Exchanging Ideas to Grow Remedial Education Programs
Reflections from a Global Reading Network Event for Sharing and Learning
The Scaling Remedial Education Programs to Elevate Learning networking event, hosted by USAID’s Global Reading Network (GRN), highlighted and shared remedial education practices that successfully improved academic outcomes.
Carmen Maria de Henriquez, Education Advisor at the USAID Center for Education, opened the event. She noted why it’s important to scale remedial education now, pointing to The State of Global Learning Poverty: 2022 Update. During the pandemic, learning poverty, a measure of children unable to read and understand a simple passage by age 10, rose to an estimated 76.7 percent in lower-middle-income countries and 91.7 percent in low-income countries.
Ms. de Henriquez highlighted the USAID Reading MATTERS framework, a resource that identifies seven components that help ensure children learn to read: mentors, administrators, teachers, texts, extra practice, regular assessment, and standards. The framework also prioritizes child well-being. She stressed, it’s a child’s right “to be well-nourished, and feel safe in a school, reduce the stress and focus on their development milestones, [and] to have some recreation and avoid violence.”
Ngwena Emmanuel Alimasi, Chief Executive Officer of Fondation Alimasi Pour La Charité, who attended the event, reiterated the importance of these components, later reflecting, “[Children’s easy access] to school, allowing the best study conditions, gender equality at school while encouraging girls to attend school without any discrimination, and permanent supervision of schoolchildren after class hours are assets that can promote education.”
The READING Matters framework identifies these well-being factors as crucial to the effectiveness of its seven components of reading outcomes.
Sharing the framework, along with the Remedial Education at Scale literature review, demonstrated how some USAID projects are effectively scaling remedial education practices, as well as highlighted work still needed to address learning loss. The literature review found the strongest remedial education practices are those supporting teachers, yet “there is a lack of [support for] social emotional learning among teachers,” Ms. de Henriquez noted in her presentation.
These topics offered participants a rich bed of information, cultivating an engaging and meaningful exchange of ideas. One GRN member who participated in the event, Selorm Afagbedzi, is a teacher with the Ghana Education Service. He noted the value of spaces to talk about these kinds of global challenges and share practices with others working on the ground in schools. He said he attended the event because “constant and continuous teacher motivation and professional learning communities are critical to remediating struggling learners.”
Mr. Alimasi added, “An interesting [need] raised during the conversation was the training of teachers to increase and update their knowledge, because I think we properly transmit knowledge that we master deeply.”
The December event was one of many opportunities for the GRN community to build its knowledge—in this case, on remedial education practices—so teachers, education system and school administrators, researchers, donors, and others working in education can effectively support positive academic outcomes and help students reach their full potential.
“It was a great event—highly educational as well as social. We were able to know more about each other and the work we do, in addition to the remediation activities in our respective geographies.” -Audu Liman, Head of the Atiku Institute for Development and Education Technical Lead at the American University of Nigeria
Continue the Conversation
Did you participate in the Scaling Remedial Education Programs to Elevate Learning event? Share what you learned with the GRN Member Discussion group on LinkedIn!
The GRN plans to host more networking events around other topics, like pre-primary education. If you are not yet a member of the GRN, join here to receive updates on future events and activities.