is exhausted by pilots – by small things that don’t scale, that don’t have evidence, that take a lot of time and resources. Scale from day one very much aligns with where the governments are. They have a big problem with the lack of foundational learning among their students, and they need big solutions. Little, tiny things are just distracting and take too much time and energy. The second thing is that we have positioned our organization to be temporary in nature, so our job is to put ourselves out of business as quickly as we possibly can. We don’t see these as “Imagine Worldwide” programs in Malawi or “Imagine Worldwide” in Sierra Leone. These are programs of the government in Malawi and of the government in Sierra Leone that we are helping to support. We’re helping to build capacity and infrastructure to build muscle within the systems. But as soon as the government is ready to maintain this on its own, we are more than pleased to step out of the way and to move on to the next challenge. I think that positioning is really important for the governments. It’s really important for the funders. It’s really important for us and our team. Too many times, an NGO establishes itself and 50 years later, the NGO is still there, doing the work. We need this work to be sustainable within existing systems. Part of that is a commitment for us to get out of the way. We have to believe in sovereignty and the power of governments to run themselves, while also acknowledging that the use of technology in a place like Malawi is new, and so there is going to be a period of time where we have to build some functions that do not currently exist.

TH: That certainly resonates with my experiences in the US where we’ve seen multiple improvement efforts collide in schools in ways that can actually undermine their capacity for improvement. What made Malawi a good context for you to work on scale-up?  

JW: The work in Malawi actually predates the partnership with Imagine. There was a program called “Unlocking Talent,” with the software developer onebillion that became our partner. The onebillion CEO went to Malawi, I think, 15 years ago, fell in love with the country, and developed the product. The first product they developed was in Chichewa, in Malawi. In other words, this was not developed in the West and then adapted to the context. This actually was developed within the Malawian context. We became a research partner to look at impact and to help do the RCT work. That has now evolved into a much more scalable model that we call the BeFIT Program. It’s serving standards [grades] one through four, whereas the first program was only standard two. 

A person holding a tablet AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Key elements of the BeFIT program in Malawi

There have been a whole bunch of iterations along the way to develop our general approach, but it basically evolved by thinking about what it would take to actually scale the program much more cost effectively to many more students in more systems. If you look at the other places that we worked, you’ll see that we started with finding local partners, mostly local NGOs, some local social-oriented businesses, and then turned over a lot of the functions to those local partners to see what worked in different contexts. From that, we have built a series of centralized functions that we’re now drawing on in our country partnerships, as opposed to having it be completely decentralized. We learned a lot from the initial more decentralized exploration, but we’re now in the process of creating more standardization. Part of scaling depends on acknowledging that you can’t have fifty different bespoke operations. You need to have systems and standards and data systems. When you have 6000 children in Malawi, using a total of 1000 devices, you can do some things by hand; but now we’re trying to serve millions of children in Malawi, with hundreds of thousands of tablets. We now need data driven systems in order to be able to manage that equipment in the field. 

TH: Let’s follow the arc of that evolution in Malawi. What are some of the steps that were crucial to your learning and to the development of the model?

JW: In Malawi, we took seven or eight years to do the research and to get the right level of government buy-in to understand what was working. That included learning things like what’s the infrastructure for the typical school in Malawi? Just to give you the context, that means more than 100 children per teacher and inadequate levels of teacher training. There’s very rarely basic infrastructure in place, so no electricity and certainly no internet connectivity. That’s the reality of the average class in Malawi. So as you think about the components of our model that have emerged the first was what you would call the infrastructure component. We put solar power into all of our schools, addressing questions like: 

  • Where do solar panels go? 
  • How does the solar electricity feed a bank of lithium batteries? 
  • How do the tablets get stored and secured overnight so that they’re charged and they’re safe? 
  • How does all that equipment get distributed to children in a really efficient manner, so that you’re getting as much asset utilization as possible and as much learning time as possible? 

In the end, our research consistently shows that the number of minutes each student uses the content is directly correlated to the level of learning. So we’re addressing these 101 things that need to be done in terms of the infrastructure and operations to maximize that time on task. And that has to take into account that the school day and the school periods are very short in Malawi and you have a lot of children in the classroom. So even just getting kids in and out of a classroom is a lot harder than in many other contexts.

A group of children raising their hands AI-generated content may be incorrect.
A classroom in Malawi

TH: You just described those complexities really effectively, but for those of us who aren’t familiar with the context, can you go into it even more deeply? What does it really take to get a program like this up and running at scale? 

JW: I think that in addition to a foundational learning organization, we are, in a lot of ways, also a supply chain logistics company. Learning gains are still our north star, but the reality is you’re talking about a phase one of BeFIT that involved launching the program in five hundred schools in five months across half of the country of Malawi, including very rural districts. So we have to deal with the logistics of getting five hundred secure storage cabinets into those schools. We have to deal with the logistics of getting 100,000 tablets distributed across those 500 schools and of getting the solar equipment put into 500 schools. That’s a significant operational lift, and you have to approach that with a level of rigor in terms of those key functions, if you’re going to be able to scale, and you’re going to be able to do that on time. And we had to do that on budget in the middle of a huge macro-economic meltdown in terms of currency and raw materials. In the grand scheme of things, once the equipment is in place, kids can get learning very, very quickly. There’s not a huge lift in terms of adult training. There’s not a huge lift in terms of the role of the adult in the model itself; the content has been built to be autonomous, meaning the child can be self-directed. The tablets themselves have been built to be very robust. A lot of enhancements have been made to make the tablet durable. There’s a long battery life so it can be used throughout the day. Every part of the tablet has been built with screws so that a component can be swapped out if something breaks. So every part of the context has been taken into account in order to get that equipment into the field and utilized. This is one of the big learnings: you have to start with the context in mind, and you have to start with the learning objectives in mind. You then make a series of software decisions, and then you make a series of hardware decisions. Too often in education, it goes the other direction, where people buy stuff, but then they haven’t really thought about what’s going to go on the stuff? What’s the training required? What are the charging and security components of it? What is our learning objective at the end of the day? You have to start with learning, move into the context, and think about all the infrastructure decisions that need to be made in order to make that learning possible in that context. 

“You have to start with learning, move into the context, and think about all the infrastructure decisions that need to be made in order to make that learning possible in that context.”

KK: I think it’s also important to flag that in working on the logistics we included the government from day one. That means things like using the delivery trucks the government already had. Trying to manage that coordination may have been a little slower or less efficient in some ways, but too often people design an implementation model, put a bow on it, and then hand it to the government without including them from inception. 

Next Week: Building the Capacity to Improve and Sustain Foundational Learning Through Government and Local Partnerships in Malawi: Joe Wolf and Kira Keane on the Evolution of Imagine Worldwide (Part 2)

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

How Do You Build a Learning Ecosystem? Gregg Behr on the Evolution and Expansion of Remake Learning and Remake Learning Days (Part 2)

Posted on January 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

What does it take to expand support for learning in and across communities? In the second part of this 2-part interview, Gregg Behr talks about the development of the first Remake Learning Days in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and how they spread to community-wide efforts in 15 different regions in 4 countries. In 2007, Behr, the executive director of The Grable Foundation, founded Remake Learning as a network of educators, scientists, artists, and makers supporting future-driven opportunities for children and youth in Pittsburgh. Celebrating its 10th edition this month. Remake Learning Days began in 2016 as a local learning festival with hands-on learning events for children of all ages at libraries, schools, parks, museums, and other community spaces. Behr is also the author with Ryan Rydzewski of When You Wonder, You’re Learning, sharing the science behind the  work and words of Fred Rogers and Mister Rogers Neighborhood, a well-known television show that ran for over thirty years.  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TH:  Let’s turn to one of the activities that I think has become a signature of your work – Remake Learning Days. What were some of the critical “aha’s” in their development? 

GB: The first “aha” happened in one of the human centered design sessions. In Pittsburgh, we had a firm called Maya Design, and they had a retreat room surrounded by whiteboards where they would facilitate these amazing sessions. In 2015, we convened about 30 people, including folks who came from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. We were asking these big questions about how far Remake Learning had come and where we might go – asking, essentially, how do you build out a learning ecosystem? What would that look like? It was during that session that it became clear that the network was serving professionals like teachers and afterschool directors, librarians, and designers really well, but that we weren’t really designed to serve parents, families and caregivers. There was a clear “aha” that if we didn’t seriously engage with these members of our community, we’d risk being incredibly faddish, and we started wrestling with what we could do to engage this group. There wasn’t an obvious way to just plug parents and families into our different programs and activities, but through this user design process two things came to light. One was that someone talked about how open houses were one of the singular moments when parents, families and caregivers really come to schools and engage with educators, as surface level as it might be. Then totally separately, someone talked about how, at least in Pittsburgh, we have lots of neighborhood festivals like the Pickle Festival, the Perogie Festival, etc. I can’t even remember who it was, but someone said “Hey, what if we put these two ideas together? This idea of neighborhood festivals with the idea of an open house?” And so we started to talk about having a kind of festival of open houses of all of these places for kids and learning that had been built over the past couple of years. At that point, we had dozens, if not hundreds of makerspaces. We had STEM labs. We began to wonder what might happen if there was a chance for parents, families and caregivers together with their kids to get into all of these spaces and to get beyond their schools and to go into into the Carnegie Museum of Art or whatever it might be. That was the germ of the idea of what became Remake Learning Days, but I can’t even recall what it was called initially. 

A screenshot of a website AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Within a year, we had the first Remake Learning Days in 2016 because all sorts of organizations said they wanted to participate. There were more 250 events over the course of about nine days. 25,000 people came out in that very first year! That was the second aha – seeing all of those people come out and realizing “Oh, there’s something here!” The other big realization was that there were 250 events that were self-organized: they did it and they weren’t paid to do it. Clearly something had traction, in 2025 in Pittsburgh, we’ll celebrate 10th edition of Remake Learning Days. 

TH: That’s an incredible story. In 2019, other cities in the US and in other countries started hosting their own Remake Learning Days: How did they start to spread? 

GB: The same people from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy challenged Remake Learning to document its work in what became the Playbook. In fact, someone from that Office left the White House to work with the Sprout Fund in designing the Playbook. The basic idea behind the Playbook was to create something that would be as helpful to people and organizations in Pittsburgh as it would be to Flint, Michigan or Oklahoma City. After seeing how the Remake Learning Days had taken hold in Pittsburgh, we started looking for financial support to develop the Playbook. We got some funding primarily from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and created what we initially called a toolkit that communities could use to host their own Remake Learning Days.  At the time, Remake Learning was deeply involved with other national organizations and associations that were involved with STEM, the maker movement, and other things like that. We just put the toolkit out there to say, “Who else might want to host Remake Learning Days?” And that’s how they began to spread. 

A close-up of hands working on a computer AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Remake Learning Playbook

TH: As I understand it, you’ve tried to let these Remake Learning Days grow and spread more or less on their own?  Are there any particular lessons you’ve learned, either any lessons you’ve learned, either vicariously or from your interactions with those in other communities? 

GB: In terms of letting them spread, yes and no. We’ve tried to provide just enough guardrails so that, if a Martian comes down and goes to Remake Learning Days in Pittsburgh and then Doncaster, England and then southern Wisconsin, it would seem like these things are connected.  If Remake Learning Days are going to be successful, you have to have that connection, but they also have to feel contextualized in these different places. 

“We’ve tried to provide just enough guardrails so that, if a Martian comes down and goes to Remake Learning Days in Pittsburgh and then Doncaster, England and then southern Wisconsin, it would seem like these things are connected.”

Along the way, the team has learned a thousand lessons. They’re going to continue to iterate as they look ahead to years 11 and 12, but like so many other community-based initiatives, you need to have that “backbone” organization; you have to have that clear champion who’s going to lead the work. In one instance, there was an amazing woman who made Remake Learning Days happen where she lived. But after she left, it hasn’t been the same thing. It was so tied to one person and one organization that it just didn’t stick; so we’ve learned that lesson. We’ve also learned the lesson that sometimes things have beginnings and ends. Chattanooga and Chicago hosted phenomenal Remake Learning Days, and they met the needs of the Public Education Foundation in Chattanooga and the Chicago Learning Exchange. But they plateaued in their utility, and both said, essentially, “We’ve loved this, but we’re not going to continue with this,” and we’ve learned that’s totally fine. We’ve seen places like Sarasota and Doncaster completely adopt this approach; raise lots of local money; and Remake Learning Days are now integral to their local efforts. If we were to shut down Remake Learning here in Pittsburgh, they would continue on in some of these other places. We’ve learned all sorts of lessons about leadership, about local financing, about making it local so people feel connected to it. It’s not just a franchise that someone imports; the Remake Learning team has worked hard in terms of monthly meetings and all sorts of things to make sure there’s quality control for successful festivals. 

A group of people standing outside AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Gregg Behr at a Remake Learning event (photo: Ben Filio)

TH: I didn’t realize how much work the Remake Learning team is putting into these. I thought you put the Playbook out there, and then just let people use it. But you actually have a team that coordinates with these other places, and in a sense sanctions these other events, and says, “Yes, these are Remake Learning Days. This is one of our partner events”? 

GB: Again, the answer is yes and no. Everything that Remake Learning has done, maybe to its detriment, is through Creative Commons licensing, so people have used the Remake Learning Network playbook and also the Remake Learning Days toolkit to their own effect. In New Hampshire, they have used the playbook to support the development of their local learning networks but never with any formal coordination with Remake Learning— – and that’s okay. Places like Qatar have had “Doha Learning Days” and have used the Remake Learning Days playbook. I’d say it’s a loosely sanctioned process. But then there are two producers of Remake Learning Days, and they in turn work with the team in Sarasota or the team in Doncaster, or wherever it may be. 

TH: How does that work? Does Sarasota have to pay the producers or are they providing pro bono services to the places that want to do it? 

GB: Yes, they have a remarkable team supported by The Patterson Foundation in Sarasota; and, for Sarasota and elsewhere, Remake Learning has borne the costs for some of the regional and national marketing, because with an event like this, the most significant costs are marketing. 

TH: Have you run into challenges where you wish that some place wouldn’t call their events Remake Learning Days? 

GB: There have been some challenges along the way, with some places that want to call it something else like “STEM Days,” and the team has had some tough conversations with some cities, saying if we’re going to be part of this, then there are a few things you need to do. Some cities have just said, “We’re going to have our own thing.”  There are also challenges around quality control and questions about what kinds of events to connect with.  There are now some pop-up festivals which have been hugely successful.  People have staged events in Tel Aviv and Antarctica, but sometimes these are singular events on a particular day, and they’re branded and connected to Remake Learning Days, and they’re on the website, but it’s not a multi-day festival the way it is in Sarasota or southern Wisconsin or Kansas City. 

Dates are also difficult. Even with the pop-up events, Remake Learning Days have had a set date range, something like April 23rd through May 23rd. For example, the six regions in Pennsylvania that now host Remake Learning days, they all happen at the same time. That is very deliberate, and they are coordinated statewide. But in 

Tennessee, they valued Remake Learning Days, but May didn’t work for them because of state testing, and it turns out that May is not a great time for Remake Learning Days in Uruguay. That raises the question: does it have to be around the same dates around the world for it to be called Remake Learning Days? The team is wrestling with a whole bunch of questions like this as they go forward. They’re trying to provide greater flexibility while maintaining quality control. 

TH: Can you say anything more about the next steps or the challenges ahead for Remake Learning Days and Remake Learning? 

GB: In terms of challenges, like a lot of these things, no one ever imagined there being a 10th edition. But even with that, ongoing fundraising is a challenge. Yet, for corporate funders, sponsoring an event like Remake Learning Days is a lot easier than sponsoring a network. For fundraising, it certainly helps that they have built up a body of data, including qualitative evidence – write-ups and videos – to support it. Quantitative data, too! For example, they worked with Heather Weiss, who led the Harvard Family Research Project to document their impact on parents. Their goals included helping parents understand how learning is being remade; helping parents understand how they can support their own kids if they find their kids are lit up by art and design or coding or maker-centered programs; and building up demand among parents so they might go to school board meetings, parent-teacher conferences, or their local library to ask questions about these approaches to learning that are clearly lighting up their kids. Heather’s work demonstrated that parents were gaining familiarity with STEAM and new approaches to learning and building their interest and support for those approaches.  

“Ongoing fundraising is a challenge. Yet, for corporate funders, sponsoring an event like Remake Learning Days is a lot easier than sponsoring a network.”

Looking toward the future, I think we’ll see fewer sites that host Remake Learning Days, but they will be more embraced by their region, with significant regional funding. In addition to seeing that in southern Wisconsin, on the west coast of Florida, and Doncaster, the Pennsylvania Department of Education has invested significantly in Remake Learning Days and different units from the state government are also providing in-kind support. I think we may see more changes like that where public funding also helps to drive further engagement and support from local and state governments.  

TH: Looking to the future, let’s return to Remake Learning in Pittsburgh. What do you think it will take to sustain and deepen this work overall?  Are there particular problems that have to be addressed or changes that have been made? 

GB: There are always lots of answers to a question like that!  One thing we have to address is leadership. The leadership has evolved over the years. When it was time for the Sprout Fund to sunset, and they wrapped up their work, we hired what amounted to a director for Remake Learning, and there have been a number of directors since that time, each of whom has held the position for at least two or three years. But incredibly, it wasn’t until around 2014 or 2015 that we convened what we call the Remake Learning Council. This is a council of CEOs, learning scientists, leaders of cultural institutions and others who meet regularly with the director and the Remake Learning team and provide advice and support.  Of course, the people in these roles change positions all the time. There are new museum directors, new superintendents and so on. We have to pay attention to that churn and make sure we have the right people and the right support, and that’s a great leadership challenge. It’s also what makes Remake Learning sustainable – it’s crucial to have a large number of leaders across the community who value this work, who are contributing to the design of it and advancing it. 

Relatedly, Remake Learning, if you can believe it, has never been its own separate 501 (c) (3) [which would allow it to be a charitable organization collecting tax exempt donations]. That’s because part of the strategy in the beginning was to demonstrate that this was not going to be something that competed for funding with other charitable organizations, like museums and some of our other charitable partners. Instead, Remake Learning has been fiscally sponsored by other organizations, and I think that’s been a real benefit – so that the focus could be the work itself. Initially, Remake Learning was fiscally sponsored by the Sprout Fund; then it was fiscally sponsored by our regional association of grantmakers called Grantmakers of Western Pennsylvania. It’s currently fiscally sponsored by the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, our region’s educational service agency. But we always have to check in on our structure: Do we have the right home? Do we have the right governance? That’s an ongoing challenge for the network. 

“Part of the strategy in the beginning was to demonstrate that this was not going to be something that competed for funding with other charitable organizations, like museums and some of our other charitable partners.”

Another challenge with any organization that reaches 20 years is that you’ve got people who’ve been involved for nearly 20 years, and there are people who just joined two weeks ago. We have to keep the work fresh and relevant for the newcomers as much as for the veterans. This is a programmatic challenge.  It’s hard to keep things fresh for most everyone involved. As one example of “keeping things fresh,” Remake Learning started in the past few years to distribute what they call Moonshot Grants. Regionally, I think they’ve spent about three or four million dollars in grants to local organizations and schools that are really trying to push the edge of what constitutes great learning, especially as such much around us is changing. That’s one example that’s kept the work really fresh. 

A group of people in a garden AI-generated content may be incorrect.
What is a Moonshot? 

Remake Learning has also really leaned into some of its national and international partnerships, which has pushed its work forward. Just last week Remake Learning announced ten national moonshot grants, which came out of the Forge Futures Summit, which brought together organizations involved in learning ecosystems from around the US, and even a few other places worldwide. This speaks to the spread and the tension: Remake Learning is committed to being a regional organization and it has to continue to do basic things brilliantly at the regional level. It’s not a national or international organization, but it sometimes has – or could have – a national and international role to play. That’s what Remake Learning Days have done, and Remake Learning is figuring out how to do that as a network while not distracting ourselves from our core mission regionally. 

TH: Can you say a bit more about what Remake Learning has done internationally? 

GB: Remake Learning has partnerships with a number of international organizations including HundrED in Finland, Big Change out of London, OECD, and the Global Education Leadership Partnership.  Just as an example, Remake Learning got connected to Big Change pre-pandemic because they had done a report and Remake Learning ended up being one of their case studies. Now Remake Learning and Big Change are funding a loose federation of international organizations that meet almost monthly. Along with Remake Learning and Big Change, it includes Learning First out of Bermuda, People for Education in Canada, Learning Creates Australia, Innovation Unit, Zizi Afrique in Kenya, Fundacio Bonfill in Spain, Educate! in Uganda, and Dream a Dream out of India. You’ve got people who represent different geographies. In some cases, they are more metropolitan like Remake Learning, but in others are more nationwide, like Uganda Educate! The first meeting focused on Bermuda’s transforming education system. The second one was a showcase of some of the work in Australia. It’s become a global learning community.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Something’s Happening Here: Gregg Behr on the Evolution and Expansion of Remake Learning and Remake Learning Days (Part 1)

Posted on January 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

What does it look like when an entire community supports children’s learning and development? In this 2-part interview, Gregg Behr talks about the origins of Remake Learning and how the expansion of Remake Learning Days has helped to catalyze similar community-wide efforts in several other cities and regions around the world. In 2007, Behr, the executive director of The Grable Foundation, founded Remake Learning as a network of educators, scientists, artists, and makers supporting future-driven learning opportunities for children and youth in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Remake Learning Days began in 2016 as a local learning festival with hands-on learning events for children of all ages at libraries, schools, parks, museums, and other community spaces. Celebrating its 10th edition this month, Remake Learning Days have now expanded to 15 different regions in four countries. Behr is also the author with Ryan Rydzewski of When You Wonder, You’re Learning, sharing the science behind the  work and words of Fred Rogers and Mister Rogers Neighborhood, a well-known television show that ran for over thirty years.  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

Thomas Hatch (TH): What were some of the key developments and “Aha” moments in your early work at the Grable Foundation and with Remake Learning? 

Gregg Behr (GB): I joined the Grable Foundation as Executive Director 19 years ago in 2006. I followed on the heels of an exceptional executive director, Susan Brownlee, who had led this organization extraordinarily well. By all accounts, the trustees were incredibly pleased with where the foundation was and where it was going. That meant I came into a position as a leader saying, “How do you build on excellence?” To try to answer that question, I spent time out in the community just connecting with people with whom the Foundation had been working. Meeting with teachers, meeting with librarians, and meeting with others involved in the out-of-school space. I asked them, “What could we do that would be helpful to you?” I heard things like “I’m just not connecting with kids the way that I used to.” This was fall of 2006 and at the time I was 32 years old, and at first, I just thought, “Oh, this is just experienced people saying something like ‘the kids these days…”.  But then I began to notice who was saying these things, and I realized I was hearing this from people in different age groups. Some had just started their work, others were 30 years into their careers, and they were all literally saying that kids are different this year than they were last year. I thought that was strange. It was if something was happening seismically in kids’ lives. Sitting here in 2024 it feels naive to say these things, but looking back, in 2006, there were massive changes underway in kids’ lives. They were consuming information differently, producing information differently, seeking affirmation differently, developing identities differently. There was, in fact, something different happening in their lives.

“[T]here were massive changes underway in kids’ lives. They were consuming information differently, producing information differently, seeking affirmation differently, developing identities differently. There was, in fact, something different happening in their lives.“

That recognition sparked something and got me asking questions like, if it’s true that something different is happening, how do we support schools and other sites of learning in different ways?  Then, I had a meeting with a colleague at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, and I began to realize that there were a whole lot of other people asking questions about kids and learning but that weren’t traditional educators. They were designers, artists; they were gamers and what we now call “makers.” I started meeting with those folks and began to wonder what would happen if you brought these people together? So I organized a meeting at a breakfast place called Pamela’s. It was just a dozen people, and I was very purposeful inviting 12 individuals from 12 very different fields, including – as examples – a teacher, a gamer, and someone in museum exhibit design. 

It was one of those things where I scheduled it for an hour for, and it ended up going on for 2 or 2 and a half hours. At the end, everyone said, “Oh, my gosh! I can think of 2 or 3 colleagues that ought to be part of this conversation about education locally.” Then I just started convening more of these meetings. I used an email subject line that said “Kids + Creativity,” just giving it a name. Then people started saying “Oh, that’s the Kids and Creativity meeting!” That continued for a couple of years, and it just kept growing and growing. It went from pancakes to bagels, and then we did a “Gong Show” like event in the basement of the Children’s Museum. After that, people at an organization called the Sprout Fund got involved. They were a community foundation-like organization that served as a “think-and-do” tank in our region. They had a 5 C’s model (Convene and Catalyze; Communicate; Coordinate;  Champion) that we still use today that they used to organize these meetings and give some coherence to this growing network of people and organizations.  They said “It will take the grant maker (me!) out of the center to see if there’s a “there there.”

A person on stage with a large screen AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Gregg Behr presenting about Remake Learning (photo: Howard Lipan)

This story speaks to a number of aha’s. It was an aha recognizing that something different was happening in kid’s lives — that the learning sciences and evidence from neural mapping now tell us was true. It was an aha and realization that we needed to think differently about who ought to be part of the conversation. There was an aha that this 5 C’s model that was originally used to attract and retain talent could be applied to help us build this network of folks involved in education generally and learning innovation in particular. The other aha was the power in shifting from talking about education to talking about learning; a simple thing in some ways, but at the time, it was profound because education conveyed schooling, whereas learning had this much bigger open sense that kids are learning in lots of places. That speaks to the power of words as well. I didn’t come up with the phrase “Remake Learning,” someone at the Sprout Fund came up with it, but, in retrospect, I think the reason that the name Remake Learning has stuck all these years is that using “remake” suggested that we don’t have to transform everything. We don’t have to blow everything up. You don’t have to get rid of everything that you’ve done for your entire professional life or what you studied. There may be some things that are timeless and classic, but we need to remake it for who today’s kids are. That name also wasn’t wedded to any particular thing like STEM or STEAM or maker education or digital learning. It captured all of those things, and it turned out to be a good umbrella for different approaches, different pedagogies, different frameworks, different words that people were using as they thought about innovation and learning in and out of school. That was another important aha. 

A close-up of a black and white website AI-generated content may be incorrect.

[T]he reason that the name Remake Learning has stuck all these years is that using “remake” suggested that we don’t have to transform everything. We don’t have to blow everything up…. There may be some things that are timeless and classic, but we need to remake it for who today’s kids are.

TH: What were some of the challenges you encountered and some of the changes you made as things developed from there? 

GB: Early on, it was important for this new intermediary – Remake Learning – to build trust and demonstrate this isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s not as if the Grable Foundation or other funders are going to now start funding this to the exclusion of other things. Then the folks at the Sprout Fund, in particular, really learned how to work well with other intermediaries in the early childhood space, the mentoring space, and the out of school time space, to see and recognize the work already going on and build on it. For example, they built on things like the Allegheny Partners for Out of School Time. It meant figuring out how something like Remake Learning builds on that work and doesn’t compete with it or replace it. We use words like “partnership” and “collaboration” pretty freely, but it’s really hard work to build trust among people and organizations. 

TH: Yes, it’s really hard work!  Do you have any examples, from the work with your partners, that helps to show what worked for you in building partnerships? 

GB: I suppose it’s not rocket science, but for one thing, we were really deliberate and very intentional about communications. We took advantage of our position in philanthropy and convened leaders of the key organizations at least quarterly so that there was transparency in our communications. We would always meet with food and other things to build relationships and get to know each other a little better, and we tried to engage in genuine conversations to say, “Here’s what we’re doing” and “How do we really help each other?” Just being really deliberate and reaching out to the Allegheny Partners and others to say “Hey, we’re thinking about an event on September 23rd.” Lots and lots of little ordinary things that would engender trust. Then people feel like, “Oh, I’m being heard.” Being deliberate about inviting leaders of organizations to be part of review committees, to create real, community-based participatory review committees for grant making. All of those simple, ordinary things repeated and done in a rhythm helped the Remake Learning team avoid some key problems. It’s a very human, relational enterprise to build out a network. 

“All of those simple, ordinary things repeated and done in a rhythm helped the Remake Learning team avoid some key problems. It’s a very human, relational enterprise to build out a network.“

TH: I think time and rhythm are really important. How do you plan for that? Did you have in your mind that this is going to take five years or ten years? 

GB: It’s interesting that you ask this question because I think rhythm is often overlooked. If Doncaster, England calls us or Fremont, California, calls, I always talk about the rhythm. I think the rhythm sets expectation. Like every spring we’re going to host Remake Learning Days. Every fall, there’s a Remake Learning assembly, which is kind of like our “State of the Union.” There are four meet ups every month. You can expect communications to come out every Friday. It’s not haphazard — all of the little things create expectations and make it easier for people to connect. thing. Kids need rhythm in their schools. but it’s also important for organizations, for cities, for regions to have a rhythm. Like this is our birthday. This is when we’re going back to school. For the network, creating a rhythm and being deliberate and intentional about it builds a culture; it builds tradition; it builds relationships. It builds all of those things. 

Kids need rhythm in their schools. but it’s also important for organizations, for cities, for regions to have a rhythm. Like this is our birthday. This is when we’re going back to school. For the network, creating a rhythm and being deliberate and intentional about it builds a culture; it builds tradition; it builds relationships. It builds all of those things.

There are a couple other things that I think kept Remake Learning grounded. One of them is that many times over the course of nearly 20 years, Remake Learning has hired consultants well trained in human centered design. They’ve convened members of the Remake Learning network for half-day or daylong retreats or other gatherings so that Remake Learning can ask “how are we doing? “How might we do things better?”  It’s ongoing strategic management with a real sense of human-centered design in it, regularly checking-in with the broader community. 

TH: So often funders and others are focused on the short-term – on generating outcomes in two or three years, but part of what I’m taking away from what you’re saying is that you weren’t focused on a specific time frame; you were focused on creating a set of activities and events that could be sustained to support activity over time, into the future. 

GB: Yes, and I would add that the focus was more about a mindset, an idea. It was about a movement to think about learning across a landscape that supports young people’s passions and interests. The events, the activities, the grants, the communications are all in support of changing mindsets about learning.

[T]he focus was more about a mindset, an idea. It was about a movement to think about learning across a landscape that supports young people’s passions and interests.”

TH: But that also entails a foundation, an organization, and people that are willing to say, “We’ll support these activities into the foreseeable future” rather than to say, “We’ll give you a three-year grant.”

GB: Yes, that is true. Remake Learning’s been lucky, and my work at the Grable Foundation plays a significant role in this, but beyond the Grable Foundation, we’ve had support from lots of other funders. Along the way, there have also been many one year and three year grants and other kinds of support for Remake Learning. But because of the steadiness of the support, Remake. Learning has always been able to budget years ahead. That’s very powerful; it’s never had to budget year to year.  

A collage of kids in lab coats AI-generated content may be incorrect.
A collage of kids playing with toys AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Kids in Remake Learning activities (photos: Ben Filio)

TH: What kind of advice do you give other people about how to establish that kind of support? Especially in a context where funders may be more inclined to give a grant for a three-year project than to provide core backbone funding for as long as it’s required. 

GB: I might win a Nobel Prize for philanthropy if I could answer that question! I use the phrase “make yourself lucky” occasionally, but there’s no doubt that you need some funder or, ideally, funders – whether they are individuals, corporations, philanthropies, or municipalities – to recognize that a network or an intermediary organization needs multi-year, discretionary, unrestricted support. Period. That’s the bottom line. If a funder doesn’t get that, you’re in trouble. 

“[Y]ou need some funder or, ideally, funders…to recognize that a network or an intermediary organization needs multi-year, discretionary, unrestricted support. Period. That’s the bottom line. If a funder doesn’t get that, you’re in trouble.”

TH: Are there things you’ve done – generating evidence of impact or sharing information – that have helped convince funders to provide that kind of support? 

GB: We use a lot of analogous and proxy examples. When we thought about Remake Learning initially, and its focus on relevant, engaging, equitable learning across our community, the easiest argument to make was to say, “look at what we’ve done collectively in philanthropy in the early childhood space over the past 20 years: we’ve built an intermediary that, in turn, supports hundreds of early learning centers. Look at what we’ve done in the out-of-school time space. Look what we’ve done in arts education space.” We really used those other examples – like the Campaign for Grade Level Reading – to say “these are the types of results we should anticipate when we create a network of schools, museums, libraries, other sites of learning committed to future facing, future driven learning.”

TH: You’ve been doing this work on Remake Learning for twenty-plus years now, but, early on, were there any developments or things you looked at that told you were headed in the right direction or that helped you convince other people to get on board? 

GB: Yes, and I wish we had more, but for one thing, we looked at data from individual organizations. I’ll give you two examples. The Elizabeth Forward School District was deeply involved in Remake Learning early on. They began rethinking how they approach professional development and learning. They sent their administrative teams to go see what was happening at some innovative places here in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon; they went to visit the Quest School in New York City, and to see a media space in Chicago. Then they started reimagining how to use their own spaces. They built a classroom that mimicked the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) and they were at the forefront of reimagining what school libraries could look like. In pretty short order they started to see some improvements in traditional measures, including math scores and reading scores. Their dropouts went from about 28 or 29 kids a year to 0 or 1. They saw the number of families choosing charter school drop by two thirds. They also suddenly found there was a new energy; there was an agency. People wanted to be in the school, and students were performing at higher levels. At the same time, the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh, like the public libraries in Chicago were at the forefront of imagining what teen spaces might look like. They brought in filmmakers and hip-hop artists alongside librarians, and they filled the shelves not only with books, but also with games and hardware and software. In pretty short order, they saw a two-fold increase of teens coming to the library. There was a massive increase of kids coming back to the library because, in that Mimi Ito way, they wanted to hang out and they wanted to mess around. Then, lo and behold, in the short term, there was something like an 18% increase in book circulation among those kids. Again, traditional measures. So clearly, things were happening, and we could point to those two and lots of other examples. 

Next week: How do you Build a Learning Ecosystem? Gregg Behr on the evolution and expansion of Remake Learning and Remake Learning Days (Part 2)

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

Next steps and critical challenges in the development of the Vietnamese education system: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling (Part 4)? 

Posted on January 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

What might it take to develop a competency-based education system? The final post in this 4-part series from Thomas Hatch describes some of the key issues that will have to be addressed to sustain and deepen Vietnam’s efforts to transform the Vietnamese education system. For other posts in this series on Vietnam see Part 1: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling? Educational improvement at scale, Part 2: Building the capacity for high quality education at scale: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling, and Part 3: Challenges and opportunities for learning and development in Vietnam: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling. Earlier posts related to Vietnam include: Achieving Education for All for 100 Million People: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Minh Lương and Lân Đỗ Đức (Part 1); Looking toward the future and the implementation of a new competency-based curriculum in Vietnam: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Lương Minh and Lân Đỗ Đức (Part 2); The Evolution of an Alternative Educational Approach in Vietnam: The Olympia School Story Part 1 and Part 2; and Engagement, Wellbeing, and Innovation in the Wake of the School Closures in Vietnam:  A Conversation with Chi Hieu Nguyen (Part 1 and Part 2).

Viewed retrospectively, Vietnam’s recent effort to shift the aims of education and the process of teaching and learning can be seen as part of a long-term, multi-decade, “renovation” effort rather than a recent initiative to transform education in one fell swoop. From this perspective, Vietnam has made substantial improvements in educational access and quality over a period of 30 years while taking incremental steps towards more flexible, student-centered approaches to teaching and learning. 

Vietnam has made substantial improvements in educational access and quality over a period of 30 years while taking incremental steps towards more flexible, student-centered approaches to teaching and learning.

Although Finland and Singapore began the journey to systemic educational improvement earlier, they followed a similar trajectory, creating comprehensive education systems with centrally developed curricula or curriculum frameworks, focused on national education goals, aligned with those on international tests like PISA. Singapore continues to top the international educational rankings, but it is also trying to contend with wide-spread concerns about the effects that the competitive, high-pressure, academically focused system has on students’ development, mental health, and wellbeing. Finland, on the other hand, has slipped somewhat in rankings like PISA (though it continues to score at relatively high levels) raising concerns that the autonomy of teachers widely cited as a key ingredient in Finland’s educational success, may also be contributing to growing inequity and an inability to move the whole system to support interdisciplinary learning. 

Reflecting on what I’ve learned about the development of all three of these systems leaves me with a number of questions: 

  • Will Vietnam follow the trajectories of Singapore and Finland or will it chart its own course? 
  • What are the chances that Vietnam will be able to expand enrollment to secondary schools, to continue to increase quality overall, and to continue to expand and deepen the use of more powerful pedagogies?
  • Will Vietnam’s education system develop in ways that are equitable, benefiting ethnic minorities as well as elites, while reducing the pressures on students and continuing to move in more student-centered directions?  

Answering these questions depends in turn on how Vietnam deals with some critical challenges: 

Can Vietnam maintain the commitment and support for K-12 education and expand support for other aspects of the education system?  

The Vietnamese government has already launched major initiatives to support the development of early childhood education. These initiatives aim particularly at creating more equitable access for early childhood education in remote, rural areas for ethnic minority groups. In February of 2025, the government also began gathering feedback on a National Assembly proposal focuses on “modernising the preschool curriculum using a competency-based approach, fostering holistic child development in physical health, emotional well-being, intelligence, language skills and aesthetics. It also aims to lay a solid foundation for personality development, ensuring children are well-prepared for first grade while instilling core Vietnamese values.” 

“[A] National Assembly proposal focuses on “modernising the preschool curriculum using a competency-based approach, fostering holistic child development in physical health, emotional well-being, intelligence, language skills and aesthetics.”

At the same time, Vietnam’s higher education system remains under-developed, with the enrollment rate under 30%, one of the lowest among East Asian countries. Increasing expenditures on both early childhood education and higher education could result in a shift in the attention and funding that has been so crucial to the development of K-12 education over the past 30 years. 

Can Vietnam continue to develop the education system despite long-standing constraints? 

Although there have been efforts to improve teacher education and the quality of the teaching in Vietnam, there are continuing concerns about shortages of teachers and further declines in the quality of the education force. Ironically, the development of other sectors of the economy means that teachers can now find higher paying jobs in other occupations. At the same time, as one of my colleagues described it, many of those who do become teachers have to work multiple jobs often having to hustle side jobs at nights and on weekends just to cover basic expenses for their families. The increasing urbanization and movement of more and more people from rural areas to cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to find jobs also mean that many urban schools will continue to be overcrowded, with large class sizes. In turn, that urban overcrowding will continue to make it difficult for teachers to adopt many student-centered pedagogies; that urbanization can also make it harder and harder to find educators to staff rural schools. 

Can Vietnam promote increased autonomy and flexibility and maintain a focus on equity at the same time?

Over time, Vietnam has tried to increase autonomy and provide more flexibility for schools and education leaders as part of their improvement efforts. In particular, initiatives to increase school-level decision-making include providing some schools with the flexibility to charge higher fees to make up for reductions in public funding. For example, about 20 of the schools in major cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have been developing investment models in which parents can pay for their child’s full tuition for all 12 grades when they start school in first grade. In return, the school makes the commitment to pay the parents back when their child graduates. In this arrangement, students can get a free public-school education (though they lose their investment if the child leaves the school), and the school gets funds it can use to make improvements in facilities and the quality of education which can help the school to raise more revenue. 

In this arrangement, students can get a free public-school education… and the school gets funds it can use to make improvements in facilities and the quality of education which can help the school to raise more revenue.

The hope seems to be that the increased autonomy will drive improvements and might encourage schools to innovate and offer more student-centered instruction. At the same time, these developments also create issues of equity as top-performing schools may be able to charge more and may be able to pay higher salaries to attract effective teachers. In addition, the increased competition for placement in top schools can also intensify the pressure on students and teachers to focus on performing well on conventional tests and exams. That pressure can already be seen in early childhood education, where, as one of my colleagues told me, there is considerable competition to get into some of the top preschools and primary schools. In order to help their children prepare for the application and admission process, which often includes tests, some parents are sending their children to both preschool and “transition programs” that cover the content and skills needed to meet the entrance requirements. 

A map of the country AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Can Vietnam continue to develop the education system in the face of resistance to changes in conventional instruction?  

Even with the efforts to encourage a shift to competencies, the pressures to maintain the conventional instruction remain. Many teachers, students, and parents are reluctant to embrace the changes. That resistance is already showing up as parents and teachers respond to the new textbook policy. Some parents, for example, have complained that having too many textbook options is both too costly for them and too confusing for students. As one of my colleagues explained, textbooks have long been passed down among siblings but that cost-effective practice will have to stop if teachers are choosing different textbooks. That flexibility may also erode the shared experiences and shared understanding of the instructional process that families gain from a common text. 

Allowing teachers to choose their textbooks was also supposed to be part of the move to provide them with greater flexibility in how best to help students achieve the new competencies. However, choosing the textbook and designing activities is a significant amount of work, and many schools and teachers may prefer to use more conventional textbooks and even those that use new textbooks may continue to move through them in a rigid, lock-step way. Complicating matters further, the textbook industry – and the corruption in it – has to be a part of this change as well. 

Schools in Vietnam have changed and improved, but can schooling be transformed?

Political commitment and funding, shared values, hard work by students, educators and parents, with textbook-based teaching that has provided alignment between what’s taught and what’s measured are all critical contributors to the development of the Vietnamese education system. These factors work in concert with the efforts to make an improved education system a key part of the effort create and sustain a strong nation, with a modern economy, that can defend itself in the face of threats from outsiders. Now the question is whether the textbook-based teaching and shared belief in conventional education will serve as a foundation for — or a barrier to — the development of more student-centered pedagogies and a competency-based system.

A building with trees in front of it AI-generated content may be incorrect.


On my visit, I talked with educators and visited schools, including private schools, like the Olympia School, that have found ways to prepare Vietnamese students for the Vietnamese national exams and still make room for more student-centered, interdisciplinary learning activities. Of course, the presence of some innovative practices in some places may not have a substantial impact on the rest of the system. But if some steps toward competency-based instruction continue to be taken, and the number of policymakers, educators, parents, and students who have positive experiences with new forms of teaching and learning continues to grow, the forces of generational change may begin to put pressure on the status quo.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

Challenges and opportunities for learning and development in Vietnam: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling (Part 3)?

Posted on January 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

How can education in Vietnam continue to improve despite questions about the quality of teaching, concerns about the coherence of the education system, and other issues? The third post in this 4-part series from Thomas Hatch explores some of the challenges as well as the opportunities that educators in Vietnam face as they try to shift the whole system to focus on competencies. For the other posts in this series on Vietnam, see part 1 on educational improvement at scale beyond PISA and part 2 on some of the key elements that have contributed to those improvements. Earlier posts related to Vietnam include Achieving Education for All for 100 Million People: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Minh Lương and Lân Đỗ Đức (Part 1); Looking toward the future and the implementation of a new competency-based curriculum in Vietnam: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Lương Minh and Lân Đỗ Đức (Part 2); The Evolution of an Alternative Educational Approach in Vietnam: The Olympia School Story (Part 1 and Part 2); and Engagement, Wellbeing, and Innovation in the Wake of the School Closures in Vietnam:  A Conversation with Chi Hieu Nguyen (Part 1 and Part 2).

Illustrating the complexity and contextual nature of educational change, some of the factors identified as critical in the evolution of other “higher performing” education systems do not apply in Vietnam. Somehow, the Vietnamese education system has improved substantially even though improving the qualifications of teachers and the quality and consistency of teacher preparation have been concerns for some time. At the same time, even as the PISA tests in 2012 were showing the world how much the Vietnamese education system had improved, the government was already developing initiatives to embrace new competency-based goals and student-centered instruction. To that end, among other changes, new competency-based textbooks began to roll-out in Vietnam during the pandemic, even as many other high-performing education systems struggle to make that major systemic shift. Given developments in the Vietnamese education system over the past 30 years, what are the challenges and possibilities for creating a competency-based education system moving forward? 

A group of books with cartoon characters AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Covers of some grade 4 textbooks of Vietnam Education Publishing House (Photo: Vietnam Education Publishing House)

Improvement despite concerns about the teaching force, coherence, and corruption

The improvements in the Vietnamese education system in the 1990’s and 2000’s were made despite a series of persistent concerns about the quality of the teaching force that remain today. These issues include a low cut-off for entrance into teacher education and failure to attract good students into teaching along with substantial numbers of underqualified teachers. Furthermore, despite feeling valued, teachers in Vietnam are not well paid, with wages that are not competitive with those in other sectors. In fact, at the same time that the “Growing Smarter” report from the World Bank highlighted the importance of a highly qualified, well-paid teaching force, it also acknowledged that teachers are paid substantially less in Vietnam than they are in other “high-performing” education systems like Singapore.  Teachers are also paid less in Vietnam than they are in other Asian countries like Thailand, which perform much worse on international tests. 

Explanations of high education system performance also often highlight the importance of coherence and alignment among goals, strategies, and incentives across all aspects of the education system. In the case of Vietnam, the historical traditions and top-down structure of the bureaucracy fosters a culture of compliance that, for better and worse, can maintain a rigid focus on textbook-based learning and exam performance. At the same time, Vietnam has decentralized control over financing of education in particular, leading one analyst to suggest that Vietnam’s 63 provinces are almost like 63 different education systems, with weak links between financing, information-processing, and accountability. Lê Anh Vinh, Director of the Vietnam National Institute of Educational Sciences, and colleagues also named the fragmentation and poor connections among key aspects of Vietnam’s education system as a critical enduring problem. 

“Vietnam’s 63 provinces are almost like 63 different education systems, with weak links between financing, information-processing, and accountability.”

Corruption across sectors in Vietnam also remains a concern. Although measures of corruption show some improvements over the past ten years, Transparency International reports that as of 2023, Vietnam ranks 83rd out of 180 countries in corruption, slightly below the average, and 64% of those surveyed in Vietnam think corruption is a big problem. Transparency International also reported that in Vietnam there has also been “an explosion of competition for admission to ‘desired schools.’…As a result, corruption in enrollment for desired schools – particularly primary and junior secondary schools – has become rampant in Vietnam, threatening the affordability and accessibility of public education.” The textbook industry, central to the efforts to shift to the new focus on competence, has also been embroiled in a major scandal. 

Building blocks for a shift to competency-based learning? 

In a system long dominated by rote learning and teacher-directed instruction,  the implementation of a new curriculum and textbooks in Vietnam that began during the pandemic is not nearly as abrupt as many might expect. There has been a history of interest in and encouragement for the application of knowledge – not just the acquisition of knowledge – and to more active, student-centered pedagogies as far back as the 1980’s. As part of the Do Moi renovation efforts, Vietnam introduced a new set of textbooks and related policies that sought to support “a more practical and learner-centered education which was seen at the time as necessary for post-war social and economic recovery. Those initiatives recognized knowledge acquisition as important, but also advocated for the engagement of students in real-world activities, application of knowledge, and the holistic development of students.  

Shortly after the turn of the 21st Century, another reform plan put in place a different set of state-sanctioned textbooks that were to be based on newly developed curriculum frameworks (which Vietnam had never had before). This effort sought to balance knowledge acquisition and application by establishing educational aims in knowledge, skills and attitudes. Skills included those identified as relevant for students’ present and future lives such as conducting experiments, raising questions, and seeking information. In turn, teachers were encouraged to adapt their teaching to students’ needs and to use more active learning methods. 

By 2010, some policymakers from the Ministry of Education had also taken an interest in adopting the Escuela Nueva model of education, which had been developed and scaled up in Colombia. That model sought to promote students’ development through active engagement in learning using materials like self-paced learning guides and formative assessments. Piloting began in a few selected school districts, but, by 2016 tens of thousands of teachers and millions of students in Vietnam were using the model. Those experiences exposed the teachers and students involved to some of the key pedagogical ideas and practices reflected in the most recent curricular materials.

At the same time that the Escuela Nueva initiative was underway, the Vietnamese government was also developing the comprehensive plans to shift the whole system to a focus on competencies. Critical aims of these reforms included altering “the outdated teaching and learning methods – which were formerly structured around the transmission of knowledge and memorization of facts – with technology-based education to equip students with hands on skills necessary for the twenty-first century.” Along with the adoption of the competency-based curriculum in 2018 (with implementation begun in first grade in 2020), the government implemented a “one curriculum – multiple textbooks” policy freeing schools from the requirement to use the single set of state-sanctioned textbooks. This new policy was designed to give schools greater choice in selecting materials relevant for their students and their local context and more flexibility in determining the content to be taught by reducing compulsory subjects and adding optional and integrated subject and theme activities.

A group of people sitting at a table with books AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Teachers in Vietnam studying new learning materials (Photo: Vietnam Education Publishing House)

In the most recent reforms, the Vietnamese government also made substantial changes in assessment and testing in order to take the focus off academic performance in conventional subjects and reduce the pressure on students. In primary classrooms, along with eliminating homework, the reforms replaced the grade-based evaluation system with oral and written feedback. At the high school level, the reforms created a single standardized exam to replace a long-criticized sequence of a six-subject exit exam followed about a month later by an SAT-like placement exam for college. 

Summing up the shift to expand the focus of the system beyond academics, at the end of 2024, the Minister of Education and Training, Nguyen Kim Son, stated that the goals of the systemic education reform efforts include developing “well-rounded individuals who know how to live happily and create happiness for themselves and others.” He went on to say: “When students engage in self-directed exploration, problem-solving, and discovery, they develop enthusiasm and are motivated to delve deeper. This progression – from knowing to understanding, from analyzing to applying and synthesizing – enhances their excitement and happiness as they master each level.”

“[T]he goals of the systemic education reform efforts include developing “well-rounded individuals who know how to live happily and create happiness for themselves and others.”

Signs of a shift in (some) instruction? 

As has been the case almost everywhere, the large-scale efforts to transform conventional instruction in Vietnam have encountered considerable resistance and numerous challenges. A review of Escuela Nueva’s expansion to Vietnam by the World Bank, (one of the funders of the project) concluded that the program had a “positive” impact on children’s cognitive and non-cognitive achievement. However, other evaluations suggest that the effects were modest at best. For example, a more recent evaluation acknowledged some short-term positive outcomes, particularly for ethnic minority students, but, over the long-term, those effects appear to have faded away. Furthermore, observers reported that some teachers and students ended up mechanically following the steps in the learning guides – much as they had rigidly followed the textbooks the guides were supposed to replace. In addition, skeptical teachers continued to use traditional methods alongside the new approach, and some parents, concerned that their children were not learning, complained their children came home with “empty minds.” Critics and the press picked up on issues like these, leading to an explosion of negative coverage in the local and national press, with many schools stopping the project as a result. 

At the same time, even in the early piloting phase of the implementation of the Escuela Nueva model, there were some provinces where there were reports of “transformative impact.” An evaluation of from the Department of Education in a northern province with a large ethnic minority population was particularly enthusiastic: 

“Students who were dependent on teachers are now more independent, bold, confident, and excited to learn, and their learning results are better. Thanks to slower-paced learning, teachers have more time to pay attention to weak students, helping to reduce the percentage of weak students. For ethnic minority students, [the program] offered chances to participate in many activities and communicate (listen and speak) with friends in Vietnamese, and their Vietnamese learning results are more advanced. In particular, the new School Model has fundamentally changed the pedagogical activities of the school in the direction of self-discipline, self-management, democratization, and formation of necessary competencies and qualities of Vietnamese citizens.”

Another review of the comprehensive reforms noted similar challenges but also evidence of progress, stating: “When launched in 2014, the process has been challenged due to concerns about the feasibility by public opinion, schools, and teachers. However, after two years of implementation, there have been obvious changes in primary education. The guiding principles of learning and teaching at primary schools now are what the students learned and what they could do, rather than their grades.”  

“[C]conventional instruction continues to dominate but… ‘there may be more competency-focused learning than is often reported in research on Vietnamese education.’”

Most recently, researchers have been analyzing videos of classroom practice in a small set of high schools across 10 provinces. Their preliminary analysis uncovered numerous instances in which teachers were using strategies like questioning, feedback and modeling to support students’ learning of skills like creative thinking and problem solving. They also found that teachers in high-performing classrooms provided more opportunities to discover new concepts and connect them to prior knowledge and experiences. They conclude that conventional instruction continues to dominate but add: “there may be more competency-focused learning than is often reported in research on Vietnamese education, and perhaps more than many policymakers know, given their ardent critiques of the education system that, they think, is tailored to memorization and testing.” 

Next Week: Next steps and critical challenges in the development of the Vietnamese education system: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling (Part 4)?

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

Building the capacity for high quality education at scale: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling (Part 2)?

Posted on January 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Despite a much more limited budget and a much larger population than “high performing” countries like Finland and Singapore, some common factors help explain Vietnam’s educational success. Drawing on observations from a trip to Vietnam, the second post in this 4-part series from Thomas Hatch focuses on some of the key elements that helped Vietnam make substantial improvements in education. Future posts explore Vietnam’s subsequent efforts to shift to a competency-based approach and some of the critical issues that have to be addressed in the process. For other posts related to Vietnam, see part 1 of this series, Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling? Educational improvement at scale, and earlier posts including Achieving Education for All for 100 Million People: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Minh Lương and Lân Đỗ Đức (Part 1); Looking toward the future and the implementation of a new competency-based curriculum in Vietnam: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Lương Minh and Lân Đỗ Đức (Part 2); The Evolution of an Alternative Educational Approach in Vietnam: The Olympia School Story Part 1 and Part 2; and Engagement, Wellbeing, and Innovation in the Wake of the School Closures in Vietnam:  A Conversation with Chi Hieu Nguyen (Part 1 and Part 2).

What does it take to create a “high-performing” education system? For long-standing top-performers like Singapore and Finland a comprehensive educational infrastructure includes: 

  • Technical capital – adequate funding, facilities, curriculum materials, and assessments 
  • Human capital – well-prepared, well-supported, and well-respected educators
  • Social capital – shared understanding and strong connections and relationships among educators, policymakers, community members and between schools and the education sector and other parts of the society.

In Vietnam, a more limited budget and a much larger population have made it harder to produce and sustain high-quality facilities, a well-prepared and supported workforce, and a tightly connected and coherent education system. Nonetheless, the Vietnamese education system has been able to draw on and develop some key aspects of technical, human, and social capital that have contributed to the establishment of a system that provides almost universal access to education through 9th grade at a relatively high level of effectiveness.

Technical capital: Funding, Facilities, and Textbooks 

In terms of funding, the Vietnamese government demonstrated its commitment to education by increasing public spending on education from about 1% of GDP in 1990 to about 3.5% in 2006. Those investments were essential for the construction of large numbers of new primary and lower secondary schools in the 1990s and for the production and distribution of free textbooks for students whose families could not afford them. In turn, these efforts contributed to the substantial increases in enrollment and access to education during that time. 

Vietnam has continued that financial commitment to education by spending nearly 20% of its budget (almost 5% of its GDP) on education from 2011 – 2020,  a level of spending higher than countries like the US and even Singapore. That commitment was put into a law passed in 2019 that stipulates that the government should spend at least 20% of its budget on education moving forward, though it has not quite reached that level. Notably, the government commitment has included an investment in equity as Vietnam allocates more spending per capita to disadvantaged provinces and municipalities and pays higher salaries to teachers serving in those areas.

A graph of red bars Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Government-produced textbooks have also played a critical role in the evolution of Vietnam’s education system. These textbooks served as the “de facto” curriculum for some time, with teachers trained to deliver the content in the textbooks and large classes of students moving through the textbooks in a lock-step fashion. Like “managed instruction” approaches that have raised test scores and achievement levels in some districts in the US, textbooks produced by the government with centrally established learning goals may have provided the rapidly increasing student population with access to a common educational experience aligned to conventional assessments and international tests. As a history of the education system in Vietnam explained it, the replacement of textbooks at all school levels in the early 1990s “brought consistency to general education across the nation.” 

Human Capital: Respect for teachers and teachers’ expertise 

In Vietnam, explanations of the development of the educational system often cite the respect for teachers and their work and dedication as critical factors in the development of the education system. Notably, in OECD’s 2018 TALIS survey of teachers and teaching 92% of Vietnamese teachers report feeling valued by society, some of the highest rates among all OECD countries and astoundingly high compared to the OECD average of 26%. By comparison, slightly over 70% of teachers in Singapore (#2 in the rankings) and slightly less than 60% of teachers in Finland say they feel valued by society. In addition, 93% of teachers in Vietnam reported that teaching was their first choice of career (versus an average of 67% of teachers in other OECD countries).  Correspondingly, teacher absenteeism is virtually unknown in Vietnam. 

92% of Vietnamese teachers report feeling valued by society…astoundingly high compared to the OECD average of 26%. By comparison, slightly over 70% of teachers in Singapore (#2 in the rankings) and slightly less than 60% of teachers in Finland say they feel valued by society.

There is also some evidence to suggest that, overall, teachers in Vietnam have a relatively high level of expertise. For example, data from the Young Lives project shows that primary school math teachers’ pedagogical skills are the one school variable that explains a significant amount of the difference in the gap between the scores of students in Vietnam and their counterparts in India and Peru. Furthermore, the variance in the effects that teachers have on their students’ learning is much smaller in Vietnam than it is in many other countries, suggesting that there are relatively few really bad teachers. 

A graph of the teacher's values Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Social capital: Shared values, common commitment, and relationships

Along with Asian countries like China and Singapore, Vietnam shares Confucian traditions that have placed high value on education for hundreds of years. That commitment to education has also been a critical part of the economic and social development of Vietnam over the last half century of the 20th Century. In 1945, for example, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam’s future depended on the education of its children, and that same year, the government issued decrees announcing a call for “anti-illiteracy” campaigns and the establishment of literacy classes for farmers and workers. Shortly thereafter, 75 thousand literacy classes with nearly 96 thousand teachers were serving 2 and a half million people. 

The intertwining of education and national development was also evident in the 1980’s as Vietnam’s shift towards a more market-based economy aligned well with the interests of international NGO’s like the World Bank and the Asia Development Bank. These and other international organizations have provided crucial funding and guidance for economic and educational development in Vietnam since the 1990’s.  

Those I talked to in Vietnam also emphasized the importance of the commitment to education that parents demonstrate in their support for schools. Vietnam’s education minister in 2015, put it succinctly:  “Vietnamese parents can sacrifice everything, sell their houses and land just to give their children an education,”

“Vietnamese parents can sacrifice everything, sell their houses and land just to give their children an education,”

Importantly, students also demonstrate a belief in the power of education and respect for their teachers. 94% of the Vietnamese students surveyed as part of the PISA tests in 2015 agreed with the statement that “It is worth making an effort in math, because it will help us to perform well in our desired profession later on in life,” and surveys from the latest PISA test in 2022 showed that the proportion of class time teachers in Vietnam have to spend keeping order in the primary classroom (9%) is one of the smallest among all participating countries. 

Along with these shared values and commitments, Vietnam also appears to have developed some strong relationships between educators, government officials, and community leaders and parents.  Attention to these relationships may have played a particularly valuable role in the effort to extend and support schooling in rural ethnic minority areas. Phương Minh Lương, who has worked and conducted research with several ethnic minority communities, explained it to me this way:  “That is the power of the collective or what we might call the ‘power with.’  There’s close coordination between authorities at grassroots levels and schools, with monthly meetings between the village or what we call the commune authorities and school leadership and educators. These include school officials like the headmaster and representatives of mass organizations like the Women’s Union, Youth Union, and Study Promotion Associations at the village level. These meetings are organized by the commune authorities, and they discuss all the problems related to the life of the local people in the village and in the school.  Then if there is a problem, like there are children who have dropped out, then the authorities can support the school in that area and they can come to see what are the reasons these children dropped out, and are there any solutions to get these children back to school.”

“That is the power of the collective. There’s close coordination between authorities and schools, with monthly meetings between the village or what we call the commune authorities and school leadership and educators.”

Reflecting on the extent and impact of this coordination, Lương described instances in which educators or village heads travel significant distances to meet parents and students in their homes, and, when necessary, provide transportation to help the students get back to school. Illustrating the shared cross-sector commitment, another interviewee reported that in some mountainous regions, parents who live far from the local schools can send their children to temporarily live at border army posts where soldiers then transport the students safely to the local school.    

Later this month: Challenges and opportunities for learning and development in Vietnam: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling (Part 3)?

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling? Educational improvement at scale (Part 1)

Posted on January 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Could the developments of the education system in Vietnam show one pathway to establishing – and then transforming – conventional schooling? Drawing on a series of interviews as well as a trip to Vietnam, the first post in this 4-part series from Thomas Hatch discusses how Vietnam has achieved near universal education at a relatively high level of quality. Subsequent posts will examine the efforts to shift the Vietnamese educational system to a focus on competencies and some of the critical issues that have to be addressed in the process. For other posts related to Vietnam, see Achieving Education for All for 100 Million People: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Minh Lương and Lân Đỗ Đức (Part 1); Looking toward the future and the implementation of a new competency-based curriculum in Vietnam: A Conversation about the Evolution of the Vietnamese School System with Phương Lương Minh and Lân Đỗ Đức (Part 2); Then Evolution of an Alternative Educational Approach in Vietnam: The Olympia School Story Part 1 and Part 2; and Engagement, Wellbeing, and Innovation in the Wake of the School Closures in Vietnam:  A Conversation with Chi Hieu Nguyen (Part 1 and Part 2).

What’s surprising about Vietnam’s educational system? For many, it’s Vietnam’s high performance on the PISA tests often used to gauge educational quality. Since 2012, Vietnam’s 15-year-olds have had some of the highest average PISA scores in reading, math, and science in comparison to other developing economies. Average math scores, in particular, are comparable to or better than the average scores of some of the richest economies in the world, including the United States. In addition, according to the OECD, 34% of Vietnamese students were “among the most disadvantaged students who took the PISA test in 2022,” yet their average score in mathematics was one of the highest for students of similar socio-economic backgrounds, and the gap between the students in the highest and lowest socio-economic categories was smaller than the OECD average.

As surprising as those results might be, as someone who has been studying “higher“ and “lower“ performing education systems such as Finland and Singapore, several other aspects of Vietnam’s educational system stand out as well:  

  • Vietnam has achieved near universal education at a relatively high level of quality in a country with almost 100 million people – roughly 10 times the populations of Finland and Singapore combined.
  • Despite these differences, some, though not all, of the key factors that support high system performance in Finland and Singapore seem to apply in Vietnam.
  • Vietnam has already launched major initiatives to shift the entire education system to focus on competency-based goals and more student-centered instruction, a move that “high performing” systems like Finland and Singapore are still trying to figure out how to make.

All of this has been achieved in a country with 54 different ethnic groups, where the city of Hanoi, on its own, has a larger population than all of Singapore and where the budget is about 22 Billion USD, compared to about 95 Billion USD in Finland.   

In another 20 years, will Vietnam be leading the way in transforming the conventional model of schooling that has dominated education for more than 100 years?  To explore this question, in the first part of this series of posts, I share some of my observations about the key developments in the Vietnamese education system over the past thirty years.

“Will Vietnam be leading the way in transforming the conventional model of schooling that has dominated education for more than 100 years?“

Improvements in enrollment and access to schooling for all students

As many countries with developing education systems continue to try to provide access to education for all students, Vietnam has achieved school enrollment rates near 100% in kindergarten, primary, and lower secondary schools. A significant amount of that growth took place in less than 20 years, between 1990 and 2012. Enrollment in secondary schools in particular tripled in only 14 years, rising from about 23% in 1992 to almost 75% by 2006. Although secondary school enrollment remains a concern, as there has been only a slight increase since then, the mean years of schooling for adults in Vietnam is still higher than expected, given its per capita income.

A Review of Vietnam’s Education Trends in the Past 20 Years and Emerging Challenges

Evidence of Educational Quality & Equity: PISA and beyond

Although many countries are working to expand access to schooling, educational quality remains a critical concern around the world. But the results of the 2012 PISA tests suggests that Vietnam has been able to increase both access and quality significantly. Those results showed that by 2014, Vietnam’s 15-year-olds were 17th in math and 19th in reading out of 65 countries. More astoundingly, that performance made Vietnam an outlier – performing significantly higher in both reading and math than other education systems with a comparable GDP.

RISE Project, 2018

These striking outcomes garnered considerable attention and generated a number of critiques that have raised legitimate concerns about the accuracy of the results. Notably, students who drop out of school in Vietnam after 9th grade are not included in the sample taking the PISA test, inflating the average PISA scores. In addition, one report suggests that some Vietnamese students participating in the PISA tests have been encouraged to do their best to “bring Vietnam honor,” and in one case, students received t-shirts identifying them as PISA participants. At the same time, this report concludes that, although these problems could have had some effect on Vietnam’s scores, statistical adjustments for those issues “do not change the overall finding that Vietnam’s PISA performance was exceptional” and that it substantially outperformed other countries of similar income levels.  

Several other sources of data confirm the significant growth in Vietnamese students’ educational performance. First of all, by 2019, 96% of the population over 15 could read and write. Vietnam’s own tests of mathematics and language in 2001 and 2007 also show what analysts describe as “very large increases over six years.” Comparisons with other developing education systems in India, Peru, and Ethiopia carried out by the Young Lives project show that the scores of the Vietnamese students continue to grow significantly over time, leading to the conclusion that a year of primary school in Vietnam is “considerably more productive in terms of quantitative skill acquisition” than a year of schooling in the other countries. As a consequence, in Vietnam, almost 19 out of every 20 10-year-olds can add four-digit numbers, and 85% can subtract fractions – proportions of correct answers similar to many OECD countries and substantially higher than those in other countries with similar GDP.

Although there are still some differences in the enrollments and performance of students from different ethnic minority groups, particularly at the upper secondary level, Vietnamese education policy and funding explicitly recognize the rights of all students to learn their own language and preserve their cultures. Article 11 of the Vietnamese Constitution states: “Every ethnic group has the right to use its own language and system of writing, to preserve its national identity, to promote its fine customs, habits, traditions and culture.” In addition, Phuong Luong, a researcher from Vietnam National University and the Vietnam National Institute of Educational Sciences estimates that the Vietnamese government has over 130 different policies to support ethnic minorities, including 10 key policies on introduction of ethnic minority languages and cultures into curriculum; more than 20 policies for financial support/scholarships, exemption or reduction of tuition fees, housing and accommodations for ethnic minority students; and five different policies for recruiting ethnic minority teachers. Most recently, the Vietnamese government has implemented regulations abolishing school fees for public education from preschool to high school. Previously, even public schools charged families fees for things like uniforms, textbooks, and other purposes. Although estimated to cost the government about 1.3 billion USD, these new regulations, along with new limits on costly supplementary tutoring sessions, are designed to ease the financial burdens of education for all students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Next week: Building the capacity for high quality education at scale: Can Vietnam transform the conventional model of schooling (Part 2)

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Leading a school in a context of uncertainty: Indrek Lillemägi discussed the initial responses to the COVID-19 school closures in Tallinn, Estonia

Posted on March 11, 2025 by | Leave a comment

What was it like to lead a school in Estonia through the school closures? This week, Indrek Lillemägi looks back on his experiences in the pandemic as leader of the Emili Kool (named for Jean Jacques Rouseau’s book Emile, or On Education), a private K-9 school that Lillemägi helped launch in 2016. In the first part of the interview, Lillemägi described how he applied what he learned at the Emili Kool as the founding principal of a new upper secondary school, Tallinna Pelgulinna Riigigümnaasium, that opened in Tallinn in the fall of 2023.

This interview is one in a series exploring what has and has not changed in education since COVID.  Previous interviews and posts have looked at developments in Italy, Poland, Finland, New Zealand, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Vietnam. This interview with Lillemägi was conducted by Thomas Hatch a few months before the Pelgulinna Riigigümnaasium opened. The interview has been edited for length and clarity

Thomas Hatch (TH): When you were the principal at the Emili Kool, you were responsible for guiding the school’s initial response to the spread of COVID-19 and the related restrictions. Can you first tell us about any directions you received about how to handle the emerging situation? 

Indrek Lillemägi (IL): Maybe a week before the government’s decision to close all the schools in Estonia we had a school crisis meeting and made our first decisions then. We had most e-learning systems set up already – Office 365, student accounts, online chats – so, overall, the transition went fairly well, though video lessons were messy at first. Months later, teachers described it as a really smooth transition since we had those systems in place already. We didn’t have to rush to find new solutions. 

Indrek Lillemägi, Principal at Tallinna Pelgulinna Riigigümnaasium

TH:   Was it common to have those systems in place in Estonia? I understand that in Finland it varied a lot.

IL:  It was the same in Estonia – some broad government directions but schools invented solutions. Our staff was pretty young so our teachers were very good with technology. They were already tech fans, and they were pretty innovative. But schools were in very different situations. I heard stories about some teachers who just threw up their hands and refused to do video lessons or digital assignments. 

TH: What were the broad government directions about initially – mostly health and safety?

IL: The initial regulations were about health and safety, staying home, things like that. It took time before they gave directions on curriculum and the schedule. Later, the Ministry of Education started publishing some directions about learning and studying, but they were not too directive, especially that first spring. I remember that some of the recommendations included do not leave any student behind and to find out if every student had internet access and a computer access so schools could provide devices to students if needed. As a private school, most of our students had computers, but some bigger families didn’t have enough. I think we only gave out computers to maybe every fourth or fifth student, and we had enough computers to give out ourselves. But many tech companies in Estonia also started helping schools get computers to students who needed them. I think most students who needed a computer got one that first spring.

Initially, schools didn’t have to do video lessons if they didn’t want to. Some teachers decided just to assign individual work and just have a reflection or something once a week. But people found that it didn’t work like that; schools needed to create an online learning environment. We started with video lessons, and then we added more and more lessons. But they were not lessons like in the classroom. It was more like individual work, with a teacher working as a mentor, helping out students one by one and explaining something important. 

The school vision and values posted on the Emili Kool website

TH: How did you make those decisions about instruction for the school? What guidance did you give teachers?

IL: In that first or second meeting we decided that we need to make a decision together, and it’s more important to make a decision than to leave things too flexible or too messy. We had a really solid structure of staff meetings, and we also decided together which apps we would use, how many letters we would send home each week, it was all written down for the teachers. As a small school, we were able to able to make the big decisions together with most teachers. Normally, many decisions are made by the leadership team, but these decisions were more collective, with all of us discussing things together early on.

“We decided that we need to make a decision together, and it’s more important to make a decision than to leave things too flexible or too messy.“

TH: What was the decision on schedule/plan? Did you tell teachers they needed students online 9am-3pm?

IL: In the beginning, all the teachers had to meet their students at least two times per week, so all the students had at least two online lessons per day. And the student from each grade had morning gatherings or morning circles at 9 O’clock every day. The teachers met with the students; they looked at the schedule and their aims; and maybe they talked about their feelings. In some cases, maybe it was important to wake students up. After the online morning meetings, the students had much more free time or autonomous learning time, and then they were brought together again by a teacher at the end of the day teachers and students would gather together again at the end of the day.

TH: That’s interesting that the teachers were talking to the students about their feelings. Was that normal before COVID?

IL: Yes, that was normal. But we wanted to make the online learning as safe, socially and emotionally safe as possible for the students, and part of that was finding things pre-COVID that we could bring to the to the online version, and morning gatherings were one of those things. 

TH: Was the morning circle just for the primary students or all students? 

IL: Both. In the primary school, the students would meet with their homeroom teacher. At the lower secondary school, the students had different subject teachers, but we still have the class teacher system in Estonia so the lower secondary students would meet with their class teacher. The head of studies made the schedule at the beginning and end of the day, but the primary teachers could decide for themselves what do in the middle of the day. 

TH: What about parents? What information did you share with parents? 

IL: I actually have the recommendations that we sent to parents and students that first month. It was a Facebook post, but we also sent it to them directly. It’s from the 17th of March, 2020 — the first month of home learning. The first recommendation is about organizing a comfortable learning space. The second is to discuss and write down the rules of home studying; make a schedule with resting and active time; make a routine; and at the end of every day write down 3 “success stories.” 

TH: As I understand it, the Estonian government made the decision early on to get students back to school as soon as possible. As you moved into the next phases and particularly as you tried to get most students back in person in the fall, what were some of the biggest issues you had to deal with. 

IL: I think the fears of people was the biggest issue. Teachers had different fears; parents had different fears. Some people were really open to coming back together, learning together, but some people were really scared to come back. Of course, people had different situations. Some had grandparents or sick people at home, and they had to be more scared. Others were thinking about all the economic problems as a lot of the parents either lost their jobs or their businesses went down, so they were much more stressed. And some parents refused to bring their children back to school. I remember there were some mathematicians who sent the calculations and said it’s going to be really bad if we come together, and they had modeled everything out.   

As a private school, there were also lot of economic questions. Lots of people were in an uncertain situation, and they didn’t know if their salaries would be cut. In general, in Estonia not too many people had deep economic problems because the government still supported small businesses and they provided some salary compensation, but still there was a lot of uncertainty. 

We tried to deal with everything through lots of communication, explaining everything, and we tried to be as flexible as we could. Some families wanted their children to stay home, and, in the first year, even after we came back in person, we accepted that, and we developed individual plans for those students to work online. But later on, during the second COVID wave, we said “These are the rules of our school, and we will all come together,” and we didn’t make these individual plans anymore. 

“We tried to deal with everything through lots of communication, explaining everything, and we tried to be as flexible as we could. Some families wanted their children to stay home, and, in the first year, even after we came back in person, we accepted that, and we developed individual plans for those students to work online.”

TH: What were some of the issues you had with online learning? As a private school, since parents were paying, maybe you didn’t have too many issues with students disappearing, but were there issues of mental health and stress? 

IL: We didn’t really have issues with students disappearing, but we had some issues with home routines not being supportive enough – so some student might just sleep in the morning and not show up online.  But no students fully disappearing; we kept parent contacts. 

There were also some students who worked individually with our psychologists or social workers during the closures, and some students came into the school and worked alone in the classroom, while a psychologist worked in the next room. We helped to create routines for those students who couldn’t work at home for some reason. 

When school opened again, we found some increased stress and anxiety among students, but it was not too bad compared to before COVID.  I still remember when we came back to school it was actually like a new positive beginning. There were really positive vibes, particularly in the primary school, where the students’ strong relationships were in their families or in their school; they don’t have friends someplace else. So they came back to school and met their friends again. 

“when we came back to school it was actually like a new positive beginning. There were really positive vibes… they came back to school and met their friends again“

TH:  In the US and other parts of the world there has been a lot of talk about academic “learning loss.” Has there been any talk about “learning loss” in Estonia? 

IL: Yes, of course. For some of the students, their results went down. And for some students home learning actually helped, but that’s only for the academic part. we don’t know about the social part because the social skills and relationships are rarely measured. We thought for about one third of the students, home learning helped their academics; for one third, it didn’t matter; and for one third it was more difficult. Later on, when the students came back, we had the extra support for some students and some extra lessons. We also had summer learning camps. 

TH:  Who paid for the summer learning camps? 

IL: There was government funding for the summer learning camps, but  schools had a lot of autonomy for organizing them. So the camps in some schools were more focused on social skills, but we put the two things together. These were like social learning camps where the students just spent time together, but they could also learn their ABC’s again. 

TH: Were those primarily for the students who were struggling or could anybody come? 

IL: Anybody could come, but I remember we talked a lot about that: That even if a student is doing okay in mathematics and sciences, it doesn’t mean that that he or she doesn’t need this social part, because that was a big loss. 

TH:  You also said that the school gave students more individual work during remote learning than they had in the past. Have they continued any of that or have things just gone back to the way it was? 

IL: Yes, after I left, they started doing individual e-learning days about once a month. Of course, everyday life in the school was also affected by the COVID experience because all the online systems became a normal part of learning and studying, so all the online collaboration methods for writing together, for doing video presentations they became part of normal life as well. 

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized