Accelerated TeachEasy

Personalized pedagogy coaching to help teachers learn, develop and implement active learning and 21st century skills in the classroom.

At Accelerated, we are building a scalable, cost-effective teacher-coaching platform, TeachEasy from the ground up for resource constrained African classrooms that helps teachers promote active learning and 21st century skills in the classroom.

TeachEasy is a people-mediated teacher-coaching platform that enables any school to offer personalized coaching to teachers of all levels. We match teachers with expert coaches and evidence-based classroom strategies best suited for their particular context. 

Out of every mode of support we invest into schools, high quality instruction has proven to have the greatest impact on student achievement. That’s why schools and development partners continue to invest in teacher trainings. However, these workshops and programs are not working for 3 major reasons. 

• Traditional PD treats teachers as passive learners and is a mile wide and an inch deep. 
• Traditional PD involves no ongoing support from an instructional expert and isn’t tailored to individual problems of practice.
• Traditional PD doesn’t create space for teachers to reflect on their practice.

Our coaching model has been designed to address these problems and to provide teachers with a dedicated coach who helps them throughout the school year to not only develop modern teaching skills, but also to implement these strategies in the classroom every day.

We have already trialed this model with 500 K-12 teachers in a variety of classroom settings in Ethiopia. We have seen positive results in terms of teacher performance (37% increase), student participation (50% increase) and learning outcomes. Student-centered active learning pedagogy is now well supported by evidence across several disciplines. 

Our core hypothesis is that teacher coaching as an education quality intervention can be scaled to hundreds of thousands of teachers and classrooms across Africa by building a robust data model on classroom teaching practices, accessible through a mobile app that can provide targeted, on-demand coaching to any teacher for any classroom scenario.

We are looking to conduct further research to:

• Develop rich profiles of teachers based on classroom observations and custom-made performance assessments
• Develop student assessments to measure 21st century skills like critical thinking
• Test our hypotheses using structured experimentation techniques and evaluate effectiveness of the intervention
• We will develop statistical models that can generate personalized recommendations for teachers based on their teaching style, grade and subject. This will ultimately feed into the TeachEasy platform to provide superior coaching through basic coaches at a very affordable cost.

Our teacher-coaching model, TeachEasy is innovative in 3 ways:

• Cost: Coaching one teacher for a year in the US typically costs over $9,000. We charge schools $100 per teacher, per year and with 10X more classroom observations and coaching sessions.
• Accessibility: Most schools and teachers in Ethiopia and other regional markets have never received pedagogy coaching or classroom support – we deliver world-class support within each school.
• Coaches: Most of our efficiencies and coach-quality assurance stem from our judicious use of technology to ensure our coaches can provide personalized coaching and teaching recommendations to every teacher.

Each of our coaches supports a whopping 100 teachers (!) and provides them with trainings, classroom visits and personalized coaching every month.  We harness technology for various activities including data collection tools for tracking teacher progress, to generate detailed analytics and dashboards for school leaders and teachers, to help our coaches access our databank of coaching strategies and finally for personalized goal setting and feedback.

Double our scale. With our current operations in Ethiopia, we are already one of the fastest growing education organizations in East Africa. We are on track to expand our model to Kenya in 2019. 

We will increase our impact and sustainability in each school by extending our model to provide professional development support to school leaders as well.

We are building a mobile app powered by our data-model that can help more coaches provide high-quality targeted support to thousands of teachers. fuseproject.com has developed an awesome front-end design and we are working with laterite.com to clean up our existing data.

Our vision is to positively impact millions of teachers and students on the African continent. Estimates indicate that countries in Africa need 10 million teachers who are trained, skilled and motivated to meet their educational goals in the next 4 years. This is the big goal that drives us everyday.

Our customers are school operators. We have seen strong customer retention over the last couple of years. Almost all our clients have committed to multiple year deals. We are constantly iterating on our coaching model with new improvements collected from the field everyday. 

We are almost the only teacher coaching company that leverages strong data network effects to provide teachers with a constantly improving coaching support.

500 teachers, 11,500 students from K-12. All teachers and schools sign up for minimum one-year coaching subscription plans and are supported by Accelerated trained coaches on a bi-weekly basis. 

Our teacher churn is less than 15%.

We expect to serve around 1000 teachers and about 30,000 students in the next 12 months in Ethiopia and Kenya.

Team members not only have significant teaching experience, but also bring complementary, divergent skills like app development, counseling and education psychology, sales and customer service. The core-team is well supported by a range of expert consultants including behavior psychologists, data scientists and programmers. 

Ravi is the founder and CEO of Accelerated. Ravi has spent the last 8 years designing and scaling multiple high-impact projects in Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia. His prior experience includes investment banking and strategy consulting in Asia and Europe and Africa. He holds a Bachelors in Computer Science Engineering and an MBA.

Bulk of our revenue is generated through our teacher-coaching model. Additional current revenue streams include testing services, lesson plans, learning materials and school-leaders coaching.

• Schools pay us on a yearly-subscription model on a per-teacher basis. A minimum cohort size is 20 teachers. Contract duration with schools range from 1-3 years. Revenue per teacher per year on average is $100. 
• Most of our growth is organic – schools almost always increase the number of teachers participating in our program (penetration rate). For instance, a partner school is extending the program from an initial 35 teachers to an additional 105 teachers. 
  • Our model and unit economics are possible due to back-end logistics and operational efficiency.
  • Distinct customer segments and high Life Time Values (LTVs) (~3 years) provide several distribution options.
  • Post current evidence-building stage, we will pursue growth through larger government contracts.

4 reasons:

• Technical support, 
• Partnerships and access to foundations and other research orgs, 
• funding and 
• credibility.

Teacher Recommendation Engine: We are building the most comprehensive, curriculum aligned teaching practices database on the African continent. Our main barrier to this is access to high-quality technical skills at the CTO level.

Our second barrier is signing up institutional partners who can provide us access to hundreds of schools. These stakeholders include foundations, NGOs, government agencies and bilateral and multilateral development partners. As a startup, these partnerships can take a lot of time and traditionally need a lot of organizational legitimacy.