Teacher to Teacher Network

TTTN is a free platform for teachers to discover, share, rate, and implement validated and impactful solutions in any classroom.

What if, instead of grand visions, we focused on the little things that make a big difference? 

Welcome to the Teacher-to-Teacher Network, a free platform designed for teachers to share micro improvements no matter where they are. 

What are micro improvements (MIs)? They are simple and easy solutions created by teachers in classrooms around the world. MIs are small enough to try without administrator approval, simple enough to work without expensive new materials, and light enough to try immediately. Because of the minimalism of MIs they are overlooked by larger innovators, but we believe that spreading small improvements will have a huge impact.

Our TTTN-platform is designed for teachers. Every user creates a profile that allows them to share their story, submit their MI, explain how it works, and report the impact on learning outcomes. Users can test and rate each others’ MIs, create collections and share them with colleagues. They get points based on their activity, and the most popular MIs are highlighted automatically. As MIs grow in popularity, we validate their impact.

Finally there is a platform with content from teachers to improve learning through teachers to help every child flourish in life. Welcome to TTTN.

We take research in this platform to mean impact validation of a solution. While it is critical to validate solutions as they reach significant scale, we anticipate the research needs of the platform will scale as individual solutions scale.

In Schools2030 schools, the evidence of impact will be self-assessed by teachers and validated independently by Aga Khan team members. While we will have impact evaluations for these, they must also be appealing for teachers to implement in their own classrooms. 

The Teacher to Teacher Network will allow teachers to rate each other’s solutions across multiple dimensions. On initial review, they can assess whether the solution will work in their context. Once they have begun implementing, they will be able to rate dimensions such as the ease of implementation, quality of implementation steps, and observed impact in their context. 

Teachers will also complete their own profile when creating accounts so that we understand their experience and details of their educational context (e.g. country, public/private, level of resources, size of class, etc.). As their expertise grows on the platform, the weighting of their reviews will increase. We will also factor differences in context into the ratings.

As we gather more data, we will be able to create a predictive model based on all the review data from teachers and the impact evaluations from the Schools2030 solutions added annually. This will allow us to create a valid but automated impact evaluation for new solutions before they are implemented.

When solutions become more popular and are implemented more often, it will become increasingly necessary to establish more rigorous impact evaluations. By setting a threshold at say 1,000 students, we can deploy just-in-time 3rd party impact evaluation which will increase the scalability of the process while validating growing solutions.

Online education resources typically fall into two categories: ideas and innovations. Ideas are free and abundant, but it is hard to know if they actually work. Innovations are more sophisticated, but implemented top-down and usually resource-intensive, putting them out of scope for individual teachers. 

We know this because HundrED has worked with education innovators for five years. That’s why in this challenge we focused narrowly on micro improvements that teachers themselves use in classrooms all around the world every day. These improvements are typically local, contextual, and do not get shared broadly.

Our free platform, Teacher-to-Teacher Network, is a place for teachers to submit, validate and recommend micro improvements (MIs). All are codified by relevant context (subject, age, location, class size, resources) to help other teachers easily find what works. They do not require heavy external processes for validation, but instead we let teachers validate and rate the MIs until they scale.

What Github has done for software development, TTTN will do for teaching. It will align teacher goals or challenges with relevant MIs that are easy to understand, and once they start implementing teachers can iterate and adapt them to their context. Those adaptations are then re-submitted back to the platform to create an MI for every situation.

TTTN will be the first platform that highlights proven improvements to teaching from all classroom contexts, validates the ones that scale, and has a measurable impact on learning outcomes around the world.

Due to the scope and nature of the problem we are addressing with our solution, we believe our theory of change will drive exponential returns in impact and learning outcomes.

The beauty of this challenge is that it addresses one of the last unsolved problems in education around cumulative global knowledge sharing on what is effective and impactful for teachers in the actual classroom. Thus it is crucial to design the platform for teachers such that they find it easy to use, engaging, and impactful for holistic development of their students.

Teachers that have developed impactful micro-improvements will be able to document their work in a clear way and get ratings and feedback on it from a global network of teachers. The reviewer teachers will also test and implement the solutions in their classrooms. Highly rated and implemented solutions will be prioritized in search and discovery on the platform, which will become a virtuous loop of accelerating implementation and impact. 

Teachers will also have one-click buttons to share success on social media, driving more teachers to the platform. This contribute -> implement -> improve -> share cycle has the potential to repeat and grow exponentially as it crosses to new schools, countries, and contexts. As the solutions grow, so will the number of teachers viewing them and ultimately the number of students with improved learning. 

This will already be evident at modest scale from the first year of the project, but as both the quality and use of solutions grows, so will the per-solution impact. The multiplicative virtuous combination of teachers, solutions, impact, and students has the potential to grow exponentially. And that is a very good thing indeed, since we truly need exponential solutions to address the SDGs by 2030.

The primary goal of the platform is to enable more teachers to improve learning outcomes around the world. Within one year, we will be able to quantify the number of improvements on the platform, the number of students they have impacted, and the actual improvements to learning outcomes. Secondary goals of the platform include teacher professional development, retention, and systemic change.

After one year we will aim to have 1,000 solutions created (100% participation from Schools2030 schools) and at least 100 that have been validated and implemented in one other context. While we don’t have a sense for estimated impact per solution at this point, we will easily be able to calculate it by then and set our next 1-5 year goals at that point.

By 2026 we would like to have 10,000 solutions on the platform, with over half of those coming from schools not in the School2030 network. That will show that the platform is getting traction with teachers in schools all over the globe, and thus our impact on students can be multiplied accordingly.

We hope that these solutions will be implemented an additional 10,000 times, although we expect the top 20% of solutions to be implemented 80% of the time. We also hope to have worked with at least 5 education providers to help implement leading teacher-created practices at scale by that point.

The four most significant barriers will be 1) getting teachers to know about this service 2) implementation support 3) cultural change within schools, and 4) translation of content to many languages.

1) The world is full of platforms and solutions that can overwhelm teachers. Even though we believe this service will be impactful and innovative, it will take some work to win them over and keep them engaged on the platform. 

2) While we will capture information on implementation and make it as simple as possible for teachers to understand, there will inevitably be questions and challenges that come up as teachers try to implement solutions, especially across contexts and languages. This will quickly become infeasible for single teachers still in profession to answer with any reasonable promptness.

3) It is critical to up school leaders to the idea of change, especially driven by teachers. Many countries culturally give teachers little to no autonomy in the classroom, and performance on standardized assessments are over-emphasized. The type of improvements that many teachers will develop and share will likely fall outside the bounds of what they are generally able to do in the classroom.

4) For this solution to truly have a global impact, it will need to be translated into nearly every language. That poses a significant challenge in the technical development of the platform itself and the actual process of localization and inputting translated solutions.

1) This is the reason why we are targeting teachers as both the creators and the implementors on the platform. This is for teachers, by teachers. Teachers will be able to create their own “collections” and share them with other teachers on social media, creating a peer-validated viral growth trajectory.

2) There are two possible solutions to this. The first is to allow teachers that have implemented solutions to volunteer to help support teachers that want to implement the solution in the future. That would allow the implementation support for each solution to grow as the desire to implement it grows.

3) While education is slow to change and culturally entrenched, educators are susceptible to peer pressure as much as anyone else in the world. As the platform picks up steam and the number of improvements implemented grows drastically, it will be difficult to hold off the overwhelming evidence that teachers love the platform and the impact is clearly evident.

4) In the short term we will get support from Schools2030 to address translation manually. Longer term, we will likely need a combination of technical tools and manual review to ensure the solutions are localized. We have a good relationship with Khan Academy who has offered to connect us to any of their many translation partners around the world that already voluntarily translate Khan Academy materials.