Radics for Teachers

Teachers’ social-emotional competence and wellbeing affect the classroom management strategies they use, the relationships they form with students, and their ability to implement SEL (social-emotional learning) programs and practices (Jennings and Greenberg's ProSocial Classroom Model). These factors, when systematically addressed, can contribute to a healthy classroom climate that then leads to students’ own academic and SEL success.

Primary causes of low social-emotional competence in teachers are:

1. Heavy workload and children's difficult behaviour (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2014)
2. Low pay (Hall-Kenyon et al., 2014

3. Lack of support from parents and directors (Rentzou, 2012; Stemmel et al., 1993)

4. Work performed in isolation from peers (Manlove, 1994; McGinty et al, 2008)

A recent RAND teacher survey has revealed that COVID19 further aggravated the problem of poor teacher wellbeing (70% teachers citing burnout as key reason for attrition) and lack of social-emotional competence to support children (78% teachers finding current training programs ill-equipped to prepare them for student SEL support). 

There's a critical need to go beyond superficial self-care for teachers and invest in structural changes to improve the quality of teacher professional support, particularly in lower and middle income countries.

Radics for Teachers is an integrated virtual and in-person teacher support solution that:

• provides reliable diagnosis of social-emotional needs of teachers and students, and 

• follows-up with a combination of expert and peer-led coaching that is personalized with the help of SEL and related measurements

Radics has three key components:

1. An AI-Chat LMS distributed via WhatsApp and Telegram that provides ready-to-use SEL and SEL-integrated measurement devices across a set of teacher and student competencies such as self-regulation, metacognition and collaborative problem solving

2. 1:1 expert-led virtual and in-person coaching that provides instructional, social-emotional and wellness support to teachers

3. Teacher peer excellence groups supported and seeded through workshops and content by experts and practitioners in social-emotional learning

Primary beneficiaries of our solution are teachers working in public and low-income private schools across India and Kenya, esp those facing burn-out, stress and lack of support on social-emotional competence.

Professional and social-emotional learning support for teachers in these contexts is dominated by ill-designed training programs delivered in large batches. With Radics we aspire to change this, by first assisting teachers reduce the operational burden of student and self-assessments, and then following-up with a personalized coaching intervention and training and content delivered in smaller, local peer groups.

In last 1.5 years, we’ve implemented two important aspects of the proposed solution:

1. AI-Chat LMS: piloted in 450+ schools across India, our AI-chat LMS has been used to measure a variety of student competencies in maths, language and science, in both rural and urban settings. Our internal surveys reveal an average saving of ~80% on teacher’s time spent towards designing, conducting and grading formative assessments due to chat-based delivery.

2. SEL Assessments: supported by Jacobs Foundation, HGSE, and MIT Solve, we’ve designed contextually relevant measures of self-regulated learning and metacognition for Indian and Kenyan contexts. Currently undergoing a feasibility test, these instruments will pave the way for building a rich repository of reliable and valid measures of SEL for both students and teachers.  

We’ve set up two prototypes of our integrated teacher support experience, in Delhi and Nairobi, with a focus on self-regulated learning and metacognition competencies in teachers and students (age group 9-12). Additionally, we are testing whether self-regulated learning strategies can lead to significant impact on building foundational arithmetic skills. These experiments will provide us invaluable learnings to build Radics for Teachers into an effective intervention that can work at scale.

We are looking for guidance on effective replication of social-emotional research, esp for adults, from institutions such as CASEL and ISELA. There’s a strong lack of evidence emerging from India and Kenya when it comes to successful SEL development strategies. With our solution we aspire to lead applied research in this area and our contexts, and being supported by leading researchers in SEL domain will be a huge support. 

We are also looking forward to partner with other groups doing similar work. The fact that we built our current collaboration (Radics, India and Dignitas, Kenya) through the MIT Solve platform, provided us with a strong validation of the peer quality and openness to collaborate facilitated by MIT Solve.

Core of our innovation lies in how we’ve used chat to reduce barriers to diagnosis of lack of social-emotional support, and then how we consolidate, enhance and deliver personalized coaching as an intervention.

SEL measurements - we adapt reliable measures of socio-emotional competencies, for both students and teachers, and leverage AI-chat to break-down long, complex psychometric tests into an adaptive conversation. This results in both a higher take-up among our target user-base, as well as a more precise measurement of the social-emotional competencies. 

On-demand, 1:1 coaching - in our target teacher communities, coaching (esp good quality coaching) is scarce and poorly structured. Radics serves as an aggregation platform to consolidate, enhance and deliver teacher coaching capacity at a fraction of the cost incurred on large-batch teacher support programs.

Chat and 1:1 Coaching reinforcement - lastly, we’ve integrated our SEL measurement/diagnosis and expert-led coaching solutions in a way that they reinforce each other. While data from the adapted SEL instruments helps coaches shape their advice, coaches in turn help engineer the AI-algorithms that power Radics’s conversational assessment interface.

We’ve set up two prototypes of our integrated teacher support experience, in Delhi and Nairobi, with a focus on self-regulated learning and metacognition competencies in teachers and students (age group 9-12). Additionally, we are testing whether self-regulated learning strategies can lead to significant impact on building foundational arithmetic skills. Over the next year, we intend to run these experiments, increase the prototype scope by adding 1-2 more SEL competencies, and shape our 1:1 coaching and peer-support interventions. 

Post Dec 2022, we will make our technology platform open access to reach as many teachers as possible and enable reliable self SEL assessments at scale. Parallely, we will continue to recruit and develop coaches, and peer-led SEL content to strengthen our teacher support proposition. In 5 years, we target to reach 100K teachers virtually, supported by a strong base of 5000 coaches.

Our impact focus will be on improvements in specific social-emotional competencies in teachers and students (starting with self-regulation, metacognition, and then branching out), effect of SEL-informed teaching strategies on student’s academic excellence esp foundational literacy and numeracy in young students, and the positive role 1:1 coaching and peer-support can play in overall teacher wellbeing.

In short-term (6-12 months), we will be measuring our success by tracking the improvements in teacher outputs and adoption metrics. Specifically, we will be tracking the shifts in:

• # of average professional support hours availed per teacher, before and after our intervention

• # of assessment development, grading and analysis hours saved per classroom

• # of peer-led workshops conducted

• # of average minutes taken to facilitate a coaching conversation

• average ratings for coaching conversations

• net promoter score by teachers for the integrated solution

In mid to long-term (1+ years), we will be tracking the impact of our solution on teacher social-emotional competence as well as reduction of key negative effects such as stress and attrition. We’ll further corroborate these figures by looking at student outcomes in both academic and SEL domains.

We hypothesize that teachers’ social-emotional competence and wellbeing is a strong predictor of student outcomes, however, low-resourced settings are ill-equipped to effectively support teachers on this matter. In India and Kenya, there’s a lack of reliable and easy-to-access measures of SEL (both children and adult), and there’s an underdeveloped coaching capacity that is best delivered sporadically, and in large batches.

By providing an integrated teacher support experience that systematically fuses 3Cs - chat (for diagnostics), coaching (for expert support) and community (for peer learning), we offer to change the way teachers are supported in a post-pandemic world.

We leverage natural language processing and machine learning in our solution to contextualize and simplify the diagnosis of social-emotional concerns faced by teachers and students.

Our NL engine is currently designed to conduct reliable measures of metacognitive performance in teachers and students based on Metacognitive Performance Assessment (MPA), CP-SRLI (Children’s perceived use of self-regulated learning), and SRLIT (self-regulated ;earning inventory for teachers), and will be generalized to cover more SEL competencies.

To improve the preciseness of SEL diagnostics, we leverage machine learning to make the measurements adaptive and less tedious (fewer questions per session). 

Further, we leverage WhatsApp and Telegram as distribution mediums to bring the benefits of personalized, on-demand coaching to teachers who do not have easy access to reliable professional support.

We are a group of two organizations, SarvSutra Systems (India) and Dignitas Project (Kenya), collaborating to deliver the proposed solution. The team is represented by members from both organizations, and led by the member from SarvSutra Systems. In case we win, the prize money will be spent equally across our pilots in India and Kenya.

Our India team has two female core team members, both in early stages of their career as education experts. In our effort to build an inclusive workplace, we are joined by our implementation partner, Dignitas, who enrich our ethnic and cultural base, and also have two women educators who work closely with our India team.  

From a beneficiary standpoint, we’ve maintained an exclusive focus on serving the needs of students and teachers who’ve been the worst hit due to the pandemic, and a large part of our efforts are geared towards bridging the digital equity gap faced by our target beneficiary base.

We are a for-profit social enterprise, and have been sustaining through B2B (mid-large education non-profits, and chain of schools) and B2G engagements for our chat LMS proposition. We’ve also served consulting assignments with World Bank for building EdMIS capacity for regional governments in India. 

Our integrated teaching experience that brings chat, coaching and community together in a single, seamless manner will be an addition on top of our ongoing engagements, and to that effect we will continue to sustain via the existing B2B/B2G model.

We plan to offer an integrated teacher support proposition to education nonprofits and government clients, who are currently struggling to support their teachers’ SEL development and wellbeing. Provided as a B2B/B2G engagement, we will charge a per teacher cost for providing a combination of AI-Chat LMS, 1:1 coaching and peer learning content.

We’ve already found an early product market fit by offering “learning measurement as a service”. We’ve realized that in India and Kenya, there’s a latent need for institutions to build reliable learning measurement capacity for monitoring and evaluation purposes, however, such capacity is currently very costly to acquire. By reducing the barrier to the adoption of reliable learning measurement (via chat), we’ve enabled large education institutions (private and government) to start thinking about the utilization of the learning data.

By plugging an innovative teacher support program (1:1 coaching and structured peer support), that is combined with an easy-to-use learning measurement tool we can offer an integrated teacher support experience that is convincingly better than the traditional one-size fits all teacher professional development models.

We currently support a host of education nonprofits to deliver their foundational literacy and numeracy programs through our “learning measurement as a service” proposition. We’ve helped these organizations build technology capacity to deliver reliable learning measurements at scale, in lieu of annually recurring service contracts. Additionally, we have served consulting assignments through World Bank, to build long-term data management and teacher training capacity for regional governments in India.