It's June 10^th, 2024. We're visiting a first-grade class, at Bohicon elementary school in the Zou department, Benin.

Eudoxie, the class teacher, is teaching a reading lesson with exceptional energy and captures the attention of her many young students. They have in front of them their textbooks with large scripted letters – referred to as a ‘decodable.’

Each student, from their own textbook, reads out loud syllables, words and short sentences, hearing his or her own voice. This experience can be a great source of pride and satisfaction for a young reader!

Eudoxie roams around the classroom, approaching each student. She asks them to read individually, congratulates and encourages those who succeed, and gives corrective feedback to those who are struggling.

She follows lesson plans with ease and ownership.

Eudoxie's class illustrates Benin's curricular reform in the first two primary grades. The reform began in 2019 with public funding combined with support from GPE (the PME-3 Program) and technical assistance from the World Bank. It was implemented in the classroom during the school year 2022-23.

The goal is to improve foundational learning for all young children. National evaluations (2016 and 2023) confirm a clear improvement in student achievement in grade 2, after just one year of implementation, and despite schools closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Best practices in curricular reform

In 2019, in order to address the serious learning crisis, Benin implemented some best practices to change their curriculum as described by the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP) 2023 report on cost-effective approaches to improve global learning and also summarized in this report commissioned by the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report Team:

1. A structured, explicit pedagogy paradigm that included structured pedagogy for instruction with corrective feedback.
2. Materials for pupils: Textbooks were provided for each student based on the phonic approach for daily practice as well as additional workbooks.
3. Classroom materials: Additional materials for oral language development were supplied as part of the curricular reform.
4. Teacher guides were developed with well-structured lesson plans, aligned with textbooks.
5. Support for teachers was carried out through practical in-service training, alignment between teaching and learning materials, and coaching for classroom teachers that was mainstreamed throughout the education system through pedagogical units.
6. Evaluation: conducting implementation and system evaluations for continuous improvement within the education system.

Using research to inform reform implementation

Benin applied the recent advances of science in the implementation of education (the way of mainstreaming research into education policies and classroom teaching practices) in its curricular reform by taking into account research evidence on:

How the brain learns to read: Cognitive science and neuroscience explain how the brain works and which neural circuits are activated to access, through vision, the areas of spoken language and reading (as demonstrated by the research of Professor Stanislas Dehaene; see here for a video on improving literacy).

Benin's decodable textbooks as well as the learning steps (the phonic approach) in the lesson plans of the teacher's guide are examples of how this research on how we learn to read can be applied in school.

Cognitive load theory, that captures how much someone may be able to retain (the ‘load’) in their memory as they learn new things and complete related activities (referred to as ‘working memory’) underpins the design of new reading materials so that content doesn’t overload learners.

By presenting and spacing learning content in manageable ‘chunks’ of information, this can make it easier for students to remember new information and supports long-term learning.

New learning materials developed in Benin include decodable textbooks, an activity book, thematic posters for oral language development and lesson plans in the teacher's guide—all based on structured pedagogy. These materials give students the opportunity to extensively practice reading and writing.

Perceptual learning shows how visual aspects of learning content influence early reading skills.

Lessons learned from scaling up a curriculum reform in Benin

• Strong leadership for learning improvement: Country leadership is a prerequisite to operationalize sustainable systemic reform towards improving learning at scale.
• Technical and management capacity building: It is feasible to build the national capacity to deliver foundational learning programs, without delegating implementation to outside agents and without “heavy” external support.
• Higher confidence in implementation by the MoE: The Beninese paradigm reinforces confidence in the country's educational institutions and innovative players. It puts more trust in the country’s central and regional institutions and actors. This has the potential to lead to long-term gains.
• Enhancig the education system: Curricular reform acts as a catalyst for enhancing the education system (inspectors, educational advisors). Implementation process similar to the Benin case generate systemic reforms by realigning and enhancing the countries’ education systems to improving foundational learning.

At the Forum on Foundational Learning, "Apprendre Pour Demain" (Learning For Tomorrow) held in Dakar last month, the countries invited by CONFEMEN shared lessons learned, strategies and evidence-based best practices in order to improve foundational learning for all young students in Africa.

• How the CONFEMEN education systems analysis program (PASEC) impacts education policies
• The importance of structured pedagogy to improve learning in sub-Saharan Africa
• How can data be used to improve teaching and learning?