The need for change in the education system is obvious and overwhelming. But each stakeholder group has its own ideas about why the system is broken and how to fix it. Competing priorities, political inertia and diminishing budgets maintain the dysfunctional status quo. This essential text examines the underlying causes behind the key challenges…

This chapter applies a layered identity model to educational development in order to unpack the complexities of our professional identities.

This article presents and discusses the findings from five principals about their experiences of using systems thinking approach to school development. This was an ethnographic multiple case study that was conducted in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Literature demonstrates the efficacies of using systems thinking as an approach in dealing with…

An ecological framework is often used to describe the context for learning in educational research and practice. However, there is often a focus on descriptive aspects that frame the ecosystem as a complicated set of interconnected elements--but not a true complex problem. Acknowledging connections between ecosystem elements is not enough to…

Reforming instruction is challenging. In this comparative case study of 12 school districts, we investigated the dilemmas that emerged for system leaders as they engaged in system building for elementary science and the approaches leaders took in managing them. We found that system leaders' efforts to manage their environments contributed to the…

The authors conduct a study of the main regularities determining the distinctive features of digital education. The conducted research allowed us to identify several trends in vocational education, providing an increase in socioeconomic and managerial efficiency and competitiveness of higher education systems in the current digital society. A…

The COVID-19 Omicron variant was causing a new wave of infections and, because of school and life disruptions, students were struggling with learning loss and a decline in mental and emotional health in 2021. Against this backdrop, FHI 360, an organization whose education initiatives aim to dismantle obstacles and give students the tools they need…

The article is devoted to the development of adult education, its andragogical principles and the impact on the quality of lifelong pedagogical education. The authors examined the mechanisms for improving the quality of lifelong pedagogical education by updating the content, developing and implementing innovative teaching technologies following…

In the United States of America, the year 2020 will be remembered as a year of sorrow, infection, greed, violence, loss, devastation, protest, resistance, and death. The tragedies of this year were made possible by America's long history and obsession with anti-Blackness, racism, white supremacy, violence, and capitalism. America's schools,…

We defend in this paper the importance of redistributing power in the field of education development by enhancing the self-sustainability of education initiatives and minimizing their roots in dependency -- these as pre-requisites for improving their sustainable development outcomes. We do this by considering an education development initiative…

Revisiting an essay from 1999, this article explores the current conditions in higher education, and society more broadly, that help shape the roles for the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and educational development. By seeing the current "crises" of higher education not only as "problems" to be investigated but as…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to analyse comparatively, at regional level, the current state of a wide range of indicators of Vocational Education and Training (VET) in Spain. This will make it possible to characterise and better understand the existence of a variety of regional VET systems, including the Initial VET and Continuous VET…

The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) is strongly committed to ensuring quality education for children living in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. GPE convenes partners and mobilizes funds to help governments in 90 lower-income countries build and finance strong and sustainable education systems that deliver quality learning to more…

Throughout history educational leaders have looked to other countries and have attempted to learn by borrowing useful examples to implement in their own educational systems. As recent comparative policy research shows, processes of policy lending and borrowing have their own socio-historically defined dynamics. In this paper, the authors approach…

The World Bank's Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) purports to benchmark developing country education systems against global best practices. SABER covers 13 topics, called "domains," and has produced over 16,000 indicators of what the Bank considers best practice and applied them in over 130 countries. Yet this…