Executive Summary

Project Host

Fellows

Clint Bartlett, Social Entrepreneur Fellow

Pawel Mordel, Social Entrepreneur Fellow

Introduction

To positively impact student outcomes across Brazil, Curiós have developed and implemented an intervention that aims to work through improving pedagogical co-ordinator (PCs) and teacher capabilities. To help them develop their evidence base of impact, as well as raise more funding and scale up their program, we developed an evaluation toolkit for them that can be used to generate conclusions that are easy to communicate.

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Organization’s role & strength

Curiós is a Brazilian start-up aiming to improve teacher training in the public sector. Every school has a PC, who is responsible for supporting the continued professional development of the teachers in their school. This is Curiós’ point of leverage: by improving the capabilities of the PC, they aim to also increase the impact of teachers on student outcomes. To date, they have worked with over 8,500 PCs across 23 municipalities in Brazil. Their technology based platform is based on a methodology that incorporates the adult learning cycle and encourages individual reflection, collective discussion, practice, refinement and application of the learned strategy into practice. Their values are simplicity, transparency, continuous learning, collective construction, and legacy.

Need summary

Curiós is at an early stage of their journey. They have designed an intervention and successfully implemented it across a range of municipalities in Brazil. However, they are struggling with determining the magnitude of its impact on PCs, as well as for teachers and their ultimate target: improving student outcomes. Crucially, they need a staged approach to building their evidence base evaluating the impact of Curiós, and directions for finding more funding and scaling partners.

Solution summary & next steps

We developed a solution with three parts. The first is a straightforward guide to research design. It outlines the considerations that should be taken into account for a study in their specific context, answers practical questions that might arise during the implementation and even gives a hand-on guide for collecting the data. Overall, we recommend that Curiós partner with an in-country researcher(s) who will be able to support the study’s ethical approval and data analysis.

The second is a set of surveys that would be administered during the research, ranging from concrete tests of understanding of the content to commonly used measures of teacher efficacy and well-being that can be compared with other studies.

Third, we sketch directions they can go to find funding and partners when they are equipped with the results of their evaluation. They can also use this part to find other organizations as examples on how to use research results in communications.