What is structured pedagogy?

Structured pedagogy is a powerful approach for increasing foundational literacy and numeracy among children.

What is structured pedagogy, and what makes it so successful? In this blog post, we’ll give an overview of structured pedagogy, including how it’s been used in the past and why it stands out in the world of global education.

What is structured pedagogy?

Structured pedagogy is a teaching and learning approach. It’s not a single technique or tool. Rather, it consists of numerous parts that are designed to work effectively together.

Structured pedagogy has been defined in different ways. The common thread is that structured pedagogy is an approach focused on:

1. A sequenced and scoped progression of grade-level skills for children to master
2. An aligned package of resources, training and support that enables teachers to deliver classroom lessons that build towards the intended skills.

Structured pedagogy programmes have often been used in low- and middle-income countries at the lower primary level with the goal of increasing foundational literacy. Some structured pedagogy programmes have encompassed foundational numeracy, too.

These programmes have been implemented at scale in many education systems in Sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda) and in South Asia (India and Pakistan).

What makes structured pedagogy notable?

Improving children’s literacy and numeracy isn’t easy. Doing it at scale is even more challenging. And showing consistent effectiveness at scale, over numerous interventions, is harder still. But structured pedagogy is one of the relatively few approaches that has managed to do this.

Indeed, research on education interventions in Global South contexts has consistently found structured pedagogy to be one of the most effective interventions for raising children’s foundational literacy and numeracy levels at scale.

It’s also worth noting that well-designed structured pedagogy programmes can achieve these outcomes cost-effectively – meaning that structured pedagogy can be a viable approach for large-scale interventions even when funding is limited.

It’s easy to see why structured pedagogy was recommended as one of only three ‘Great Buys’ in the 2023 Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel report.

What can structured pedagogy do?

Examples from real scaled-up structured pedagogy programmes show that it can make a remarkable difference.

In Liberia, the Read Liberia structured pedagogy programme increased the proportion of students meeting the Ministry of Education’s oral reading fluency benchmark from 13% to 35.5%.

And in Kenya, the Tusome structured pedagogy programme increased the proportion of students meeting the emergent literacy benchmark from 12% to 30% for English, and from 13% to 35% for Kiswahili.

What is structured pedagogy’s secret to success?

Academic research suggests several reasons why structured pedagogy programmes work.

One is that the structured pedagogy approach makes sense given what we know about the science behind children’s learning. For example, a well-sequenced progression of skills, like what we see in structured pedagogy, is important for ‘scaffolding’ the student learning process. Children can’t learn how to read a paragraph before they can read a sentence.

Another reason is that an aligned package of lesson plans, instructional materials, training, and ongoing support helps teachers to master new pedagogical techniques and embed them in daily lessons. So, the intervention isn’t just about the children’s learning that day. It can also enhance teachers’ skills and expertise through following years as well.

But the specifics of programme design and delivery matter too. That means, for example, that a structured pedagogy programme needs to align with government priorities and work with existing government structures. And it’s important for any education intervention to be adaptive so that it can become the best version of itself.

Learn more about structured pedagogy

If you’d like to learn more about structured pedagogy, take a look at two publications from which this blog post draws:

• The path to scale: navigating the scaling of structured pedagogy programmes, an insight note
• Implementing structured pedagogy programmes at scale, a synthesis brief.

And if you sign up to our mailing list, you can stay updated about our future work on structured pedagogy, including a paper on the core components of structured pedagogy set to be released in the coming months.