From Content Knowledge to Competencies and Exams to Exit Profiles: Education Reform in Zimbabwe

For over two decades, Zimbabwe has been embroiled within a complex web of economic, political, and financial challenges. In 2013, the country embarked on an ambitious journey of overhauling its education system by moving from content knowledge to a competency-based curriculum. The theory of change, in particular, was that, if the curriculum is entirely overhauled from outdated knowledge-based to twenty-first-century skills and competencies, then in the long-term, students would ultimately be able to meet the economy and labor market demands. The reform was phased from 2015 to 2022 and at the time of writing is in its last leg of implementation; there is much to appreciate and learn from the progress thus far. The chapter begins with an overview of the country’s education system and conditions that shaped the reform, followed by a more detailed description of the reform. It then analyzes the reform stages through Reimers’ five perspectives of educational change (Reimers, Educating students to improve the world. Springer, Singapore, 2020), and concludes by presenting the results and challenges at the time of writing. The success of such reform requires a systemic collaboration and stable conditions, and at this stage, it remains to be seen, which direction the reform takes.

Conclusions. Seven Lessons to Build an Education Renaissance After the Pandemic

This chapter draws out seven lessons from the cross-country analysis of the six reforms studied in this chapter. These are: Lesson 1. The power of complex mindsets about education reform. The six reforms all reflect reliance on the worldviews presented in the five frames of reform: cultural, psychological, professional, institutional and political. Those that have been sustained relied on insights from more of these five frames than those that were short lived. Lesson 2. Implementation matters considerably. The chapter discusses how the implementation process in effect recreates a reform, and how the development of an operational strategy defining the details of reform is what in the end most matters to the success of reform. The chapter discusses how the six reforms produced rather distinct operational strategies of seemingly similar components of the reform such as the learning goals for students or teacher professional development. Implementation strategies are also based on implicit theories of how organizations work, and the chapter explains the usefulness of a developmental theory of how organizations evolve to designing strategies that are aligned with the functionings that are possible in a given developmental stage, while also helping the organization evolve towards higher levels of functioning. Lesson 3. The need for operational clarity. People can’t execute what they don’t understand, and a reform must be able to translate goals into clear objectives and reform components into clear tasks which can be widely communicated and understood, as well as tracked to discern improvement and course correct when necessary. Lesson 4. Large scale reform is a journey: Coherence, Completeness and the Five Frames. The chapter explains how using the five dimensional theory of educational change can support coherence and completeness in a reform. Lesson 5. Sequencing, pacing and the importance of first steps. An operational strategy needs to be sequenced attending to ambition of goals, to existing levels of capacity and to institutional stage of development of the system. The first steps in the sequence are consequential because they shape the narrative of reform in ways that have long lasting consequences. Lesson 6. Staying the course. Long policy cycles are essential for reforms to be implemented and to produce results, and those cannot be taken for granted. Coherence, communication and participation can garner support that sustains a reform over time. Lesson 7. Learning from experience to build system level capacity. Most important to the coherent implementation of a reform is to create opportunities for key stakeholders, at various levels of the system, to learn together as a result of implementing components of the reform. Creating feedback loops and processes for making sense of such information is critical to support such learning.

Education Reform in Ontario: Building Capacity Through Collaboration

The education system of the province of Ontario, Canada ranks among the best in the world and has been touted as a model of excellence for other countries seeking to improve their education system. In a system-wide reform, leaders used a political and professional perspective to improve student performance on basic academic skills. The school system rose to renown after this reform which moved Ontario from a “good” system in 2000 to a “great” one between 2003 and 2010 (Mourshed M, Chijioke C, Barber M. How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better, a report McKinsey & Company. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/our-insights/how-the-worlds-most-improved-school-systems-keep-getting-better, (2010)). Premier Dalton McGuinty arrived in office in 2003 with education as his priority and was dubbed the “Education Premier” because of this mandate. His plan for reform had two primary goals: to improve student literacy and numeracy, and to increase secondary school graduation rates. McGuinty also wanted to rebuild public trust that had been damaged under the previous administration. The essential element of Ontario’s approach to education reform was allowing educators to develop their own plans for improvement. Giving responsibility and freedom to educators was critical in improving professional norms and accountability among teachers (Mourshed M, Chijioke C, Barber M. How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better, a report McKinsey & Company. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/our-insights/how-the-worlds-most-improved-school-systems-keep-getting-better, (2010)) and the sustained political leadership throughout the entire reform concluding in 2013 provided an extended trajectory for implementing and adjusting learning initiatives. The Ministry of Education’s Student Achievement Division, which was responsible for designing and implementing strategies for student success, took a flexible “learning as we go” attitude in which the reform strategy adapted and improved over time (Directions Evidence and Policy Research Group. The Ontario student achievement division student success strategy evidence of improvement study. Retrieved from http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/research/EvidenceOfImprovementStudy.pdf, (2014)). This chapter will discuss influences on the reform design and key components of strategies to support student and teacher development and build a relationship of accountability and trust among teachers, the government and the public. The successes and shortcomings of this reform will be discussed in the context of their role in creating a foundation for the province’s next steps towards fostering twenty-first century competencies in classrooms.

2013 Mexico’s Education Reform: A Multi-dimensional Analysis

The 2013 education reform to Mexico’s education system had two main goals, one explicit, to improve the quality of education and one implicit, to reassert federal authority over the education sector. Beginning with institutional and political mechanisms that introduced evaluations to the teaching profession, the reform sought a shift in Mexican educational culture. This chapter will begin by analyzing Mexico in international and domestic contexts to understand the urgency of the reform. It will then use Reimers (2020b and 2020c) five perspectives on education change to analyze the reform and evaluate the sequence in which it was implemented. The chapter concludes by outlining the results of the reform to date and summarizing the relationship between the five perspectives. Ultimately, we argue that the initial deprioritization of technical aspects, including pedagogical and curricular ones, stymied the cultural shift towards an educational model grounded in twenty-first century competencies that the reform sought. When coupled with a limited political cycle and uneven implementation at a state level, the reform’s sequence left little time for full implementation of its more pedagogical aspects, such as the new education model, and ultimately faced dramatic reprisal from the new presidential administration.

Singapore’s Teacher Education Model for the 21st Century (TE21)

Singapore introduced the Teacher Education Model for the 21st Century (TE21) in 2009 as a framework to propose a set of 21st century competencies that Singaporean teachers should be equipped with. The introduction of TE21 catalyzed the reform of existing programs and the implementation of new initiatives in initial teacher preparation programs and lifelong teacher professional development. This chapter first examines the local and international driving forces that led to the conceptualization of TE21 since Singapore’s independence. Then, the recommendations of TE21 are scrutinized along with the implementation of two new initiatives in the initial teacher preparation program. The findings are twofold. First, we find that Singapore has extensively performed a comparative review of global 21st century recommendations over four decades to customize an education system for their local context. Second, by synthesizing information sourced from interviews, government documents, and quantitative data, we find that the progress towards developing a cadre of 21st century teachers and producing holistic students in Singapore is largely successful. However, students are found to be at the receiving end of a generational cultural clash between them and their parents’ beliefs about the core of education.

The Punjab Schools Reform Roadmap: A Medium-Term Evaluation

In 2010, a whole-system reform was designed and launched in the Punjab province of Pakistan called the Punjab Schools Reform Roadmap (PSRR). This reform was a direct response to the challenges of education in the province at the time, which included scale, capacity to deliver, and political will. Further, 2010 was a time at which the political and administrative landscape of Pakistan was changing: the right to education act had just been formalized and education was simultaneously devolved from a federal matter to a provincial one. This chapter studies the outcomes of the PSRR a decade after its implementation with an emphasis on three dimensions of the reform: management capacity, teacher capacity and monitoring & information systems. Specifically, we discuss the above with reference to increasing access to and quality of education in the province while also analyzing the outcomes and sustainability of the reform 10 years from its inception.

In Search of a Twenty-First Century Education Renaissance after a Global Pandemic

The COVID-19 Pandemic renewed interest on the question of what goals should be pursued by schools in a world rapidly changing and uncertain. As education leaders developed strategies to continue to educate during the Pandemic, through alternative education arrangements necessitated by the closure of schools, the question of re-prioritizing curriculum became essential. In addition, the anticipated disruptions and impacts that the Pandemic would cause brought the question of what capacities matter to the fore. This chapter reviews the history of mass education and examines the role of the United Nations and other international organizations advocating for schools to educate the whole child and to cultivate the breath of skills essential to advance individual freedoms and social improvement. The chapter makes the case that the aspiration to cultivate a broad range of competencies is not only necessary to meet the growing demands of civic and economic participation, but also critical to close opportunity gaps. The development of a science of implementation of system level reform to educate the whole child is fundamental to close the growing gap between more ambitious aspirations for schools and the learning opportunities that most children experience and that are at the root of their low levels of knowledge and skills as demonstrated in international comparative assessments. Implementation strategies need to take into account the stage of institutional development of the education system, and align the components and sequence of the reform to the existing capacities and structures, while using the reform to help the system advance towards more complex forms of organization that enable it to achieve more ambitious goals. The chapter makes the case for examining the implementation of large scale reforms in countries at varied stages of educational development in order to overcome the limitations of the current knowledge base that relies excessively on the study of a narrow range of countries at similar levels of development, many of them with stagnant or declining performance of their students in international assessments of knowledge and skills. Effective implementation requires also coherence across the various levels of governance of the education system and good communication and collaboration across a wide spectrum of stakeholders. Such communication can be facilitated by a good theory of mind of how others view reform. A reform can be viewed through five alternative frameworks: cultural, psychological, professional, institutional and political, or through a combination of those, and each reform is based on elements reflecting one or several of those frames. Understanding these frames, can help better understand how others view change, thus facilitating communication and the development of a shared theory of change. The chapter concludes describing the methods of this study and introducing the six large scale reforms examined in the book.

Nurturing Every Learner’s Potential: Education Reform in Kenya

In Kenya, a broad education reform was implemented after recognizing that the current system was not aligned with the country’s vision of producing globally competitive learners with competencies for the twenty-first century. The implementation process began with a pilot in 2017 and is planned to continue through 2028. In addition to the introduction of a competency-based curriculum, key components of the reform are a commitment to achieving a 100% transition from primary to secondary school by eliminating exam-based barriers to transition and a provision of a wide range of pathways for students to follow. Under the vision of “Nurturing Every Learner’s Potential”, the reform is grounded in the idea that learning should be active and individualized rather than teacher-centric and that schools – including secondary schools – are a place for developing a wide range of competencies and behaviors in addition to the traditional academic skills. In doing so, the government of Kenya seeks to reframe deeply-held cultural perspectives on education’s purpose and content. Such cultural shifts will require significant outreach and training efforts to achieve the buy-in from both families and teachers, and at this stage, it remains to be seen whether these efforts will succeed.