Partnership Series: NYU Global TIES for Children
Read about the HEA’s strategic partnership with NYU Global TIES for Children and how it is helping us take the HEA’s capacity building programme to the next level
Education enables people to acquire the skills to thrive, defined by Nobel Prize-recipient Amartya Sen as ‘the freedom to make choices and pursue the life they envision’. But conflict, pandemics, climate change and their consequences can limit the full possibility of flourishing for our children — and future generations. In response, refugee and host communities, teachers, private sector partners, national and local authorities, and humanitarian agencies are dedicating themselves to innovating the processes and practices of education to promote thriving in the face of “predictably unpredictable” futures.
While there is growing evidence on how such innovative solutions impact children’s academic and social and emotional outcomes over short durations and at a smaller scale, little is known about how to ensure the sustainability and scalability of such innovations in the face of ongoing crises. Humanitarian organizations currently have limited embedded knowledge, funding and capacity to support rigorous research to facilitate adaptation for successful and sustainable scale. And in turn, a lack of solid evidence on programme quality and outcomes throughout the scaling process limits donors and education partners’ ability to make cost-effective, evidence-based decisions on how to scale education innovations in protracted humanitarian settings.
The HEA approach to evidence
To address the evidence gap outlined above, the HEA aims to generate evidence that improves understanding of the complex journey from high potential pilot projects to education initiatives for refugees and displaced communities that can operate at scale (see our understanding of scale in the HEA glossary). This is achieved through providing a package of capacity building, mentorship and financial support to strengthen, among other aspects, internal monitoring and evaluation systems in implementing organizations, in addition to funding external evaluations.
The HEA and NYU-TIES partnership story
In 2020, the HEA COVID Challenge supported a group of innovators who were piloting approaches to ensuring continuous educational access for marginalized learners through COVID. In a relationship brokered by Porticus, NYU-TIES conducted workshops with HEA teams to develop programme theories of change for their distance education innovations. This work ultimately contributed to an interactive report on theories of change and measures for distance education programming in low- and middle-income countries, to be released by NYU-TIES in September 2022.
Following this successful collaboration, UNHCR more formally engaged NYU-TIES as a technical advisor and mentor around monitoring and evaluation for the HEA Phase II teams. Specifically, NYU-TIES have worked with teams for over a year to strengthen their capacities to apply theory and research methods to measure, monitor and evaluate their programmes and to make evidence-based decisions; also producing resources and public goods that support teams as they scale and advocate for their programmes. At the same time, NYU-TIES have worked to strengthen their own capacity to communicate clearly about the measurement, monitoring, and evaluation process to a non-academic audience, while embarking on their own scaling journey of sorts (more on that coming up!)
The HEA is excited to share a series of blogs in collaboration with NYU–TIES here on the HEA Learning Series, unpacking our partnership and their approach to building the capacity of our HEA grantees. You can find the first installment below:
The NYU-TIES mentorship programme: Phases 1 and 2
We have worked with the HEA grantees to achieve our objectives in three phases. In Phases 1 and 2 in 2021, we conducted a series of lighter-touch virtual, synchronous workshops that guided teams to:
- develop their programme theories of change based on existing theory and evidence;
- develop measures and data maps linked to their theory of change;
- identify fit-for-purpose measures of holistic learning outcomes; and
- identify possible research designs for an external evaluation.
Each of these sessions was interactive and tailored to the unique needs of each of the projects, utilizing interactive whiteboard software to brainstorm and Zoom breakout sessions to provide individualized feedback. Feedback from the HEA grantees at the end of Phase 2 was positive and encouraging, with one of the partnerships even indicating that they changed their business model as a result of the theory of change workshop.
What we have learned together in Phases 1 and 2
We are, at heart, researchers. The profession often has a bad connotation, one that conjures images of ivory towers, statistical jargon, and one-way extractive transfers of knowledge. Throughout our journey with the teams — and in the context of a broader reckoning of our role as a research center embedded in a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich Democracy — we are working, albeit imperfectly, to query our practices, imperatives, and communications as researchers. This involves, from the very start, building trust with the teams, a process we are learning involves:
- Listening to understand: The teams are the experts. They know their programs and they know what they expect their programs to achieve. Our role in developing the program theories of change — which are roadmaps of how programs are expected to operate — is first and foremost to ask a series of questions about their programs and listen deeply to the answers, reflecting back visually and verbally what we are hearing. This process of documenting each step in their programming develops a shared understanding of the program activities, goals, and values. Then, discussing each of the pathways in the theory of change in light of their experiences and child developmental and education theory and evidence allows us to identify new and/or alternate pathways for change.
- Practicing flexibility in the research process: The process of developing a program theory of change requires — at some point — identifying the assumptions underlying each of the pathways: What do you need to assume to be confident that X activity leads to Y change? But it is challenging to ask teams to be vulnerable about these assumptions and potential pitfalls in the context of a competitive accelerator program where funding and resources are at stake. Given our goal of building trust as long-term mentors, we elected to de-emphasize that part of the program theory of change development during Phases 1 and 2
- Meeting teams where they are at: The teams each work in different contexts, and they each have different skillsets, resources, priorities, and needs. Thus a “one-size-fits-all” approach to mentoring does not work. To begin to address this, we built out our modules to try and target a range of learning levels and interests, while following up with targeted sessions and materials that allow us to provide tailored support.
Stay tuned for more details about Phase 3!
Based on our experiences in Phases 1 and 2 and team interest, in Phase 3 NYU-TIES is piloting with the teams a year-long hybrid course, “Adapting Holistic Learning Outcome Measures for Program Monitoring and Evaluation Purposes: A Mixed-Method, Inclusive Approach.” Over 10+ modules, teams are working to select an outcome of interest from their program theories of change, and to adapt and test a measure of the outcome. While the course itself focuses on assessment, it touches on other essential skills for monitoring and evaluation, such as sampling, data collection, and data visualization.
Follow NYU Global TIES and the HEA on LinkedIn and Twitter to get updates from our in-person workshop in Kenya in July!
