Research, Reflection & Evaluating Head
Purpose
The Research, Reflection & Evaluating (RRE) Head will build SmartStart’s Research & Evaluating department and partnerships, and will lead
- creating & sharing knowledge
- research programmes & projects relevant to practice
- evaluating SmartStart’s practice and progress
- co-creating the conditions for deeper reflective practice and evaluative thinking
The RRE Head will lead in generating knowledge from and with SmartStart’s people and practices for innovating & learning across the network and early childhood care & education ecosystem.
Context
This role will head a new department in the relatively new Innovation & Learning portfolio.
This is an exciting time in making the way together to early learning for all, focused on those most marginalised — first in South Africa; and already with a view to the wider global south & beyond.
SmartStart is currently committed to:
- reimagining an open platform for societal scale powered by people & technology
- showing up differently to enable the ecosystem and convene collaborators
- crafting a coherent cost & investment strategy for societal scale
We see the new Research & Evaluating department as contributing across this range over time.
The RRE Head is responsible for heading the Research & Evaluating department collaboratively with other departments for synergies across the Hub Network.
The RRE Head is jointly responsible – with all other managers – for collaboratively guiding the SmartStart Hub Network of partners in:
- Co-developing and realising SmartStart’s strategy
- Creating the conditions for the Hub & network to succeed
Location in Hub organisation (and network)
Line Manager: Chief Innovation & Learning Officer (Network Hub)
Job grade (Paterson framework): D Upper
Manages
- Contractors & consultants
- Staff team to follow
- Partnerships
Key Responsibilities for the job
Leading and developing SmartStart’s approach(es) to identifying, creating, nurturing & sharing knowledge (know-how & know-that) for use across the network & ecosystem
- Exploring & seeking new knowledge and introducing what’s valuable to SmartStart appropriately
- Collaboratively questioning key assumptions
- Collaboratively identifying, creating, and packaging knowledge for use & sharing
- Leading an asset-based orientation to knowledge
- Creating, distilling and/or packaging knowledge from SmartStart people’s experience and expertise, with an orientation towards people’s agency & diversity, and “positive deviance”
- Co-creating the network-wide conditions for more deeply reflective practice and evaluative thinking (with the rest of the Innovation & Learning portfolio)
- Reflective practice: asking questions & questioning assumptions about one’s own work and ways of working (standing on the balcony outside the dance, double-loop learning, reflexivity, etc)
- Evaluative thinking: “an attitude of inquisitiveness and a belief in the value of evidence”…[1]
Leading and developing SmartStart’s approach(es) to researching and evaluating
- Leading & managing an iterative, multi-question, multi-year agenda focused on use/utilisation
- Building wider understanding across SmartStart of the nature and value of questioning, researching & evaluating — incl. evaluating as integral to practice; and research as informed by & informing practice
- Leading SmartStart’s using research in evaluating, and using both in learning
- Building & sustaining research-practice partnerships to realise SmartStart’s approach
- Managing SmartStart’s research & evaluation assets
- Researching: curiously and creatively formulating, prioritising, and inquiring into questions with appropriate discipline(s) and diligence — yielding conclusions and new questions
- Evaluating: “any systematic process to judge merit, worth or significance by combining evidence and values”.[2] More specifically: “Evaluation science is systematic inquiry into how, and how well, interventions aimed at changing the world work.”[3]
Leading SmartStart’s scoping, designing & managing research and evaluation programmes & projects
- Designing appropriate (often mixed methods) approaches and adapting these over time
- Developing appropriate terms of reference and requests for proposal for independent evaluations
- Leading & managing research and/or evaluation programmes and/or projects
- Conducting research and/or evaluations
[1] …“that involves: 1. identifying assumptions, 2. posing thoughtful questions, 3. pursuing deeper understanding through reflection and multiple perspective taking, 4. and making informed decisions in preparation for action”. “Defining and teaching evaluative thinking: insights from research on critical thinking” (Buckley et al 2015)
[1] This definition is from BetterEvaluation: the knowledge platform of the Global Evaluation Initiative. This definition is a version of the American Evaluation Association’s definition in their resource statement: “a systematic process to determine merit, worth, value or significance”.
[1] “Evaluation Science” (Michael Quinn Patton, 2018), published in the American Journal of Evaluation.
[1] See Akshay Mangla’s renowned work on how norms shape policy implementation in ways that yield very uneven educational outcomes for children. Mangla characterises these norms as broadly “legalistic” (inflexible rule-following) or “deliberative” (flexible problem-solving). “Social norms are the glue and grease of every organization” (Woolcock)
[1] “Evaluators are an eclectic group working in diverse arenas using a variety of methods drawn from a wide range of disciplines applied to a vast array of efforts aimed at improving the lives of people in places throughout the world.” Evaluation Science (Michael Quinn Patton, 2018), published in the American Journal of Evaluation.
[1] See, for example, Capturing Complexity and Context: Evaluating Aid to Education (Samoff et al 2016).
Key Responsibilities as an Exco member
Practising and exemplifying systems thinking-and-doing, including societal thinking-and-doing
Collaboratively Guiding the SmartStart Hub & network of partners + Developing Professionally
- Co-realising SmartStart’s strategy by managing strategically
- Seeing and sharing the big picture coherently: co-building & communicating coherence unendingly
- Creating the conditions for and facilitating people’s thinking diversely and doing good work together
- Leading as a learner-and-teacher
- Practising SmartStart’s “purple practices” for collective success, incl. but not limited to:
- Behaving trustworthily and building trusting relationships
- Playing roles across contexts adaptively
- Co-creating our thinking environment and nurturing our psychological safety
- Learning curiously (and unlearning to learn)
- Asking for & giving reasons (account-giving / accountability)
- Managing by coaching (and asking “How can I help you?”)
- Developing self and systems doing-and-thinking
Key Person Specifications
Qualifications and Experience
- Min. masters degree or equivalent with relevant experience; preferably PhD with practical experience
- Min. 8 years’ relevant & diverse experience in complex organisational-systemic contexts incl.
- Min. 4 years in senior role(s) successfully leading functions and managing teams
- Experience of social impact initiatives, programmes and/or organisations
- Advantageous: fluency in one or more African languages
- Very advantageous for Head job: employment equity candidate (especially Black Africans, incl. men)
Specific (incl. technical) Knowledge & Understanding and/or Skills & Abilities
- Comfort and confidence leading sophisticated research and evaluations
- People-and-user-centered approaches to research and evaluating
- Thoughtful familiarity with M&E/MEL/MERL approaches and practices
- A track record of, and strong appetite for, seeing patterns and building coherence amid complexity
- Advantageous: proficiency in/with
- Tools suited to relevant research methods
- Developmental evaluation
General Knowledge & Understanding and/or Skills & Abilities
Behaving & Learning
- Behaving trustworthily: being reliable, accepting, open, congruent (ie. integrity)
- Learning curiously, incl. learning how by doing differently
- Clear curiosity (asking questions, questioning assumptions, doing differently, trying things)
- Track record of learning
- Openness to & appetite for feedback
- Familiarity with and curiosity about
- Societal scale
- Systems doing-and-thinking
- Design thinking & iterative designing
- Driving to succeed
- Commitment to SmartStart’s purpose and social justice internationally
- Advantageous: experience in, or familiarity with, early learning, ECD, education, public health, etc
Relating & Adapting
- Building trusting relationships
- Playing role(s)-across-contexts adaptively
- Creating the conditions for and facilitating people’s thinking diversely and doing good work together
- Co-building & communicating coherence continually
- Reprioritising continually
Developing Self
- Acknowledging one’s own relative strengths (& weaknesses)
- Seeing & navigating rhetoric vs reality
- Navigating ambiguity
- Coping with stress caused by the above
Developing Systems Doing-and-Thinking
Seeing, synthesising, sense-making and influencing
- the big picture / story, incl. emergent phenomena
- the relations between wholes & parts
- patterns across space and over time
- feedback loops (circular causation)
- boundaries and working across them appropriately
Sophisticated problem-solving, incl. distinguishing complicated from complex problems & contexts
- scan & synthesise disparate sources of information
- if complicated: sense-analyse-respond
- if complex: probe-sense-respond
