Millions Learning Real-time Scaling Labs: designing an adaptive learning process to support large-scale change in education

Millions Learning, a project of the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution, addresses the question of how to scale quality education for all children and youth. CUE is launching Real-time Scaling Labs in partnership with local institutions in a number of countries and U.S. cities to generate more evidence and provide practical recommendations around the process of scaling in global education, encouraging a stronger link between research and practice. These labs are not physical spaces, but rather a process established by CUE and partner institutions to learn from, support, and document existing efforts to scale interventions focused on improving children’s learning as they unfold in real-time. This will include observing, gathering, and analyzing data, as well as encouraging self-reflection, recommending course corrections based on existing evidence, documenting the scaling process in real-time, and sharing ongoing learning with those involved. The ultimate goal is to support initiatives as they scale while simultaneously gaining deeper insight into how policymakers, civil society, and the private sector can most effectively work together to bring about large-scale transformation in the quality of children’s learning and their development.