At STiR Education, we think a lot about scale. Since 2012, we have supported over 550,000 teachers in India, Uganda and Indonesia through high quality professional development focused on fostering ‘intrinsic motivation’ so that improvements in the classroom are driven by a love of teaching.

These teacher professional development programs have been delivered through learning partnerships with government: deep collaborations with those within government education systems to co-design initiatives so that teachers engage fully with training and program content that is meaningful to their teaching practice.

The latest assessment of STiR’s work suggests this approach yields success.

Evaluations that have compared schools in Uganda and Indonesia between those that use our teacher professional development programs and those that do not show the programs’ impact on teachers and learning in turn, specifically increasing children’s literacy and numeracy outcomes at scale and at low cost per child.

But we believe evolving our approach can have even greater impact.

Rethinking impact at scale, sensitive to context

STiR’s work developed on an assumption that government school systems always represent the best value for money in terms of scaling impact. This understands scale in terms of program reach as the number of students, teachers or schools.

More recently, conceptualizations of scaling have rightly shifted.

When thinking about scale in education, the right question is no longer “how can we ensure our intervention reaches the biggest number of people or schools?” But instead, “how, in a particular context, can we have the greatest impact?” in the sense of making a meaningful, positive change to learning.

As scaling expert Larry Cooley puts it, we need to scale impact, not interventions.

Being sensitive to context also means finding what is working already and trying to amplify it. This is important both strategically and pragmatically.

We know from behavioral and implementation research that building on existing ‘bright spots’—things that are working well—yields significant impact.

We also know that the political economy of international education has changed: ever tighter funding means we need to find smarter, faster pathways to impact children’s learning.

This requires an entirely different way of thinking and doing. It means starting with the question: where, how and with whom might we have the greatest impact?

What does ‘rethinking impact at scale’ look like? Amplification in Ghana

STiR has developed a new model of ‘amplification’ as one response to this question. In this approach, STiR seeks to harness its expertise in fostering motivation to provide insights and capacity building to strong local actors.

Focusing on scaling impact rather than interventions has meant distilling STiR’s expertise into a set of discrete, flexible principles that can be integrated into pre-existing or pre-planned professional development programs to ensure they’re robustly underpinned by what we know from the science of motivation.

An example of this approach is STiR’s project with T-TEL (Transforming Teaching, Education & Learning) in Ghana. T-TEL is a Ghanaian nongovernmental organization with a track record of working at scale with the national government.

The ‘Leaders in Teaching programme’ is a national program to reform secondary schools led and implemented by Ghana’s Ministry of Education.

The program aims to roll out a new secondary education curriculum and revamp pre-service and in-service teacher training with an emphasis on teacher leadership, quality of teaching, how teachers are recruited and their motivation as professionals.

This motivation component led T-TEL to approach STiR for support.

STiR’s role in the consortium led by T-TEL and funded by Mastercard Foundation is not just about delivering a one-time, standalone project, but how to embed the principles of intrinsic motivation across the program in order to ensure all aspects are underpinned by what we know about motivation and behavioral change.

Over the past 2 years, STiR’s support has included: contributing to a research study on teacher motivation in Ghana; sharing insights on processes for the monitoring and evaluation of motivation; reviewing teacher training program materials; and developing training for the T-TEL team on motivation.

In our next phase, the focus will be on integrating motivation content into leadership interventions for other key education stakeholders such as school leaders and supporting T-TEL to build momentum for the importance of teacher motivation within the Ghana Education Service.

The critical role of trusting partnerships

For an amplification model to work, open and trusting partnerships are essential.

And this has been the case for T-TEL and STiR. We are organizations with similar values—a critical feature of the success of the partnership.

As with many large projects, time and resources are extremely limited, but staying true to the principles of impact and flexibility ensures that needs can be met as they arise.

T-TEL’s program is scheduled to run until 2028 and the partnership with STiR will continue, provided that both sides believe it’s continuing to create the desired impact.

There remains lots to do and learn, including how best to evaluate the impact of amplification in different settings and how we can best share lessons from this approach to partnership more widely.

In an ever-unpredictable landscape for international aid to education, it is crucial we continue to innovate with new partnership models for nongovernmental organizations.

Amplification is one such innovation. It will not be the right approach for every organization nor in every situation.

But in addition to supporting organizations like STiR and T-TEL to deepen their respective areas of desired impact in education systems, we are hopeful an amplification model will provide a catalyst for new ways of thinking about collaboration.