Why answer Teach to Reach Questions-small

Why answer Teach to Reach Questions?

Global health

Have you ever wished you could talk to another health worker who has faced the same challenges as you? Someone who found a way to keep helping people, even when things seemed impossible? That’s exactly the kind of active learning that Teach to Reach Questions make possible. They make peer learning easy for everyone who works for health. What are Teach to Reach Questions? Once you join Teach to Reach (what is it?), you’ll receive questions about real-world challenges that matter to health professionals. How does it work? What’s different about these questions? Unlike typical surveys that just collect data, Teach to Reach Questions are active learning that: See what we give back to the community. Get the English-language collection of Experiences shared from Teach to Reach 10. The new compendium includes over 600 health worker experiences about immunisation, climate change, malaria, NTDs, and digital health. A second collection of …

The pedagogy of Teach to Reach

What is the pedagogy of Teach to Reach?

Global health, Learning strategy, Theory

In a rural health center in Kenya, a community health worker develops an innovative approach to reaching families who have been hesitant about vaccination. Meanwhile, in a Brazilian city, a nurse has gotten everyone involved – including families and communities – onboard to integrate information about HPV vaccination into cervical cancer screening. These valuable insights might once have remained isolated, their potential impact limited to their immediate contexts. But through Teach to Reach – a peer learning platform, network, and community hosted by The Geneva Learning Foundation – these experiences become part of a larger tapestry of knowledge that transforms how health workers learn and adapt their practices worldwide. Since January 2021, the event series has grown to connect over 21,000 health professionals from more than 70 countries, reaching its tenth edition with 21,398 participants in June 2024. Scale matters, but this level of engagement begs the question: how and why does it …

Brevity’s burden The executive summary trap in global health

Brevity’s burden: The executive summary trap in global health

Global health, Learning strategy

It was James Gleick who noted in his book “Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything” the societal shift towards valuing speed over depth: “We have become a quick-reflexed, multitasking, channel-flipping, fast-forwarding species. We don’t completely understand it, and we’re not altogether happy about it.” In global health, there’s a growing tendency to demand ever-shorter summaries of complex information. “Can you condense this into four pages?” “Is there an executive summary?” These requests, while stemming from real time constraints, reveal fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of knowledge and learning. Worse, they contribute to perpetuating existing global health inequities. Here is why – and a few ideas of what we can do about it. We lose more than time in the race to brevity The push for shortened summaries is understandable on the surface. Some clinical researchers, for example, undeniably face increasing time pressures. Many are swamped due to underlying structural issues, …

Community-based monitoring for immunization

Integrating community-based monitoring (CBM) into a comprehensive learning-to-action model

Global health

According to Gavi, “community-based monitoring” or “CBM” is a process where service users collect data on various aspects of health service provision to monitor program implementation, identify gaps, and collaboratively develop solutions with providers. By engaging service users, CBM aims to foster greater accountability and responsiveness to local needs. The Geneva Learning Foundation’s innovative learning-to-action model offers a compelling framework within which CBM could be applied to immunization challenges. The model’s comprehensive design creates an enabling environment for effectively integrating diverse monitoring data sources – and this could include community perspectives. Health workers as trusted community advisers… and members of the community A distinctive feature of TGLF’s model is its emphasis on health workers’ role as trusted advisors to the communities they serve. The model recognizes that local health staff are not merely service providers, but often deeply embedded community members with intimate knowledge of local realities. For example, in …

Heini Utenen OpenWHO confusion about methods and learner preferences

Why asking learners what they want is a recipe for confusion

Global health, Theory

A survey of learners on a large, authoritative global health learning platform has me pondering once again the perils of relying too heavily on learner preferences when designing educational experiences. One survey question intended to ask learners for their preferred learning method. The list of options provided includes a range of items. (Some would make the point that the list conflates learning resources and learning methods, but let us leave that aside for now.) Respondents’ top choices (source) were videos, slides, and downloadable documents. At first glance, this seems perfectly reasonable. After all, should we not give learners what they want? As it happens, the main resources offered by this platform are videos, slides, and other downloadable documents. (If we asked learners who participate in our peer learning programmes for their preference, they would likely say that they prefer… peer learning.) Beyond this availability bias, there is a more significant …

Learn health, but beware of the behaviorist trap

Global health, Theory

The global health community has long grappled with the challenge of providing effective, scalable training to health workers, particularly in resource-constrained settings. In recent years, digital learning platforms have emerged as a potential solution, promising to deliver accessible, engaging, and impactful training at scale. Imagine a digital platform intended to train health workers at scale. Their theory of change rests on a few key assumptions: On the surface, this seems sensible. Mobile optimization recognizes health workers’ technological realities. Multimedia content seems more engaging than pure text. Assessments appear to verify learning. Incentives promise to drive uptake. Scale feels synonymous with success. While well-intentioned, such a platform risks falling into the trap of a behaviorist learning agenda. This is an approach that, despite its prevalence, is a pedagogical dead-end with limited potential for driving meaningful, sustained improvements in health worker performance and health outcomes. It is a paradigm that views learners …

Why health leaders who are critical thinkers choose rote learning for others-small

Why health leaders who are critical thinkers choose rote learning for others

Global health

Many health leaders are highly analytical, adaptive learners who thrive on solving complex problems in dynamic, real-world contexts. Their expertise is grounded in years of field experience, where they have honed their ability to rapidly generate insights, test ideas, and innovate solutions in collaboration with diverse stakeholders. In January 2021, as countries were beginning to introduce new COVID-19 vaccines, Kate O’Brien, who leads WHO’s immunization efforts, connected global learning to local action: “For COVID-19 vaccines […] there are just too many lessons that are being learned, especially according to different vaccine platforms, different communities of prioritization that need to be vaccinated. So [everyone]  has got to be able to scale, has got to be able to deal with complexity, has got to be able to do personal, local innovation to actually overcome the challenges.” In an Insights Live session with the Geneva Learning Foundation in 2022, she made a compelling …

Self-Regulated Learning: Beliefs, Techniques, and Illusions

8 things we know about learning across the lifespan in a complex world

Theory

The work by Robert A. Bjork and his colleagues is very helpful to make sense of the limitations of learners’ perceptions. Here are 8 summary points from their paper about self-regulated learning. Source: Bjork, R.A., Dunlosky, J., Kornell, N., 2013. Self-Regulated Learning: Beliefs, Techniques, and Illusions. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 64, 417–444. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143823

Credible knowers

Credible knowers

Global health, The Geneva Learning Foundation, Thinking aloud

“Some individuals are acknowledged as credible knowers within global health, while the knowledge held by others may be given less credibility.” – (Himani Bhakuni and Seye Abimbola in The Lancet, 2021) “Immunization Agenda 2030” or “IA2030” is a strategy that was unanimously adopted at the World Health Assembly in 2020. The global community that funds and supports vaccination globally is now exploring what it needs to do differently to transform the Agenda’s goal of saving 50 million lives by the end of the decade into reality. Last year, over 10,000 national and sub-national health staff from 99 countries pledged to achieve this goal when they joined the Geneva Learning Foundation’s first IA2030 learning and action research programme. Discover what we learned in Year 1… Learn more about the Foundation’s platform and network… What is the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030)? In global health, personal experience is assumed to be anecdotal, the …

Learning for knowledge creation WHO Scholar programme

Learning for Knowledge Creation: The WHO Scholar Program

Global health, Learning strategy, Scholar Approach

Excerpted from: Victoria J. Marsick, Rachel Fichter, Karen E. Watkins, 2022. From Work-based Learning to Learning-based Work: Exploring the Changing Relationship between Learning and Work, in: The SAGE Handbook of Learning and Work. SAGE Publications. Reda Sadki of The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), working with Jhilmil Bahl from the World Health Organization (WHO) and funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, developed an extraordinary approach to blending work and learning. The program started as a series of digitally offered courses for immunization personnel working in various countries, connecting in-country central planners, frontline workers, and global actors. The program was designed to address five common problems in training (Sadki, 2018): the inability to scale up to reach large audiences; the difficulty in transferring what is learned; the inability to accommodate different learners’ starting places; the need to teach learners to solve complex problems; and the inability to develop sufficient expertise …