Leading Lights

Teachers in emergency contexts lack accessible, sustainable, and consistent professional development and socio-emotional support. The unstable and non-cohesive nature of education provision within these settings manifests in a variety of barriers to success for teachers, such as a lack of adequate support and training and over-crowded classrooms.These compound to engender a stressful and precarious work environment that puts a significant strain on teachers’ well-being as well as the organizations working to support and train them. Our solution is to provide a space for a virtual community of practice with the aim of leveraging existing resources and knowledge in spaces where they are needed most. Central to our work is the aim of enhancing teachers’ well-being as a means of sustaining the passion in their work and realizing the possibilities within their practice.

A UNESCO estimate shows that, by 2030, close to 69 million teachers will be needed globally if we are to keep pace with international pledges on education. The importance of the instructional role of teachers and the training they need to be effective is reflected in UNHCR’s Education Strategy 2030 acknowledging that “teachers matter more than any single factor to students’ learning.” Despite this broad international consensus, there is a dearth of interventions directly targeting teachers.One of the most salient issues, voiced across contexts as diverse as Kenya, Lebanon, and Greece, is a pervasive feeling of isolation. Often as the only point of contact for incoming refugee students, the weight of attending to the needs of this fragile population falls primarily on the teacher. This feeling of isolation is compounded by a lack of resources and insufficient training, leaving them with the feeling that they are ill-equipped to meet the demands they face in their everyday work. Often working at capacity in over-crowded, inadequate classrooms, teachers experience high amounts of stress and frustration. As a result, the teacher profession within these environments is characterized by a “revolving door” of teachers, stemming from high rates of attrition and teacher burn-out.

Leading Lights is an enhanced yet low-tech application designed for Android or IOS enabled devices. Our platform functions as a complementary tool to be utilized by organizations providing teacher professional development training to vulnerable populations. Our platform will facilitate a peer-to-peer community where teachers will be able to share and access content such as classroom management techniques, videos of successful activities, request tips and feedback for upcoming lessons, or reach out to fellow teachers for support with any of the struggles they might be facing in their work, in a user-friendly space. It will provide a targeted and easily navigable platform of knowledge, skills, and practice sharing that will augment what teachers are being exposed to in PD programs, and allow for continued knowledge sharing long after these programs have concluded. Tethered to this community of practice, is the sense of belonging that we hope to instill in teachers as the custodians of their own professionalized network.

As students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Nita and I have spent the last six months speaking to expert practitioners from institutions such as UNHCR, War Child, and Columbia Teachers College, as well as engaging with teachers across contexts such as Lebanon and Kenya to understand the most salient pain points these communities face.  We have also drawn from our own experiences as teachers in designing our solution to meet these teachers’ needs. We have learned that teachers in these contexts are utilizing messaging platforms such as WhatsApp to share ideas and build community, however, existing means are not serving teachers adequately. Teacher’s lives in context have been severely overlooked in these settings, and we aim to serve them by providing them with a means by which to cultivate community and focus on their own well-being as people, while concurrently improving their practice as educators and contributing to the endeavor of quality education for all.

Recent interventions utilizing mobile phones in such settings have shown signs of promise. For example, in increasing gender equity at Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, teachers are using instant messaging and peer-to-peer networks to stay informed about interrupting social and cultural practices to better support girls and women teachers. In settings fragmented by conflict and displacement, discussions surrounding gender equitable education can often be interrupted or neglected. Access to a network of peers can help to empower teachers to advance these discussions and promote the sharing of contextualized, gender-inclusive strategies across communities.

Our solution to creating a more sustainable, healthy community of educators is to provide a platform for peer-to-peer learning. We believe that there is immense expertise and talent that could be leveraged within the teaching community. Beyond sharing professional expertise, there is also great potential in emotional support systems through the creation of peer developmental partners. While there are competitions such as large international organizations working in the education sector such as UNESCO, IRC, War Child, etc., these competitors are simultaneously potential collaborators. Many organizations are beginning to realize the importance of investing in the well-being of teachers and we believe the most effective way to do this is by building a platform that allows the creation of a supportive network of peers. Ventures of a similar nature have been attempted before, but they were unsuccessful mainly because they required teachers to adapt their lesson plans to a preexisting template created by the organization, resulting in more work for the teachers. Our platform will allow teachers to upload content in whatever form is most useful to them such as photos, videos, or documents. Similar ventures have also been predominantly one-sided in nature, and have adhered to a top-down approach. Our platform will allow teachers to interact with accessible and contextualized content, providing feedback to their peers and curating their own bank of resources on their profile.

While it is well documented that mobile phone technology should be viewed as a tool to supplement the existing infrastructure and should not be mistaken for a panacea, (Toyama, 2011, 2015) digital communities within this landscape has been shown to be an asset to teachers and their students to bolster teacher training, provide digital content, and enhance opportunities for literacy and learning (Save the Children, 2018). UNESCO sponsored programs in Nigeria and Pakistan that utilized mobile phones for teacher professional development, reported decreased feelings of isolation among participants as well as improved relationships with other teachers as a result of knowledge sharing among colleagues (Ingram, Sammons, & Lindorff, 2018). These interventions also illustrate that the multi-media content that mobile phone technology can host has the potential to show participants effective pedagogy rather than simply describing it in theoretical terms, which can be more difficult for teachers to put into practice (Ingram, Sammons, and Lindorff, 2018).

Our TOC links teacher well-being to attrition rates and teacher burnout. A longitudinal causal impacts study of preschool teacher training on Ghanaian children’s school readiness found that more contextualized teacher professional development, focused explicitly on the teachers well-being and practice (not attempting to relate it back to students) resulted in lower attrition rates among the cohort and less teachers reporting feelings of burn-out upon follow up. We believe that a virtual community of peer learning can enhance teachers’s feeling of belonging and well-belonging by providing both practical development and socio-emotional support. There is significant research (see Teachers Lives in Context: A Framework for Understanding Barriers to High-Quality Teaching Within Resource Deprived Settings) that suggests teachers’ efficacy as instructors and, consequently, student learning outcomes, are linked to overall well-being and motivation. The main outputs we posit from the introduction of this intervention are increased retention rates for teachers within refugee contexts, translating to lower costs for organizations providing training as they can put greater focus on advancing skills of returning teachers rather than continuously recycling training for new teachers. Our virtual platform will also allow organization to focus their energy and resources on other supports for teachers, as some of the most expensive aspects of in-person teacher development training, Teacher Learning Circles (TLC’s) and administrative costs, can be done less frequently or partially supplemented by providing some of these supports via our virtual platform. In-person training and mentorship is critical to teachers' success, however, given the fragile and precarious context, a virtual community can buttress the supports that can be interrupted and fragmented in settings of conflict and displacement. 

The idea of teachers sharing lesson plans and professional resources with one another is nothing new. Though the idea of teachers sharing with teachers has been around, our goal is not just to create a content sharing app. It is about elevating the feeling of being a teacher. How teachers connect, engage, interact with one another can transform the learning environment for millions of students. Whether intentional or not, teachers will carry who they are into the classroom and this is what and how children will learn. This is not about making teachers happy, it is about creating a supportive network where teachers feel belonging to a career that is so critical in who our next world leaders can and will become. We speak about creating a kinder, more equal, more just, more peaceful world, so where does that work begin if not the children we are educating. And who are we asking to educate our children? Let’s focus on these people. 

In the next year, our venture will be diligent in developing and designing an app that adds value through constant feedback loops and iterations with a teacher-centered, whole-community approach. Within the next five years, we hope to witness strong communities of teachers consistently and sustainably interacting to improve educational quality. By patiently building a network of high-quality teachers who feel valued, connected, and purposeful, we can transform education for all. 

Currently our most significant barrier is financing. We have secured the most critical practical and legal supports through our connection the Harvard Innovation Lab this summer. We have secured start-up funding from HGSE, however, in order to advance a pilot platform that can truly provide meaningful feedback to iterate upon Nita and I will need to secure more financing. It is critical to us that this platform is of the highest quality and is responsive to the needs of teachers, based on their context and culture. This will require multiple iterations and continuous adaptation on our part in order to ensure that the platform is accessible and culturally sensitive for each population.

Further, our initial marketing approach centered on in-person professional development programs where teachers come together and feel bonded and a sense of belonging. Our app would enter as a tool to help carry that bond virtually when teachers returned to their respective schools and classroom. However, since COVID, these in-person training programs have stopped and teachers are now more isolated. We have had to rethink our marketing approach. One of the questions we have reflected on is whether and how we can initiate this bond virtually. As educators and program managers have had to adapt to an all-virtual working landscape, we see this barrier also as an opportunity to bring more value to the global education sector.

As the students at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Nita (Co-Founder) and I have focused our coursework on how to best serve students in settings of conflict and displacement. This has given us the opportunity to learn and engage with expert researchers and practitioners in the field such as Dr.Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Dr.Mary Mendenhall of Columbia Teachers College, and Dr.Larry Abers at NYU. Personally, my own work at the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies has given me access to what organizations and communities are experiencing on the ground and how EiE practitioners are responding to and supporting teachers in real time. Nita, a former fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and MBA, has been a passionate educator her entire professional career. With the financial support and guidance provided to us as fellows of the HGSE Education Entrepreneurship Fellowship and Harvard Innovation Lab Summer Venture Program, Nita and I are well positioned to advance our social impact plan. More importantly, Nita and I are former teachers and are dedicated to helping our colleagues around the globe realize the possibilities within their practice.

We are currently in discussions with UNESCO about a potential partnership and pilot in the Caribbean. We believe this could be a fruitful collaboration because UNESCO’s goal is to create a new way for teachers to interact with one another. This interaction is exactly what we would like to accomplish. From experience, teachers are likely to adopt effective practices from colleagues, especially if there is a sense of community and bond. By working with UNESCO, we would be able to experiment new functions of our venture and test its response. This feedback will allow us to adapt and reiterate so that we can create something that adds value to the global education community. Ideally, we hope to start the pilot in two countries, one with a stronger resource structure and one that is still developing. Our venture could be used to connect the countries so that educators can easily have a two-way interaction. A partnership with UNESCO will also help us begin to build important relationships with other key stakeholders such as ministries of education. 

Inherent in our venture is that community is critical to advancing knowledge and growth. Nita and I are experience educators, but we are aware there are many things we do not know that we must solve together with our colleagues who seek to advance the goals of education for all. While Nita and I believe there is much expertise we can offer as education practitioners, we believe we could benefit immensely from the entrepreneurial and innovative expertise abounding at MIT Solve. The supports offered my the MIT Solve network will help our venture grow and become more resilient and responsive to the needs of those who week to serve. While financial support is key in advancing the milestones of our venture, more important, is the network of knowledge that MIT Solve can provide. The problem Nita and I seek to address, supporting teachers within fragile contexts, is one we know will not be solved by actors operating within a silo, but by humble innovators working together to advancement a humanitarian agenda. In particular, as Leading Lights moves into its prototype phase, developing a robust mechanism for monitoring and evaluation will be a critical step that we look to develop through the partnerships and resources available via the MIT Solve network. 

Those displaced by conflict, natural disaster, or economic calamity face myriad barriers to their own prosperity. Leading Lights offers a tool in the endeavor for self-reliance for these communities. Education is an aperture, an equalizer that provides not only economic opportunity, but a sense of normalcy and escape for those experiencing crisis. In order to ensure that refugee children do not become a "lost generation" it is critical to ensure sustained education provision within these settings. While it is not a panacea, our venture can be a sustainable and resilient tool for educators of refugee students, host governments, and humanitarian and development organizations supporting education provision in these contexts. Teaching is often one of the few professions open to refugees, and can provide a pathway to resilience and autonomy. Leading Lights is a means to support these teachers and give them the tools to be successful in their work and  unleash their human capital. The Andan Global Citizens Alliance can help in advancing our solution by providing partnerships with refugee communities. At Leading Lights we remain committed to acting as partners with communities in this work, and remaining responsive to their needs. Support from the Andan Alliance can be a critical ally in advancing our reach and impact for the most undeserved communities