CIES 2026

Rachel Neville, JET Specialist Manager, reflects on the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Conference, held in San Francisco. One of the panels explored the affordances and limits of scaling foundational maths through structured pedagogy. They showed how some classroom practices improve through these programmes, others, such as moving beyond closed-ended questions to higher-order “why” questions, still require stronger support.

"A key takeaway was that without genuine learner engagement, learning remains surface-level. The conversation reinforced the importance of equipping teachers to foster engagement within structured pedagogy, while also developing better ways to measure and support this in practice."

Rachel presented on Engagement and Developmental Outcomes in South African Preschools,” which explores findings from a pilot of the Early Childhood Education (ECE) Engage tool, highlighting the link between children’s engagement and school readiness (assessed using the Early Learning Outcomes Measure- ELOM) across 150 classrooms in KwaZulu-Natal.