Teach For Vietnam

Empowering teachers to build up learner-centric solutions by creating a cohesive, affordable and accessible educational supporting ecosystem

1. Problems include:

-Lack of certified teachers to deliver the new competence based education system and low quality of professional development for educators

-Lack of consistent model for delivering education in a turbulent context with COVID-19 and climate related disruptions

-Fragmented ecosystem to support students

2. Solution:

a.Place trained teaching fellows in public schools in rural Vietnam to deliver competency based curricula. Our fellows utilize a blended approach that includes in-person, online and print modalities with available and suitable platforms and delivering classes and tracking student outcomes.

b.Partner with stakeholders to implement student-led projects, as part of our 21st century skills embedded curricula, to address most pertinent community issues.

c.Empower local educators with relevant high quality professional development opportunities, with specific focus on Competency Based Education, Design Thinking and Project-Based Learning, and Online and Blended pedagogy and platforms. We deliver the majority of our training using any available online platform that suits the best for our participants.

d.Partner with donors, parents, educators to equip students with suitable devices and connectivity for hybrid and online learning. 

3. Impact:

a.K-12 rural students’ access to develop 21st century skills and leadership skills through 3 subjects: English, STEM and Entrepreneurship Education.

b.Community of empowered teachers to deliver high quality curricula using readily available modular training for educators on pertinent topics.

c.An integrated model for delivering education in the most vulnerable regions impacted by disruptions (e.g. flooding in Central and Mekong delta or pandemic).

d.A cohesive and collective leadership ecosystem putting students at the center

1.1. Dimensions: 

• Increase equitable access to quality learning opportunities.

• Strengthen delivery of STEM and 21st century skills for learners.

1.2. Problems: 

• Students in the rural regions have limited opportunities to develop skills and leadership abilities required from a 21st century labour force.

• They are the most affected by school closures as there is limited infrastructure or process in place to deliver education to them. 

1.3. Data: 

• In Vietnam 47% rural children complete upper secondary school Versus 70% urban children (Source: UNESCO, 2013)

• More than 80% of applicants lack the required skills for professional jobs & technical positions (Source: World Bank 2014)

• 24% of students in rural areas of 22/63 provinces or 1.5 million lack devices for basic online learning (Source: Ministry of Education and Training, 2021) 

• 51.4% children studied less than required or did not study via online learning (Source: UNICEF, 2020)

2.1. Dimensions:

• Support educators, school leaders, and other system stakeholders

2.2. Problems:

• They aren’t provided the most relevant professional development opportunities that will up-skill them sufficiently in a changing education landscape.

2.3. Data:

• Only 3.2% of teachers have been trained for the new policy focusing on building competencies for students (Source: Ministry of Education and Training- MOET, 2020)

• 40% of current teachers (or 475,000) need to be trained and up-skilled to meet the requirements of Law on Education 2019 (Source: MOET, 2020)

2 main target populations are – students and educators in Quang Nam and Tay Ninh provinces. The average income of our target regions are around $1,000/year.  

For the past 5 years we have created impact to 35,000 students; 2,000 local teachers of more than 100 schools and 60 educational officials of 12 districts of these 2 provinces. 

1. Students:

30%-40% of students come from ethnic minority groups which have low ratio in upper secondary school completion. Majority of them ends up in being low-income workers or farmers. The students in these regions have nearly no opportunities to develop skills and leadership abilities outside of the knowledge-heavy mainstream education. In addition, only 40% of students are able to study virtually according to our preliminary research. 

Our program will equip them with 21st century skills, STEM, entrepreneurship and employability skills through classrooms, extracurricular activities and student-led projects. 

2. Educators:

While educators are under a lot of pressure to deliver, they aren’t sufficiently valued or paid. These issues are exacerbated by the lack of autonomy provided to them in normal situations. These issues are predicted to lead to teacher shortages in the near future. 

In crises, like COVID-19 and floods, educators are left to figure it out by themselves with limited guidance by authorities. Since July 2021, we had a request of more than 1,500 local teachers in delivering online learning effectively. 

Our solution will provide the most relevant professional development opportunities that will upskill local educators sufficiently in a changing education landscape. 

The greatest alignment comes from the fact that we work directly with the most marginalized communities in Vietnam. Below is a 1:1 alignment mapping. 

1.1. Dimensions: 

• Increase equitable access to quality learning opportunities.

• Strengthen delivery of STEM and 21st century skills for learners.

1.2. Problems: 

• Students in the rural regions have limited opportunities to develop skills and leadership abilities required from a 21st century labour force.

• They are the most affected by school closures as there is no infrastructure or process in place to deliver education to them.

1.3. Solution: 

• Place trained teaching fellows in public schools in rural Vietnam to deliver the verified curricula. Our fellows utilize a blended approach that includes in-person, online and print modalities to deliver classes despite disruptions.
  

• Train local educators on Competency Based Education, Design Thinking and Project-Based Learning, especially focusing on delivering education effectively and efficiently rooted in the community context. 

• Partner with community members to equip students with devices and connectivity for online learning. 

2.1. Dimensions:

• Support educators, school leaders, and other system stakeholders

2.2. Problems:

• In crises, like COVID-19 and floods, educators are left to figure it out by themselves with limited guidance by authorities. 

• They aren’t provided the most relevant professional development opportunities that will upskill them sufficiently in a changing education landscape.

2.3. Solution: 

• Empower local educators with relevant high quality professional development opportunities, including Online and Blended pedagogy and platforms.

• Create a community of local teachers to support each other and raise their voices to the government. 

The CEO - Trang Nguyen

Our innovation lies in 3 areas:

1. Curricula: There are 2 aspects that makes our curricula stand out

• All curricula are based on OECD framework and Skills Development guidelines provided by the most recent Education Policy of Vietnam. As part of the verification process, we have completed a thorough analysis of the current education system and have designed our curricula to be complimentary to the system. 

• Our curricula are modular in nature, i.e. it has a framework for implementing and assessing skills and knowledge, while providing content and examples for educators to choose from.

2. Blended delivery of content in rural areas: We utilize multiple modalities to deliver our content to the students. We rely on in-person classes, print and text materials, and online platforms which makes us more resilient to any disruptions caused, especially for the most marginalized students. We utilize best practices from our implementation to train local educators. Additionally, our model can be replicated in regions that face disruptions. 

3. Community at the centre of the solutions: In our partnerships with the provinces, we integrate community priorities into our interventions. We conduct thorough secondary and primary research for our provincial level approvals. Based on the research we contextualise the curricula accordingly. For example, in Tay Ninh we focus on Agriculture Technology while in Quang Nam we focus on Climate Change. Additionally, we implement student-led projects that involve multiple stakeholders for example STEM gardens to learn best practices in Agriculture that involve students, parents and educators. 

Curricula: We have implemented all 3 curricula in Tay Ninh and Quang Nam, impacting more than 35,000 students since 2017.

Modalities: Until 2019, we primarily implemented our programs via in-person classes. In COVID-19 closures, we began piloting online classes using Zoom, Jitsi, ClassIn and GoogleClassroom as primary platforms. We piloted a completely online summer program in May 2021 for 100 students that aimed to test online teaching methods and tools to create a foundation and solutions for large-scale implementation in future. 80% of students achieved our intended outcomes. 

Educator Training: We have implemented multiple educator development projects since 2017, impacting ~2,000 teachers. We have rolled out modular teacher training at scale in 2021. Since August we have conducted 9 courses on a number of topics including Online Teaching Strategies, and COVID prevention impacting over 2000 teachers with satisfaction rating of 4.5 of 5 and 99% recommending course to other educators.

Our ultimate priority is the accessible and affordable solution for students , as such we use various platforms suiting students' capacity the best.

For online learning classes, our fellows mainly use ClassIn. ClassIn is an online classroom management and teaching platform that simulates a traditional classroom. The platform has many features to support teaching and encourage students to interact well. The platform is integrated with asynchronous teaching, to assign homework, grade and manage student work.

An alternative option that our fellows use for asynchronous learning is Google Classroom. It is used as an effective platform for storing documents and videos by categories that students can easily find again. 

Synchronous platforms are ClassIn, Zoom, Google Meets and Jitsi. 

Additionally, we use the following free complementary applications that improve the learning experience.

1. Nearpod: An asynchronous learning app that engages students in the classroom with an interactive learning experience. Students can participate in virtual reality lessons, 3D objects, PhET simulations, etc. Software features help students participate in activities such as open-ended questions, polls, quizzes, collaboration boards, quizzes, support for creating lectures (slides).

2. Padlet: An online interactive virtual whiteboard where everyone can pin, store, and share information and ideas with each other, and visualize student ideas.

3. Flipgrid: A video discussion app that helps teachers manage student work in the classroom and promotes a fun and collaborative learning environment. 

4. Desygner: A photo and poster design app (with a website if using a computer).

Activities:

• Create curriculum and teacher training aligned to Competency Based Education in 3 subjects (English, STEM and Entrepreneurship)

• Partner with community members to solve local education problems 

• Work with local government authorities to create programmatic interventions aligned to the province/district’s human resource needs

•  Provide professional development opportunities to educators on pertinent topics

Teaching Fellowship:

• Fellows are placed as full-time teachers in high need rural areas

• Coach and train fellows to create impact both in and outside of the classroom; Fellows teach Competency Bases Education curriculum to at least 75 students per fellow 

• Fellows implement student-led community projects in partnership with stakeholders

Outputs (1-2 year):

• Certified Competency Based Education curriculum that can be used by teachers across Vietnam

• Certified teacher training and fellowship model that can be applied in Pedagogical universities and colleges

• Educators gain an understanding of specific topics like Skill Building, Online Teaching Strategies, etc. and implement the same in their classroom

• Students gain 21st century skills and experience with project-based learning

• Stakeholders engaged and involved in community projects

• Community of empowered teachers to support each other 

Outcomes (3-5 years):

• Students have the knowledge, skills and mindset to achieve academic and non-academic goals

• Students have an ideal class and school environment that promotes holistic education

• Educators in the schools we partner with have the tools to accelerate student outcomes

• Districts/provinces are in a partnership with TFV such that real co-creation occurs

• School leaders, local teachers, and parents understand the issues that are holding the students back and partner with fellows to make improvements at a community level

• Local governments utilize "grey areas" like skill development to trial new policy in line with TFVs programs

• Educational leaders work collaboratively to enhance students' outcomes

Impact (5+ years):

• Students in the district/province have access to holistic education that includes 21st century skills

• Schools are more student-centered learning environment; Schools we work significantly improve their student and teacher outcomes

• Stakeholders across the board have the mindset and provide the support needed to drive education excellence; TFV programs and products recognized and promoted by all levels of partners

• System changes towards students' outcomes and a cohesive ecosystem using learning-centric approach. 

1. Student Outcomes Aligned to Curricula: We have created a holistic skill assessment framework developed under expert guidance of professors from pedagogical institutions. We conduct 2 summative assessments at the end of each Semester and the reports are submitted to the government authorities. In addition, we perform formative assessments to support students' improvement. 

2. Effectiveness of Teaching Fellows: We conduct twice-a-year feedback surveys from students, local grade level teachers, school leaders and parents to understand teacher effectiveness. This includes a standardized teacher effectiveness survey conducted by Teach For All, our global network

3. Educator Training: Post every training session we have assessments and satisfaction surveys to capture the immediate impact of training. In addition with teachers serving in the same school as us, we capture effectiveness of training through observations and projects under taken by the teachers.

4. Effectiveness of modalities: In our “Online Summer Program” pilot we surveyed students and parents to understand the effectiveness of different platforms and will continue to rely on surveys going forward. Additionally, we use ClassIn and GoogleClassroom Learning Management System to capture assessment data from online modules and virtual classes, and compare them against in-person and print content delivery.

Major Impact Goals include:

1. Number of rural Provinces and Districts TFV partners with

• 1-year – 2 provinces, 3 districts

• 3-year – 3 provinces, 4 districts

• 5-year – 5 provinces, 7 districts

2. Number of Teaching Fellows placed

• 1-year – 30

• 3-year – 70

• 5-year – 230

3. Number of local educators impacted through professional development

• 1-year – 3,000

• 3-year – 6,000

• 5-year – 12,000

4. Number of students impacted

• 1-year – 2,250 directly and 300,000 indirectly

• 3-year – 5,000 directly and 500,000 indirectly

• 5-year – 17,000 directly and 1,700,000 indirectly

5. Adoption of curricula and teacher training programs

• 1-year – Completed verification and supporting impact data for all 3 curricula and teacher training programs

• 3-year – Schools and districts we work with promote TFV interventions at provincial level

• 5-year – Adoption of curricula aligned framework and best practices by districts that we work in and partnership with provincial authorities to implement educator training programs as part of the official professional development schedule

We will continue to invest in current operating model which relies on building long-term relationships with provincial and district level authorities by creating value propositions aligned to their Human Capital Development strategy and supported by robust impact data. We will work towards further integrating ourselves in the communities we serve and be the catalysts for empowerment and change via education.

Financing: Being a social enterprise that works on a non-profit model, we are constrained by the funds we can raise through philanthropy. Vietnam’s CSR and philanthropy sectors are underdeveloped with most large organizations and wealthy individuals not having dedicated resources and strategy to make significant impact. Currently we rely heavily on a combination of international organizations and grants, individual giving campaigns and sliding fees model for a few of our services like teacher training. While we are working on getting financing from local governments, it will take us 2 more years to provide the requisite impact data required. We want to focus on local organizations and individuals in the future. To achieve the same, we are working with local companies like Mitsubishi Electric Vietnam and Lifebuoy on small scale partnerships. 

Technology: Our M&E systems depend on GoogleSuite products, especially GoogleSheets and GoogleForms. While this is sufficient currently, we need an effective and affordable data gathering and analysis platform as we scale. 

Market Entry: Entry into a new province and district is a complicated and bureaucratic process that often depends on who is at the helm. While we establish ourselves by delivering on proposed impact, the engagement from authorities varies greatly based on their priorities. We try to minimize this by creating partnerships at all levels - federal, provincial, district and school. 

Teach For Vietnam was established in 2017 with the vision “In 2050, All Children In Vietnam Will Attain An Excellent Education” and mission to “Develop young leaders from diverse backgrounds to build a sustainable ecosystem supporting education.” We joined the 60+ network of partner organizations under the “Teach For All” umbrella to leverage resources and learning from the network to amplify our impact.

Our founder and all team members were born in low middle income families yet our parents had been determined to support our education and it changed our lives. As a result, our founder wanted to create a collective movement of leaders who commit the inequality and inequity in education. 

We focused on placing our trained teaching fellows in public schools in the most marginalized communities, with a focus on 21st century skill development. With our initial experience, we realized that local educators were essential for change to occur at scale and included educator empowerment as a core focus of our program. 

Since conception we wanted to ensure our interventions were complimentary to the current education ecosystem. Hence our curricula are focused on practical knowledge and skills lacking in the national curriculum and our educator development programs focused on pertinent topics that were not being delivered. With the recent education policy and COVID-19, the past few years have been tumultuous and we have been able to establish ourselves as innovation leaders to fill the gaps and provide much needed thought leadership grounded in practicality.

44 full-time staff includes 30 teaching fellows 

Our team includes:

1. Team Lead or CEO: Trang Nguyen, MBA. Trang has 6 years of experience in banking and finance and 3 years of working as social enterprise coach and community development before joing Teach For Vietnam since 2018. She is also in charge of fundraising asides from general 

2. Director of Program: Huyen Nguyen, PhD in Education. She has 16 years of teaching experience in both University of Education and K-12 schools (not for profit, for profit, public and private). She's a well-known person in education sector in Vietnam

3. Director of Community and Public Sector Engagement: Huan Bui, MA. Huan graduated from University of Education and has 16 years of experience in education primarily in big education projects which help him have strong relationship and understanding about Vietnam education system and government before joining our team in 2017. 

4. Program team including 6 members, who are well trained in curriculum design and leadership development

5. Recruitment team - recruit fellows including strong skills in marketing, communication and recruitment. 

6. Teaching fellows: young talents coming from diverse backgrounds. They have to pass through our intensive training program before being placed in the schools. 

80% of our team members, especially 100% of our senior leadership team coming from same backgrounds as our students. Moreover, our teaching fellows are living at the community in 2 years which lead them to understand and co-design the solution with students and community members. 

A key requirement for curricula is locally-rooted. 

Teach For Vietnam is one of a few organisations can implement 21st century skills in our curricula and teaching delivery to our students. The idea of developing skills gains popular as the new competency based framework was introduced in 2018 but majority of educators have limited understanding about it. 

In order to bring this to life, since 2018, our Team Lead has been leading the team:

1. Assessed existing curricula based on OECD framework and decided to create new curricula. 

2. Set a new team of curriculum design comprising curriculum leads and curriculum advisory board (including experts and scholars)

3. Researched what 21st century skills can be embedded and choosing the ones suit the most to our students in rural areas. There were many consultation with scholars, experts, practitioners and local teachers besides need assessments in this step to conceptualise and ensure the shared understanding about this idea in our team. 

4. Pushed our team to verified the new curricula to make sure it would achieve intended outcomes by making it as organisational priority 

5. Set up tracking system to assess student outcomes and share knowledge.

We are working with a wide range of partners: 

1. Ministry of Education and Training (MOET): we are a strategic partner in delivering Entrepreneurship and STEM program in 14 provinces from 2019-2024. We collaborate with them on many dimensions: creating curriculum, training local educators and support student-led projects

2. Department of Education and Training of Quang Nam and Tay Ninh: strategic partners to deliver English, STEM and Entrepreneurship Education program for K-12 schools. 

3. People's Committee of Quang Nam, Tay Ninh, Ben Tre: strategic partner to deliver our program as this is under their approval. 

4. Teach For All: strategic partnership in modeling via unifying principles, sharing practices and knowledges. We learn from other partners and share our experiences for the same outcome of bringing education equality for children. 

5. University of Education, Ho Chi Minh City: to recruit young talents and develop leadership skills for their teaching students. 

6. ExxonMobil, Mitsubishi Electrics, Robert Bosch Viet Nam, ASML, Temasek, Deloitte, US Consulate of HCMC, Unilever (Lifebuoy), 3M in funding. We raise funding from these organisations. In addition, there are many other organisations that we are working to raise funding. 

Partnership with Octava and MIT Solve will add a lot of value to our organisation in these dimensions: 

1. Financing: 

- Grant to catalyse while we continue to seek for funding from domestic companies which is spent for Covid-19 relief in Vietnam

2. Networking and resources from a wide range of partners for financing and market entry. 

2.1 These in-kind supports will open the resources to collaborate and hence reduce the costs or increase the chance to secure further funding. Learning from other partners will also help us to create different CSR packagesfor different companies that aligns to our solutions. 

2.2  With the experience and network from Octava in Vietnam, we would amplify our partnership with Vietnamese government, therefore, increase our chance to enter into new provinces or tighten our partnership with current provinces. 

2.3 Learning from industry and sectors would help us implement new intervention and adapt existing intervention from global partners to support our students better. 

3. Technology development and enhancement 

We strongly believe the capacity and expertise from MIT Solve and Octava would benefit us to figure out and set up a more robust, effective and efficient learning management system. This system can be used to manage the data and track student outcomes in the hybrid and printed modalities. Currently, even we are using ClassIn and Google Classrooms for LMS but it takes time and effort and risks to migrate and synchronise data. We are at the early stage to implement a system for monitoring and evaluation. 

1. Human Capital: Teach For Vietnam is in the process of renewing new Advisory Board, we would love to have additional support to sourcing new suitable persons for Fundraising Committee and Governance Committee 

2. Network Connection in approaching big corporates in Vietnam and implementation communities across the region and global to learn from their innovations and partners to scale them up if any. 

3. Public Relation especially in branding and marketing strategy. Teach For Vietnam branding does not serve our current customers and creates confusion in communication while our marketing effort is adhoc and based on our campaigns rather than a clear and cohesive message. We really need support in redefining our brand and have a clear marketing strategy. 

4. Monitoring and Evaluation: we have several surveys and store our data using Google Sheets which is not systemic designed and stored. It takes a lot of manpower to collect, trace and analyse our data. Our goal is to create a holistic technology-enabled M&E system to collect and measure our impacts. 

5. Technical Support: new Learning Management System and web development to increase the interactive of customers/ visitors.