Education in Action - The Nudelman Initiative

Education in Action - The Nudelman Initiative is a philanthropic project designed to create a new educational model for early childhood education in Brazil. The goal is to develop an innovative and scalable approach that will enable children to reach their full potential.

The team leader’s role is to build and maintain relationships with the different partners and stakeholders involved in the project. As an entrepreneur in residence at the Stanford Graduate School of Education with a successful experience in education in Brazil, Andre uses his network and entrepreneurial skills to bring this project to life.

The Nudelman Initiative is scheduled to start in September 2023. A timeline has been created that already includes various weekly periods of time focusing on the project implementation and operations. The entire leadership team is expected to participate in these collaborative times. The most effective solution could be to schedule some time for the LEAP Project during these weekly meetings.

Researchers and local practitioners collaborate to address inequalities and create a new model for education that can be replicated.

Passo de Camaragibe is a small city with approximately 13,000 inhabitants in Brazil's Northeast region. The city is characterized by its natural beauty and coastal location, but unfortunately, it is also known for its poor socioeconomic conditions, including high poverty and illiteracy rates. The public school system in Passo de Camaragibe faces significant challenges, including low levels of literacy and limited resources. Education in Action - The Nudelman Initiative aims to address these challenges and create a new model for education that can be replicated in other cities in Brazil.

The Education in Action - The Nudelman Initiative will start with an initial pilot program in Passo de Camaragibe, focused on early childhood education. The pilot program will provide resources, training, and support to local schools and educators to improve the city's education quality. The program will initially focus on children aged 3 to 5 years old and will then gradually expand to include additional grades, one per year.

The project will focus on developing a new educational model that takes into account the local social and cultural structures and specificities of the Passo de Camaragibe community. This will strongly emphasize play-based and experiential learning and innovative teaching methods that engage children and promote their active participation in the learning process. The project will also explore how Artificial Intelligence might help improve day-by-day practices.

The Education in Action - The Nudelman Initiative is seeking partnerships with leading educational institutions and philanthropic organizations to help support the project's goals and expand its impact. We believe our project will benefit from collaboration with institutions such as Stanford University Graduate School of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Gates Ventures, and Lemann Foundation. Together, we can create a new educational model that will help shape the future of early childhood education in Brazil.

The Nudelman Initiative will bring Early Education researchers from Stanford and Harvard together with local practitioners and school communities to collaborate at a newly created research center located in Passo de Camaragibe, Brazil. Researchers can stay for short or long periods of time to work on their own research questions or collaborate with other researchers on big ideas. One of these big ideas is to see how Artificial Intelligence could help generate more personalized instruction that integrates different types of variability.

Thanks to a long-term partnership signed with the local municipality, researchers will be able to collaborate with local teachers, parents and students and conduct ongoing and extensive fieldwork.

The studies used by our organization to design our project come from multiple sources. As an entrepreneur in residence, Andre Nudelman works with Stanford's Center on Early Childhood. Their studies focus on how the learning experiences a child has in early childhood can affect lifelong health, learning, and behavior. Andre Nudelman and his team have also developed a collaboration with Nonie Lesaux and Stephanie Jones from Harvard's Saul Zaentz Early Education Initiative. Their work on early education leadership complements well the research done at Stanford. Finally, Andre Nudelman is collaborating with Stanford's Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence on questions linked to AI in education. 

The project team will work with researchers to determine the appropriate methods and tools to be used in Brazil. Both formative and summative research are expected to be implemented because research is at the heart of this project.

Our goal is to be able to generate valuable research that can be published and contribute to the overall improvement of education in the world.

The preliminary research showed that there is a real and growing interest in innovative early education practices everywhere in the world. At the same time, many communities' needs are immense and multidimensional because of a lack of resources, information and professional learning. Researchers and practitioners do not seem to have a lot of opportunities to cooperate, which could benefit both and, ultimately, enhance student learning. We also learned that while AI has a lot of traction in the media, it has not translated yet into concrete applications. There is no research on how AI could help improve day-by-day practices in early education. We want to explore this gap.

The timing could not be better to engage in a LEAP project because we are launching our project in September 2023. Although we have a good understanding of what we would like to achieve and how we are planning to do it, we need some guidance on the evidence base dimension of our solution. Our team combines many competencies, but none of us is an expert in that field. We want to learn from and with the LEAP fellows so that we can define the most appropriate and tailored tools and methods for this solution.

We understand that it is essential to gather robust and reliable data that can support and inform the project's goals and outcomes. We are particularly seeking guidance on how to choose appropriate data collection methods, and implement data collection and quality control measures.

- How might we use AI to improve day-by-day practices in education?

- How could Artificial Intelligence help generate more personalized instruction that integrates different types of variability?

- How might we develop a new educational model that takes into account the local social and cultural structures and specificities?

Desired outputs of the 12-week LEAP Project sprint could include:

-Select appropriate data collection methods based on the research questions and objectives. This may include surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations, document analysis, or a combination of methods.

- Ensure that the chosen methods are valid, reliable, and appropriate for the context.

- Implement the data collection process according to the defined research framework. 

- Ensure that data is collected consistently and accurately, paying attention to quality control measures.

Once the outputs are established, we will integrate them into our Project Handbook. We will also create research evidence base guidelines to be shared with all our partners and stakeholders. The idea is to make sure that everyone involved in the project has access to the outputs in our digital platforms. We intend to translate them into Portuguese and have hard copies available at the local research centers.

The 12-week LEAP Project allows us to start our solution on a solid foot with established and well-defined evidence-based practices. It will help our organization to monitor progress, reflect and adapt. In the long term, it will help us be consistent and have reliable points of comparison over months, years and decades. Because we are expecting to scale up, the benefits of the LEAP Project will also impact other cities and projects in Brazil and elsewhere in the world.