Building Champions for Excellent Education

Strengthening teaching excellence through smart data.

The problem: A child in an urban low-income primary school in Bangladesh is typically in classrooms learning for only three to four hours a day, with 50 to 100 other students. Compounding the reality of overcrowdedness and little class time, there also exists a wide range of age and learning levels of students in one single classroom. A grade three class for example, may have students who are 8 years of age, to students who are 12 years old - the combined results of inconsistent admissions processes into these schools, and learners repeating grades or starting school late. Teachers in these high-needs schools often do not have the necessary tools or training to deliver the quality of education that is actually required by these demanding environments. They struggle to even maintain basic classroom management, and end up fostering a culture of rote learning, as they are unequipped to reach individual learners through customized and personalized teaching.

The Solution: Our program recruits high quality individuals driven to bring systems-level change to inequity, to teach in low income primary school classrooms in some of the most vulnerable urban communities in Bangladesh. The participants of the program - Teach For Bangladesh Fellows - go through intensive training contextualized to the challenging reality of high needs classrooms, before they start teaching and throughout their placement. In addition to pedagogical and innovative teaching methods, we boost their skills in utilizing existing free and open source technology, specifically simple spreadsheets and G Suite platforms by Google Cloud to connect and share learnings with other educators in the school system, and introduce them to best practice in data collection and analysis to inform their teaching practice. Fellows deliberately build processes of data collection into their lesson content, and track the live progress of each of their students throughout the year. This gives them the ability to identify students who are excelling and struggling, and also understand where they are being effective as teachers, and where they need to re-strategize their support for designing tailored lessons relevant to student needs. The training we design and deliver for Fellows enables them to create the most impact in the learning experiences of a large number of students,even within the constraints of limited teaching time and lack of resources.

Changing the world: Our data-driven model that utilizes affordable and easily accessible technology has the potential to transform teaching practices in high-needs schools across Bangladesh. By increasing collaboration with the government as we scale our solution, we can reach more teachers and educators working in resource and talent strapped conditions in some of the most inaccessible communities in the country. 

Our solution offers a process for enhancing the real-world skills of teachers that they can use to understand contextualized student needs, applying readily available free technology platforms, and training at low costs. Other teachers and educators in Bangladesh working in the challenging binds of overcrowded classrooms, short teaching time, and very limited resources, currently do not have access to the formalized training on data collection, analysis or application, or using technological platforms utilized by our model. 

As a non-profit organization, instead of investing in high-tech solutions we have currently opted for adapting to easily available free technological platforms to ensure that it can be accessed by a larger number of educators in a resource constricted context. Our data collection processes use Microsoft Suite and G Suite technology - from creating and maintaining databases and trend analysis to sharing live information across Fellow school groups, as well as connecting and linking knowledge sharing with other teachers and educators outside of our program.  

For the next 12 months, we are focused on enhancing our training for current and new Fellows in methods of collecting, analyzing, sharing and applying periodic data from classrooms to design lessons. Our coaches will provide tailored training to equip them with relevant and contextualized skills to decode and interpret the year-round data into actionable information that strengthens their teaching practice personalized to individual student needs. We will continue building on regular training through monthly professional development workshops, and facilitate spaces where Fellows can also share learning and innovative solutions to school community challenges with each other and their coaches.

Over the next three to five years, we aim to scale our data-driven model to a second region in Bangladesh, while increasing our collaboration with the government. The Bangladesh government’s current emphasis has on bringing innovation and digitalization in education, particularly in the new phase of the national Primary Education Development Plan. They are seeking to learn and partner with private and non-government sector actors to service the capacity gap in these prerogatives. We aim to become part of the network of private sector actors who will impact education policy decisions at a national level. 

For our program, we recruit and rigorously train exceptional young graduates and young professionals committed to changing learning outcomes in high needs schools in low income communities. Every student in our classrooms gets access the personalized support in areas they actually need through our Fellows, who continuously update their teaching methods and strategies in classrooms to tailor the lesson content to the individual learner.

We are serving over 4,100 students with personalized teaching across 32 schools in vulnerable urban communities. Each Fellow utilizes data collected at regular intervals throughout the year to continually inform strategies in classrooms. For example, our Fellow Masum teaching 94 students, analyzes his mid-year student data to track performance and growth of each student from the beginning of the year in January. Based on this data, he designs content relevant for different groups - more rigorous content for students excelling, while more broken-down work for students struggling; he may even design peer-learning groups where superlative students support low achieving students.

By 2019, we expect to serve around 6,486 students in 138 underserved classrooms in two regions of Bangladesh, and by 2021, to reach around 9,870 in 210 underserved classrooms in the two regions of the country. The students our Fellows teach will have access to customized learning experiences, tailored to their individual needs. The Fellows in turn, will have access to training and soft-skills that enable them to apply their training to spaces outside of classrooms, when building networks with allies in the education ecosystem.

We have dedicated teams responsible for recruiting and training exceptional Fellows, and building a network of partners to support our work. Leadership Development team is committed to coaching and training our Fellows in building skills, knowledge and capacities as excellent teachers and leaders in their school communities. Fellow Recruitment team identifies and recruits high caliber talent into the Fellowship. Partnership Development team manages relationships with supporters who ensure the strengthening of program content through thought-partnership or funding.

Teach For Bangladesh is a registered not-for-profit with a 501(c) status charity in the US,  implementing our program in Bangladesh through the NGO Bureau registration. We partner with the Department of Primary Education (DPE), Government of Bangladesh to place teachers (Fellows) in Government Primary Schools and work closely with DPE to identify high needs partner Schools. We secure funding through local and international partnerships with development partners, foundations, corporations and individual philanthropy.

Our sustainability focus is on stewarding relationships with donors to invest them as multi-year repeat funders by building trust and legitimacy in our program through transparent and authentic monitoring and reporting mechanisms, and ensuring mutual spaces for feedback and partnership outcomes. We prioritize investing local funders to ensure the long-term viability and expansion support for our data-driven solution to best teaching practices. We are exploring innovative partnership avenues with several mission-aligned local corporates, leveraging their investment in us to connect to other local philanthropic interests. For example, two renowned local corporates are supporting us to navigate the realities of expanding to multiple regions by funding pilot projects in two rural and remote semi-urban areas away from our capital region.

We believe that our data-driven solution, utilizing low cost technology, in building excellent educators has the potential in creating sustained and contextually relevant impact in some of the most underserved classrooms in Bangladesh. MIT Solve supporting our program will highlight how easily accessible free technology can be used effectively for the specific purpose of enhancing teaching in the neediest communities. The funding from the Challenge will support us in ensuring we are able to provide effective and stronger training and support to our Fellows.

In our early years, our constant challenge remains in investing local donors, school communities and government support in the effectiveness of our data-driven model and program. Solve’s support can help us convince other stakeholders in the legitimacy of our approach, underscoring the importance of technology in helping teachers learn more effective best teaching practices. In addition, Solve can boost our own knowledge and resource base about how we build and share our solutions across different stakeholders in the Bangladeshi education and development ecosystem, enabling us to demonstrate our impact to donors and thought-partners locally.