As STS’s Senior Director of Impact and Learning, Dr. Carol DeShano da Silva serves as the senior leader of STS’s Evaluation & Research team. She defines and implements a strategic vision for STS’s monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning (MERL) and ensures the department delivers on the STS mission to improve the lives and learning of children worldwide through thoughtful research, practice, and partnership.
Dr. da Silva is a technical expert in language and literacy. She has rich experience in developing teacher training, curricula, and assessments, primarily on foundational learning in multilingual contexts. She co-wrote the original teacher training curriculum for Literacy Boost, an award-winning intervention to improve early literacy instruction and achievement in Save the Children basic education programs worldwide. She also led the 2016 revision of the Literacy Boost Toolkit and developed and taught a hybrid Literacy Boost course to train Save the Children education advisors to implement the approach. She has provided direct technical assistance and conducted research on literacy projects in Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Mozambique, Peru, the Philippines, and Uganda. She also has expertise in organizational capacity building and development, working with multi-stakeholder populations and strategic planning. At Save the Children International, she collaborated with senior education leaders from Save the Children Italy, Norway, UK, and the US to develop a three-year global education strategy. Dr. da Silva has also co-led multi-stakeholder strategic planning processes at Worldreader and the Global Book Alliance.
Dr. da Silva holds an M.Ed. in international education and an Ed.D. in education policy, leadership, and instructional practice from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.