INTED - Teaching Practices

Prototyped with 1,300 teachers, we train teachers to use an empathic design process to engage students critically in their learning.

Across West Africa, the quality of student performance continues to declines at the secondary level.  In Ghana, a recent stirring headline was the Mathematics results of the 2016 May/June West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), which showed that out of the almost 200,000 candidates, more students received the single worst grade (F9, 38%), than all who got each of the possible passing grades combined(A1-C6, 33%).

While a number of successful efforts have gone into improving the access to secondary education (most recent making public secondary schools free and accessible to all), very few efforts have gone towards building the capacity of teachers to improve the quality of education being delivered, or, as the case is, manage the increasing number and diversity of students in the classroom.  Although we know that continuous professional development improves teacher attitudes, practice, and student outcomes by up to 50% points, when we started piloting our initiative in 2011, most public school teachers were lucky to receive professional development opportunities once or twice in their entire careers.

In 2012, Institute of Teacher Education and Development (INTED), worked with then Centre to Support Excellence in Teaching of Stanford University to develop a number of teaching practice modules on Lesson Design and Factors Affecting Student Learning; Active Student Engagement, Using Prior Knowledge, andCritical Thinking Skills.During 2013, and expanding in 2018, we designed a course inDesign Thinking to Improve the Classroom Experience.  

In our pilot, we have since delivered most of these teaching practice modules, where we train teachers to use an empathic design process to engage students critically in their learning and from their previous knowledge, to more than 1,300 teachers in Ghana.  Although most of these teachers are low-income and work in under-resourced schools and communities, they have found keen interest in paying an affordable fee for our programmes.  The main attraction is our peer professional development module, where teachers learn from their own colleague teachers who share the deep problems they encounter, not from some lecturing white-gloved consultants.

Although we have a substantive base of and compelling testimonials of teachers who have benefitted from the programme, we are still well away from impacting the 1,000,000 primary and secondary teachers across the region that use the West Africa Examination Council (WAEC) curricula and face similar challenges that can be addressed by our modules. We are looking to build an INTED YouTube Channel to reach the broader populace of teachers across the sub-region.

• Our curricula use 21st Century teaching practices developed by consultants at leading institutions such as Stanford University
• Our peer delivery module lowers cost, and enhances scalability and impact.  Teachers find it inspiring to receive training from peers, not only to use strategies but also to become trainers themselves.
• Our focus on practice and feedback results in higher adoption and classroom application rates.  We spend at least 50% of training time on practice to make sure all anxieties to adoption are resolved.
• Convenient training: our trainers are available to schedule programmes at the comfort of timing and location of the trainee (teacher).

• Thus far, we have been delivering the training to teachers in person, using basic slide presentation technology (PowerPoint, laptops, projectors).
• Our proposal, however, will make our solution available more broadly online, so that teachers with a reasonable access to the internet, will be able to access it.
• We anticipate that this solution will require video production (our end) and access technology (user end) and an interactive feedback system to support and address issues that trainees may have with the online training programmes
• We anticipate significantly enhancing our website and development capability to be able to support this new interface

• Our plan is to be able to produce high quality videos for our INTED TP Channel during the first quarter, launch the channel with marketing during the second quarter, host live and recorded testimonials from selected members of our 1,300 alumni teachers as well as key stakeholders during the third quarter, and reach at least as many teachers in one year as we have in 7 years of operation (1,300 target).

• With the ability to deliver teacher training online, we believe there is a significant potential to reach teachers across the continent. We will actively use online and social media presence to target and drive teachers to the Channel, using media such as website, Facebook, Twitter and Vimeo viral marketing.
• We project reaching over 16,000 teachers in the first three years (1,500 in year 1, 5,000 in year 2, and 10,000 in year 3), and over 50,000 teachers by the end of the fifth year (15,000 in year 4, and 20,000 in year 5). 

• We will reach teachers through marketing to schools and teacher and subject association groups.  We will retain them by incentivising them to adopt a continuous professional development ethos and coming for new, follow-on programmes.  We will deploy our programme through paid online access to a YouTube channel.  We will host periodic practice sessions for participants to complete offline to earn their certificates.

• We have only done offline in-person trainings at this point, which we have delivered to 1,300 teachers and heads in 47 schools.  These trainees are mostly from public senior high schools, although a minority of participants are from two private international schools and a few others from three junior high schools. We have received primary feedback, as well as through independent monitoring and evaluation consultants that our training has improved the practices and attitudes of teachers, with students highly engaged, and in most cases, with a positive change in student outcomes.

• We project reaching over 16,000 teachers in the first three years (1,500 in year 1; 5,000 in year 2; and 10,000 in year 3).  Most of the trainees are expected to be teachers, but a proportion (2.5% - 5.0%) will be leaders of schools.  The superiority of internet infrastructure and greater population of teachers in Nigeria (than the rest of the West Africa combined), we mean more teachers will be trained from Nigeria over time, though with Ghana dominating during the first year.  We expect that the majority of teachers will be from public schools.

• On our team are professionals that have been able to secure financial and non-financial resources needed for INTED to succeed.  A few years ago, working closely with our Board Chairman, our Founder was able to raise  >$250,000 from the Skills Development Fund, sponsored by the World Bank and Danish Government.  Prior to that, our Founder was awarded the $80,000 Social Innovation Fellowship from Stanford University.  Our Board Chairman has run a number of education and training institutions, and comes with a wide network and leadership skills that can help us continue on out success.

We have pivoted our model from grant-only (during the first three years) to a pre-dominantly revenue source of income. We now run a cross-subsidization model, where income generated from private or international schools, together with funds generated from local corporate organizations are able to support operations and provide discounts towards our programmes for public schools.  During years three through six, we piloted and marketed three new programmes that we priced below cost.  Our staff has also been helpful in  running an IndieGogo crowdfunding campaign, and also securing non-financial resources in the form of facilities, etc. from SEED, Airtel, Earlbeam Hotel, etc.

• We are at a critical point of scaling the impact of our existing programmes that have been piloted offline (in person) to 1,300 teachers and heads, and now launching new technology programmes to build the skills for low-income youth.  We believe Solve has the global partnerships, influence, and the profile to bring needed attention and support to our efforts.  We also appreciate the funding, which will go directly into programme development for both initiatives at this vital time for progress on the critical social issues of quality education and skills development at INTED.

• When we started in 2011, the major barrier was establishing a programme teachers would want to pay for (barriers to sustainable adoption).  Having done that, we are now looking at barriers to scale, such as readiness for online access, government support for quality education (given current local policy focus on access to education), funding to support programme development (support operations as well as new online videos).
• We believe Solve can help with adding more credibility to our approach to this education challenge, attracting more support.