CUEL Director Shelby Cosner and colleague Dr. Asmaa Al-Fadala, Research Director of the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), presented to an international forum sponsored by WISE and the Global Education Forum in Medellin, Colombia on May 24, 2023. Their paper, titled “Post-Pandemic National Educational Investments: School Leadership Development Through Innovative Learning Designs,” explores the role of a public-private partnerships to innovate more powerful professional learning designs for school leaders, particularly for nations outside the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In particular, the paper traces the evolution of the partnership between Qatar’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education and WISE, an initiative of the Qatar Foundation, to train a next generation of innovative school leaders for Qatari schools. According to the authors, the paper addresses a gap in the growing international research literature on public-private partnerships in educational reform, which tends to overlook the sector of school leadership preparation in countries outside the OECD. For this reason, the paper also devotes considerable attention to the new learning designs that are emerging from the Qatar partnership, and considers how those designs are responsive to national and local educational contexts. The paper should appear soon as a policy paper on the WISE website.
While in Medellin, Dr. Cosner also contributes to a panel discussion of global patterns in educational leadership development, and participated in a gathering of Qatar/WISE’s ALL IN Community initiative on May 23rd. The ALL IN convening reviewed findings regarding educational leadership development from three ALL IN working groups, as well as engaging the authors of the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report. To view agendas for both WISE convenings, see here and here.