Major recent global challenges have highlighted the increasing importance of education systems fostering children's skills for adaptability and capacity for responding to change. Competences such as creativity, innovation and problem solving could be particularly valuable, but in countries like Rwanda little is currently known about how schools and teachers nurture them in the classroom. This paper adopts a psychological framework based on learners’ cognitive flexibility to address that gap, drawing on exploratory qualitative data from interviews and lesson observations in primary schools in Kigali, Rwanda. The findings identify teachers’ use of practical exercises, group work and frequent transitions between activities and languages as potentially supporting different aspects of children's cognitive flexibility. The paper concludes with implications for nurturing learners’ skills for adaptability in similar low-income contexts.

最近的主要全球挑战凸显了教育系统培养儿童适应能力和应对变化的能力的重要性。创造力、创新和解决问题等能力可能特别有价值，但在卢旺达这样的国家，目前人们对学校和教师如何在课堂上培养这些能力知之甚少。本文采用基于学习者认知灵活性的心理框架来解决这一差距，并利用来自卢旺达基加利小学的访谈和课堂观察的探索性定性数据。研究结果表明，教师使用实践练习、小组作业以及活动和语言之间的频繁转换有可能支持儿童认知灵活性的不同方面。本文最后提出了培养学习者在类似低收入环境中适应能力的启示。