News: Chemonics and One World Network of Schools Create Institutional Partnership

Chemonics International and One World Network of Schools (OWNOS) have entered into an institutional partnership bringing together global education practitioners with expertise in instructional leadership and a shared conviction that schools cannot outperform their leaders. The partnership uniquely positions Chemonics and OWNOS to study high-performing teachers and teacher-leaders globally through a practice-based approach. As partners, they are leveraging student learning data to identify schools and classrooms that are positive outliers, study common behaviors, and codify and disseminate best practices for teacher and coach professional development.

Founded in 2013, OWNOS is an education nonprofit that improves student learning by developing the next generation of school leaders. OWNOS collaborates with instructional leaders around the world, reaching 1.35 million students across fourteen projects in eight countries. Chemonics’ and OWNOS’ three-year exclusive agreement solidifies institutional relationships begun on the 2021-2025 Chemonics-implemented USAID/Tajikistan Learn Together Activity. Together, Chemonics and OWNOS have used digital development principles to build a coaching and monitoring platform that empowers Tajikistan’s district-level decision-makers with real-time data about teachers’ and instructional leaders’ coaching and mentoring quality.

“We are at a pivotal moment in the education sector where education reform tools, such as assessments aligned with the Global Proficiency Framework: Reading and Mathematics, can help us follow the data and identify highly effective teachers and instructional leaders in their country contexts,” Chemonics Global Practice Lead for Education and Youth Audrey Spencer said. “We can study common behaviors of local exemplars and collaborate with partners to see what works, name it in a meaningful way, and support more teachers, coaches, and mentors to do it too.”

Since signing their exclusive agreement in June 2021, Chemonics and OWNOS have aimed to scale their innovations by launching the Fellowship for Instructional Leaders on October 7, 2021, and the Fellowship for Teaching and Learning on January 13, 2022. The fellowships provide a rare opportunity to gather eight OWNOS global educators and 25 education programmers serving on Chemonics-implemented projects globally. In doing so, they join a growing cadre of educators working to build on a taxonomy of evidence-based techniques that improve formative teaching and learning.

OWNOS Executive Director Brian Sims welcomed the expanded collaboration with Chemonics as a new implementing partner, emphasizing the value of instructional leadership “Despite a sincere desire to improve, when school leaders lack access to effective tools and training, their students miss out on a fundamental need: a great education. Their life opportunities become limited, and their potential goes unrealized,” Sims said. “This is not simply a single student missing out on learning but a collective and shared loss. As our world becomes increasingly more connected, we risk losing out on what our young people might have become and the gifts they could have contributed. Whether it’s curing disease, reversing climate change, or inventing new industries, we’ll never know what they might have done if they’d received a great education.”