Field Notes

I returned to Accra one year after the close of A nationwide transitional bilingual reading intervention to examine whether trained pedagogy and instructional routines persisted once external support ended. Some teachers sustained core practices, while others struggled as coaching, monitoring, and material replenishment declined. The follow-up (Here) showed that leadership mattered, but was not sufficient on its own. Sustained implementation depended on a broader institutional ecology: continued access to materials, internal monitoring, teacher collaboration, and alignment between district expectations and school practice. This became the empirical foundation for my work on principal implementation leadership and, later, on how instructional reform becomes institutionalized rather than remaining dependent on donor-supported rollout. 

In 2023, I led a research co-creation initiative in Northern Ghana examining the role of low-cost private schools in expanding access to quality education in underserved areas. I worked with senior leaders from the Ghana Education Service, NaCCA, NaSIA, FHI 360, Opportunity International, and local research partners to identify pressing policy questions and translate them into a rigorous study design. I then led a three-day co-creation workshop to develop a wait-list control RCT examining how low-cost private schools might achieve learning outcomes comparable to effective public-school interventions. The process reinforced an important principle in my work: rigorous research is more useful when system actors help define the questions, shape the design, and connect the evidence to decisions they actually face.

Between 2022 and 2024, I led a multi-country diagnostic of primary education book supply chains in Rwanda, Honduras, and Cambodia to trace how instructional materials move from procurement to the classroom. In Rwanda, working with University of Rwanda faculty, I examined this process across provinces, school types, inclusive education settings, and the domestic publishing sector. The fieldwork showed that reliable access to books depends on more than procurement. Infrastructure, administrative accountability, publishing capacity, and last-mile delivery all shape whether materials actually reach students and are used for learning. This work extended my research from how teachers use resources to how systems make those resources available in the first place. 

Traveling to Northeast Nigeria brought me into education settings shaped by conflict and displacement. The broader developmental needs I had studied in Malawi took on greater urgency: children were not only navigating disrupted schooling, but also violence, trauma, and displacement. Working with partners providing accelerated and non-formal education, I saw both what these programs could achieve and the difficulty of reconnecting children to formal schooling. The experience expanded how I thought about educational equity: children facing fundamentally different circumstances may need different forms of support for learning to become possible.

This was my first consultancy after completing my PhD. I returned to Malawi for a higher education needs assessment focused on STEM, moving beyond the early childhood and primary settings that had shaped much of my earlier work. Engaging universities alongside government and other education actors gave me a wider view of how different levels of an education system connect, and where those connections break down.

I returned for a second SUPER Fellowship in 2016, this time in Malawi. My research lens widened. In Mozambique, I had focused closely on literacy instruction; in Malawi, I began to see how incomplete that view was. Understanding learning required looking beyond the classroom to the wider ecology surrounding children. I traced that ecology across early childhood centers, primary schools, teacher colleges, homes, and communities, with particular attention to social and emotional learning. The work showed how children’s development is shaped not only by instruction, but by the relationships, expectations, and support surrounding them. This fieldwork became the foundation for a series of studies on Parental SEL Engagement, Teacher Pedagogy, Curriculum Implementation, Teachers' Own Social-Emotional Competence, and Home-School-Policy Alignment. Through it all, it became clear that a child's learning is deeply intersected with the social and emotional environment created by the adults around them.

During the second year of my PhD, I traveled across Mozambique as a SUPER Fellow (Save-University Partnerships in Educational Research) to understand what literacy instruction looked like beyond policy expectations. Teachers worked under severe resource shortages, instructional demands, and linguistic complexity, yet I repeatedly saw them adapt creatively. In one rural school without textbooks, students practiced writing letters on the ground; elsewhere, a teacher used a simple blackboard to make phonics instruction visible and engaging. These observations later informed two journal articles (here and here) and deepened a question that had begun in Zambia: how do teachers create workable instructional practice when system conditions fall short? 

This was my first independent fieldwork. I arrived not only as a researcher, but as a former teacher who saw the Zambian educators as peers. I observed a principal whose leadership commanded deep respect from teachers and the community, combining care with high expectations. With the support of Shakazo Mzyece from the Examinations Council of Zambia, I gained access to institutional perspectives I could not have reached on my own. One result was my paper, "Making Do," which documented how teachers created meaningful learning opportunities despite persistent textbook shortages. The experience sharpened a question that would recur in my later work: how can effective practices developed under constraint become embedded in systems rather than remain isolated responses to top-down mandates?

In 2012, I conducted my first fieldwork in Nairobi while teaching elementary school in Korea and completing my master’s training in international development education. Until then, I had understood education reform largely through policy frameworks and development models. Working in Kenyan schools, NGOs, and the Ministry of Education showed me how differently reform looks once it encounters institutions and classrooms. That experience shifted my attention from reform design to what happens in practice, beginning a line of inquiry that still shapes my work on literacy, implementation, and education systems.