Teacher Boost (Impulso Docente)

Teacher Boost is learning how to teach. Highly effective and short term incubation for mentors to boost teachers towards success.

Teaching is a performing profession: most of the skills are only developed through focused practice. But coaches and principales only spend 12% of their time evaluating, supervising and guiding teachers. They have few opportunities to practice and students pay the price of their learning curve. Over 20% of them abandon their career after their first year and 40% do by their fourth year. In fact 59% of them step away from teaching due to lack of professional development opportunities. The quality of an educational system will never surpass the quality of its teachers and the quality education that is stated so commonly around the world only stands as an aspirational dream. Behind every great teachers stands the support of highly effective training from a mentor.

We propose a short-term, highly effective and in school incubation of mentors with three core components: analysis of classroom videos, planning of observation-feedback cycles and practice of the whole process. Simoultaneaosly teachers learn about techniques that foster high expectations and learning culture within classrooms. Overall we offer professional development for both mentors and teachers, a common language is developed that ensures an effective and sustainable system for teacher feedback to enhance student learning. This system becomes part of the school culture leaveraging leadership and the schools own capability to sustain change.

Classrooms are filled with micro moments that distinguish average from great teachers. Teaching is a performing profession that requires observation, feedback and practice cycles that sustain continuous improvement. Both teachers and their mentors will benefit from a simple, yet highly effective professional development training that will take their students learning to a new level of achievement and satisfaction. So far we have served over 1,800 teachers and 500 mentors. Our impact is promising: surveyed students report better teaching and there is a positive correlation between their answers and an increase of their learning. With your help this may be replicated at a larger scale. Let us together boost teachers towards their greatness.

Our solution is a new way to understand teacher development:

Practice builds autonomy: a class is filled with micro moments that define the quality of students learning. With us mentors narrow their teachers mastery to that and help free space for creative thinking.

Leverage leadership in local mentors: educational interventions tend to be dependant on those who created it. We make sure schools build capacity to continue professional development with this new focus.

Regular evidence based feedback: usually teachers end their feedback sessions with an infinite list of to do. Videos as evidence narrows it down to bite size improvements.

Effective feedback sessions are evidence based.Technology becomes integral to our solution because:

1. Videos are at the core of our professional development proposal: teachers/mentors upload videos from their teaching/coaching in order to analyze their performance and design tailored practice sessions.

2. The history of recorded videos serve as impact measurement: the advancement of our program can be vividly portrayed to the entire school community when it has been registered in our platform.

3. Videos serve as a customized shared space for learning: teachers can access exemplary classroom practices from all Latin America that builds on common language for continous improvement.

Feedback from collaborators: our proposal has shifted according to an exploration of our potential clients. We look to include feedback for our phone app and online platform of videos to improve exponentially.

Enhance our online solution: design, offer and pilot an entirely online course for mentors. This will extend our current national coverage from six to potentially twelve regions in Chile.

Communicate to influence public policy: it is tough for start-ups to transmit the vision/mission to their public. We have been working on our organization narrative and we are looking to position ourselves in the educational public policy discussions.

Teacher Boost has had an exponential growth in the last three years. For the upcoming three years we want to thoughtfully prepare for a second growth sprut that will be marked by the government partnership contract that will be closed. Teacher Boost will be a certifying entity to prepare mentors that will perform the mandatory support among first year teachers across the country. This mandatory support for novice teachers is a common trend in Latin America: Uruguay, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and Colombia so there is confirmed interest in opening Teacher Boost in these countries in the next five years.

Our professional development for mentors and teachers is deployed in person. Through intensive three day long workshops and monthly support that shifts between in person and online support for the learning to be incorporated at a school culture level. Next year we will offer a fully online course that certifies mentors that live in remote areas, which is a growing group.

The online portion of the support is access through a mobile app that guide their development. Where as workshops are accesed through in person assitance, they are mostly done in well known and easily access educational centers.

So far we have served 30 schools, 1800 teachers and 500 mentors in six different regions of the country. Structure of our solution: 1) learn and practice both teachers and the administrative team immerse in classroom techniques and feedback cycles that maximize learning in students. 2) On going and on the site support for learners to adjust their school culture. Support by an Impulso Docente project leader that either visits or connects with them online every two weeks after the intensive workshops are delivered. 3) Share and foster an improvement community online that viralizes great and inspiring classroom practices. 

In one year, we expect to serve no more than 30 schools, 1800 teachers and 500 mentors. This is not very different to the current scenario, specifically because we aim to mantain quality standards and prepare our team to scale in terms of coverage in the next three years. Scaling preparation means  fundamentally two milestones: focusing on communicating our results-impact so far (public policy impact) and closing a government partnership to prepare mentors. Within three years we will serve the 100,000 mentors that will be part of the national coaching team for new teachers. 

With 10 years of education experience: 5 out of 7 team members are teachers, served in underprivileged schools and have experienced first hand the difficulties of the profession. This  background drives our compromise to tackle the lack of adequate support for teachers.

 Locally informed and globally aware: connected to educational networks helps us learn from our partners. We regularly interview actual and future clients to understand their needs and better tailor our solutions.

People and quality oriented: getting the right people on our team keeps us devoted to our work and the quality of our work keeps us busy.

In Chile there are no formal mentoring programs for coaches. But there is a law that guarantees mandatory coaching for new teachers.  So we have an open channel  to receive governmental funding, specifically from two sources:

a. From the Ministry of Education. Under the “SEP” (Subvención escolar preferencial) law regulation, the state allocates specific money to low-income schools to be spent in professional development and instructional support.

b. A second source of funding comes from district resources that allows schools to spend up to 850 USD per teacher in professional development opportunities, through a law regulation called SENCE.

c. Starting 2017 public education management will be separated from municipalities, this law being currently discussed, considers the creation of Local Services that will have both financial and pedagogical responsibility. Each Local Service will manage up to USD$ 33 million annual budget which could be partly spent in teacher training.

In the long-term we will achieve a mixed financial model, by 70% of public funding and 30% of sources coming from private donors (through partnerships with local sponsors, philanthropists and international aid). 

Peer to peer feedback and collaboration: MIT has the largest collborative platforms for start-ups to connect, interact and solve together. We want to be part of that because it is the most effective way to tackle the educational challenges we face.

Enhance our online platform and phone app: Solve has the connections and resources to boost our online proposal. We strive for top quality online learning and extend our current online coverage.

New ways to portray impact: we currently use a validated student perception survey to measure teacher´s progress. We are looking to combine with student progress measurement.

Demonstrate impact: we are looking for better ways to demonstrate positive correlations in our impact.

Education is over-saturated with solutions: this is why we are looking to better understand the challenge that we are set out to tackle. This way we are able to deliver a solution that is perfectly in tune with our beneficiaries.

Mis-conception of educational technology: to what extend will the observation and feedback cycles be over-run by automated techonolgy? We want to be explore this current discussion and find ways for robotics and teachers to co-exist and maximize learning.