Guidance Note: Identifying and promoting innovations, a crucial challenge for education systems
IIEP-UNESCO’s Support for Education Quality Management Programme, through the diagnostics it has carried out in eight countries, has been able to measure the extent to which the identification of innovative practices and their promotion are a central but complex issue for systems. The popularity of transferring educational innovations from one country to another masks a lack of attention paid to identifying, developing or supporting local innovations. Indeed, even if they are promising, they are generally not sufficiently studied or experimented to be adopted on a large scale.
High potential hampered by obstacles to identifying and promoting innovative practice
Many players at different levels of the education system are developing innovative practices, both in the classroom and in the management of the system. The diagnosis identified several interesting practices, each showing encouraging results in their specific context. These practices have great potential for improving education systems, but they come up against a series of obstacles, starting with the system's difficulty in identifying innovations. Then there are the weaknesses in terms of documentation and formalization of these practices, which explains the limited use of innovations that are already present in the field. Other obstacles to identifying and promoting innovative practices complete the list.
Conditions for enhancing innovative practices to improve system qualit
The program's hypothesis is that it is necessary to put in place mechanisms to identify these innovations, but also to create the conditions for their development, validation and gradual extension to the whole system. A number of avenues are proposed, including the organization of missions to identify innovations, the development of support systems, and the collection and provision of data on education at local level.
Tutored micro-teaching workshops in Niger: A promising practice that the Ministry and the IIEP are seeking to promot
Among the practices identified during the diagnosis, the organization of small tutoring workshops between students emerged as a promising innovative initiative. The results of this experiment were shared in March 2023 with the six other teacher training colleges and two faculties of education. The feedback was positive, and it was felt that the practice should be extended nationwide.
To find out more about this initiative and the challenges of identifying and promoting innovations in education, download the guidance note below.
