CM (Chief Minister's) Rise–Teacher Professional Development

Every school system has the responsibility to nurture, enable and grow every child under its care. The poorest of the poor in India depend on the public education system to realise their dreams of a better future. This system is a lifeline for them, being free of cost, and the government expends immense resources towards running this school network that dots the Indian landscape.

Yet, India is now at the edge of an educational crisis of epic proportions. The Indian school system is massive, with 250 million students and 9 million teachers. However, the student learning outcome data is grave: 53% of Grade 5 students in India cannot read a Grade 2 textbook and three-quarters cannot divide, as per a nation-wide survey.

For the 131 million children going to 1 million+ public schools, the learning gap is particularly acute. Millions of dollars are budgeted and expended by the government – towards school buildings, books, stationery, boundary walls and beyond. Millions of schoolteachers, school leaders and a constellation of education officials are engaged daily in delivering education to the next generation of the country. Yet, the system falls woefully short on student learning outcomes, due to an interconnected web of poor policy, implementation, and governance.

As a whole, the public school system spends too little time on academic activities and learning outcomes, focusing heavily instead on school administration – record-keeping, mid-day meal distribution, non-education professional duties (e.g., running census, manning election booths).

To articulate the problem: In India, our children are going to school, but not learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated it, with school closures leading to immense learning losses. Consequently, we have a situation of 'learning poverty' on our hands, whose reverberations are bound to be felt for decades to come.

In Madhya Pradesh (a state in India ~1.2x the size and population of the United Kingdom), almost ~9 million students face the issues that manifest nationally. With such a high inequity already existing in learning, COVID pandemic has pushed this inequity even further. Many of these students who are studying in government schools have been away from schools for almost two years. The whole education system needs to pivot to ensure children continue to learn. This has created two challenges for the education system:

1. How do they ensure maximum student engagement as they transition back to physical classes?

2. How do they prepare to bridge learning losses incurred over the school closure period?

In addressing both challenges, the role of the teacher is paramount. Therefore, supporting teachers and their development becomes an integral part of safeguarding quality learning for all children and ensuring the inequity does not widen further. Teachers, thus, become central to the delivery of quality education to the last mile and ensuring that the students come back to the schools and are able to bridge learning gaps. Thus, the whole education system needs to support teachers and empower them with the right knowledge, skills, and mindset to prepare them to handle any shocks to the system and help make the system resilient to any crisis, especially in the new world order created by COVID.

The CM Rise is a flagship programme of the Government of Madhya Pradesh (GoMP), which aims to systemically transform the state's education system to build an ecosystem for the holistic professional development of teachers. The vision of the programme is to create a high-quality teacher for every child in the state.

The programme was initiated as a COVID response programme on the 1st of May 2020, by Hon'ble Minister of the Government of Madhya Pradesh (a state in India ~1.2x the size and population of the United Kingdom) to digitally train 265,000+ teachers across ~100,000 schools with the ambitious goal of building the resilience of the public education system to respond to the pandemic.

Peepul is the key implementation and design partner of the programme. In the last year since its rollout, this programme has pioneered exemplar teacher professional development. It has become a national benchmark for effective training and capacity-building programmes as Madhya Pradesh became the first state in India to cross a million and then, two million enrolments in digital teacher training courses over DIKSHA (India's national teacher training portal).

The programme works towards upskilling the teacher workforce in the state and, thereby, improve student learning. It focuses on three aspects:

1. Teacher professional development: As part of this, we are creating a holistic teacher professional development ecosystem in the state. Towards this, we are working with the government to develop the necessary policy infrastructure like the teacher competency matrix, updating the teacher training policy of the state, capacity building of teacher training institutes etc. We are trying to create an ecosystem that provides need-based support to a teacher as per their requirements.

2. Digital teacher training curriculum: The programme will also look to strengthen and further build on the digital teacher training courses focusing on Foundational Literacy and Numeracy, Early Childhood Education etc (priorities of the Government of India), in line with the National Education Policy 2020. The programme will aim to build teachers' competencies to equip them with the skills to bridge the learning losses of children stemming from the prolonged school closure period.

3. Systemic reform of the state education system: We are also driving systemic reform of the education system at a massive scale. We are working with the government to create Standard Operating Procedures with the state government that will guide the development of 9000+ model demonstration schools in the state of Madhya Pradesh that will exhibit high-quality teaching and learning in government schools. In addition, we heavily involve the government in the programme by setting up high-level steering committees which include the senior education officials and bureaucrats in the state.

The beneficiaries of the CM Rise program are the 9 million+ students studying in ~100,000 public schools in Madhya Pradesh which as a state is 1.2x the size of the United Kingdom while being placed as the fourth poorest state in India as per the Global Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index 2018.

The children we serve as part of the program belong to families that fall in the bottom 20% of India's population by income. These are typically children from marginalised and vulnerable backgrounds, with a significant percentage of them from protected caste and tribe designations notified under the Indian Law, and also first-generation school-goers. The average household income for a family of four in our target group is under USD 80. For the children we serve, public schools are the only institution that can provide an opportunity to receive an education. Their parents do not have the financial resources to send them to a low-fee private school; the public school system is free and offers additional benefits to students through free meals, free books and scholarships.

The education system at large pays very low focus on teacher development. CM Rise is ensuring that teachers are aware, equipped and motivated to support their students sensitively and effectively, and to impart learning with high quality, therefore being critical in enabling the government education system in serving the most vulnerable sections of society.

The program is helping develop a holistic teacher professional development ecosystem in the state to create high-quality teachers for each student. As part of the programme, digital teacher training content is created that places the welfare of the community at the centre, for example, one of the digital courses aims to build the capacity of the teacher to foster meaningful relationships with parents to involve them actively in the child's learning journey. Another course focuses on the approach teachers must take to reach and teach children during school closures which have aided teaching practices during the pandemic. The nature of the program, leveraging existing technology platforms allows us to reach the remotest of villages in the state, not hindering the capacity building of teachers serving in the hinterlands, thereby ensuring no child is left out.

The programme has thus created a blueprint to amplify existing government resources and structure to support the most vulnerable sections of society.

Peepul has been working with the government education system since the year 2015 when we pioneered the first public-private partnership school in Delhi. We have since deeply worked with various state governments to design and implement solutions aimed at improving student learning outcomes. Given our deep experience and expertise in developing and rolling out systemic interventions in the education space, we are enabled with organisational knowledge and skillsets to cater to the complex issues that CM Rise is solving.

As part of our Exemplar Schools program (we run three model demonstration schools in New Delhi, India's capital where we exhibit how public schools can provide high-quality education and produce high student learning outcomes), we have driven whole-school transformation to improve the functioning and performance of three dilapidated government schools. These schools serve some of the most vulnerable communities in Delhi surviving on USD 80/month. The impact of these schools led to enrolment skyrocketing across these schools with 85% of the students meeting or exceeding grade level expectations. Post COVID, the 72% of our students have continued to meet grade level expectations. We also run a systemic reform programme ~ Project Parivartan that is designing and implementing a series of academic, institutional, and administrative policies to improve student learning across 568 schools and 300,000 government school students.

At Peepul, we believe in upskilling the key implementation workers in the education system for better prospects. They belong to diverse economic and social backgrounds and are typically from lower-income backgrounds. We reflect on the learnings from the field and respond rightfully to the needs of our beneficiaries. Currently, we employ 95 local resource who enable our pioneering model of a public-private partnership with different governments. Towards this, we hire teachers, school caretakers, implementation officers etc. to support the existing school staff to execute their responsibilities in the school ecosystem.

Across the organisation, our recruitment strategy focuses on prospects who are grounded with the communities we work with. We hire personnel from esteemed and reputed fellowships like the Gandhi Fellowship, Teach for India fellowship, Mahatma Gandhi National Fellowship (MGNF). Further, we also focus on hiring diverse individuals who match the profile of our stakeholders. For many roles like Implementation Coordinators, we hire personnel from the same geography or people who are well acquainted with the government education system.

The organisation and the project's strategic direction is led by our founder & CEO Kruti Bharucha. Kruti Bharucha has 21+ years of experience in various leadership and management roles in the education, management consulting and advisory sectors as well as with multilateral institutions. As the Founder and Chief Executive Officer for Peepul, she provides strategic direction and vision, managing the portfolio of programmes and identifying innovations and partnerships that will lead to significant improvement in learning outcomes in government schools. Before Peepul, she was with McKinsey and Co., where her expertise was in the field of consumer goods, retail and agribusiness. She has also previously worked at The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, where she specialized in fiscal policy reform, education sector policy and financial sector reform. 

An economist by training, Kruti has completed her MSc (Development Studies) with Distinction at the London School of Economics, MA (Economics) from the University of Maryland and her BA (Economics) with Distinction from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi. Kruti has been selected as a Rainer Fellow by Mulago Foundation in 2020, the only Indian selected. She was also recognised as Top 100 Women Transforming India by Niti Aayog.

Further, we have an extremely strong team in place to design and implement different programme aspects.

Our Director for Scale programmes, Girish leads the project. He brings in experience as a McKinsey consultant, with vast experience in the delivery of at-scale systemic programmes. He has worked across agriculture, renewable energy, education, employment, and financial services to deliver systemic solutions to a wide range of beneficiaries. He is a graduate from eminent educational institutes of IIT Madras and IIM Ahmedabad.

There are three individuals who form the middle management layer of the CM Rise programme:

1. Suman Dasgupta: Suman brings in experienced leadership and insights to the CM Rise programme and Team with 15+ years of experience across domestic and international NGOs. As part of the programme, he is currently anchoring our work on the Teacher professional development policy for the state, and leading quality assurance efforts for our training courses while assisting programme implementation efforts.

2. Sachin Ashapure: Sachin is extremely adept at executing large-scale programmes with the government and brings loads of experience in working with the bureaucracy, having 16+ years of experience in the education domain. He is responsible for program design, implementation, government partnerships and working to build an effective and sustainable delivery architecture. He strongly believes in supplementing the system rather than creating a parallel system or substituting it.

3. Shiladitya Ghosh: Shiladitya has spent close to 30 years in classrooms across India. He has worked with XSEED, Shiv Nadar Foundation, CENTA in senior positions. Shiladiya has also completed a certification programme in school teaching and learning courses from Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), Boston in July 2018. At Peepul, he is heading our academic support workstreams as part of the CM Rise schools program aiming to build 9200+ demonstration schools across the state of Madhya Pradesh.

Peepul works towards driving systemic reform programmes with state governments across India. These reform programmes address the root problems that impede governance systems from addressing student learning efficiently. These programs design interventions that improve the effectiveness of existing government resources by focusing on four critical pillars: high engagement classrooms, academic coaching & mentoring, teacher skilling and aligned incentives & accountability systems.

The solution that we are applying for as part of this application impacts the education system of Madhya Pradesh which is ~1.2x the size and population of the United Kingdom. The solution is an aspirational step towards leveraging public-private partnerships to create a synergy between the public and private sectors to design governance solutions that build the resilience of the government education system. It is ensuring that over 9 million students in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh have access to high-quality teaching. The program ensures this by developing a holistic teacher professional development ecosystem in the state's education machinery.

Given the rigorous and comprehensive nature of the project, it is developing critical products that will shape the education system of the state to improve students. Among the various components of the program, CM Rise is also building Madhya Pradesh's Training Policy framework, Teacher Professional Standards Rubric, Technology backbone for unified teacher development and so on.

We want the solution to be part of the Solve network because of our unwavering belief that diversity and critique are the foundations of pathbreaking innovations. Given the unique large scale innovative program that we run in the challenging geography of Madhya Pradesh to support the vulnerable communities living on less than USD 80/month, we will leverage the Solve network's experience and expertise to strengthen various aspects of the program. The entire engagement will enable us to strengthen critical processes of the project – be it impact evaluation, designing for international replication in other lower-income development economies, or technical support to develop technology to support education reform. While various components of the programme have already broken the scale-quality trade-off by setting the benchmarks of success in teacher professional development, we are constantly looking at ways to improve different processes as part of the program.

The cohort will also help us access a high-quality network of individuals that will enable us to find talent that can take on the complex issues we are solving. Given the scale and magnitude of the task at hand, we require support in head-hunting and find bright, fearless talent that can bring in the rigour required for programs like ours to succeed. The network will enable us with contacts and networking groups to source such talent.

The cohort also brings a unique opportunity for us to associate with the MIT Solve branding which can open multiple doors of opportunities for us. Given the scale and impact generated by this project, we aspire to associate it among the select group of Solve initiatives that design and implement best-in-class solutions to solve social problems.

Teacher professional development has been happening in the Indian educations system for a long time. However, the investment in the same has not been intensive enough. As per a report by Accountability Initiatives India, the share of education finances dedicated towards 'Teacher Training' has been extremely low and was less than or equal to 1 per cent of the Education Department's finances for the sample states (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh etc) during Financial Year 2016-17.

While there are different Teacher training initiatives that have been happening in government systems, student assessment data suggests that students are not learning better. According to a 2019 national report on the status of Education in India, for Madhya Pradesh, only 38.4% of Std 3 students could read an Std 1 level text. Similarly, in 2018, less than half of the children surveyed in Std 5 (41.6%) could read an Std 2 level text in Madhya Pradesh. Further, only 16.9% of Std 5 children could read a level 1 text, as per a 2018 report on the status of Education in India. Therefore, there is a dire need to revamp teacher professional development to ensure quality teaching-learning that takes place.

CM Rise as a programme has been focussing on specific challenges in the existing teacher professional development practices:

- All trainings that happen in govt. systems happen as a cascaded model, which means by the time it reaches the teacher, there is a severe dip in the quality of training.

- All teachers go through the same content irrespective of the needs or challenges they face in their classrooms. This makes them averse to the trainings and learning becomes a mere administrative exercise.

- It is a strong possibility that because of COVID, many group-based physical training may not happen in the near future. Therefore, it becomes critical to revamp the teacher training/capacity-building system to be resilient to shock and support teachers in these circumstances.

- Typical teacher training also means that teachers have to skip regular teaching days and spend two days of their time at training centres. This also poses challenges for teachers working in remote areas to reach the centre, having to travel huge distances.

CM Rise is a programme that addresses all these challenges. It ensures that there is no loss in training quality by the time it reaches to each teacher through a standardised delivery mode. It is also working towards making training contextual and need-based by strengthening mentoring and academic support within the government education system. It also enables them to access need-based training seamlessly without losing out on teaching hours.

This is the first-of-its-kind large-scale digital training and capacity building programme for teachers across India and has been recognised as a best practice to be followed and adopted by other states. The factors that differentiate this solution from others are:

1)The biggest differentiator of this program is the sheer scale this program will achieve with a high focus on quality. Many teacher development programmes are focused on a particular district or set of teachers/officials. Through this program, we are impacting ~2,65,000 + teachers and ~ 6,000 academic officials directly across the whole state of Madhya Pradesh. This ensures we can impact even the remotest regions of the state (that faces mobility issues, lack of transport infrastructure etc.) and make access to quality education realistic for all.

2)The type of training and capacity building support follows a specific structure and training arc. We have devised bite-sized, practical courses that have a consistent structure of pre-work, main course sessions and post-work. This helps ensure that the training 'sticks' and is not forgotten after course participation by the teacher. Most training programmes are lecture-based and do not happen around the year.  

3)The programme is unique in how we have cascaded the communication channels, reaching each district Academic Project Officer (point of contact at a district level in administering the program) and each of the 52 DIETS (District Institutes of Education and Training: Teacher Training bodies at the administrative level of a district in India) in the state. This has been done through a series of carefully crafted communications disseminated before each course and how our Team continuously engages with the districts to track course completion and course learning.

4)Another key differentiator is the holistic focus on systemic transformation for Teacher Development. Beyond the focus on teacher training, we are also building solutions like the Teacher Training Policy framework, Teacher Professional Standards Rubric, Technology backbone for unified teacher development which are long term solutions to strengthening teacher development in the state.

5)Along with being a flagship intervention led and owned by the School Education Department, this program is one of the first programmes that brings all teacher development efforts of an Indian state under one platform. The program is also one of a kind because it works across all dimensions of teacher development and not just teacher training. It integrates all teacher development efforts (learning communities, in-school support) within one unified framework. It is important because it moves the teacher development efforts from being siloed to being holistic and building upon each other. The programme supports teachers by providing multiple opportunities to develop their skills and get the proper support to provide quality education to children.

6)This programme also innovates and pioneers the usage of the national technology platform, DIKSHA. The programme has leveraged a national platform to reach out to teachers directly and has served as an example of direct-to-teacher support. We have also worked closely with DIKSHA to innovate and roll out in-course assessments for the courses. 

CM Rise has been working towards developing a holistic professional development ecosystem in the state of Madhya Pradesh ( an Indian state ~1.2x the size and population of the United Kingdom). Towards this, the programme has modelled successful digital teacher training for 265,000 teachers in the state. The programme led to Madhya Pradesh becoming the first state in India to cross a million and then two million enrolments and completion of digital teacher training courses.

The initial one and a half years of the programme has focused on strengthened capacity building, especially on digital capacity building in the state. In the coming year, digital training will continue to be a core part of teacher professional development. However, it will also strengthen training by transitioning into a blended learning model that mixes online teacher training followed by offline or online learning communities.

The programme is also upskilling other teacher development bodies of the state like District Institute for Education and Training to provide mentoring and monitoring support to the teachers and handhold them to implement these trainings back in their schools. Therefore, teachers get high-quality training and get supported by their peers and mentors to successfully implement the course's learnings back in their schools.

To share how the solution is changing the lives of 265,000+ public school teachers:

Teacher professional development before CM Rise: Teachers travel 20-50 km to training centre for 10 days a year, closing their schools. Trainings have 200+ participants/session, as lectures. In cascaded mode, the core message is lost. There is no further follow-up.

CM Rise model: Teachers access curated, high-quality training digital courses. They download content on their phone, self-paced way. They get a certificate for completion/merit. They then attend a follow-up academic discussion organised in their school cluster, to cross-learn from other teachers. A state-assigned member then observes their classroom implementation of course learnings and gives the teachers feedback against the course learnings. This model has been widely appreciated by teachers, with 90%+ teachers engaging.

In five years, CM Rise will transform India's professional teacher development ecosystem, embedding deeply into the national education system & institutions to create high-quality teachers in every government school to improve student learning outcomes. It will begin the transformation by focusing on six Indian states over the next five years, and replicating parts of the program nationally.

Our strategic goal as an organisation is to adopt and institutionaliseour approach by the state governments and the national Ministry of Education. In the next three years, we will deepen our impact across 100,000 schools, 265,000 teachers and around nine million+ children in Madhya Pradesh while expanding to other states.

Given that the programme leverages the national technology infrastructure for teacher training ~ DIKSHA, it can be seamlessly expanded across all the states, with state-specific training cells developing content that are nuanced and applicable to the state-level issues. We are already working closely with the national teacher training bodies to develop and roll out teacher training courses as part of the NISHTHA (National Initiative for School Heads' and Teachers' Holistic Advancement) training sessions.

CM Rise has gained widespread recognition as a best-practice example of teacher professional development in India, skilling and building the capacity of the entire government school system to deliver high-quality education.

There are three things to scale this model:

1.           Codify our work - To be able to scale further, we need to create assets and toolkits that will increase the ability of other teachers and states to be able to implement this solution. We are developing a teacher competency matrix, codifying the processes around rollout and dissemination, packaging each of the skill-based courses into independent modules, developing the front-facing dashboards for the states and schools to be able to measure improvement, etc.

2.           Respond and strategically expand to other states – We have received interest from Haryana, Delhi, Andhra Pradesh among others to replicate this solution and work in their states. We have a strategic plan to expand our work to 6 states in the coming five years, directing impacting 20 million children and 550,000 teachers.

3.           Discuss national adoption of the CM Rise model – We have had positive discussions with the Ministry of Education Government of India, National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT: an autonomous organisation set up in 1961 by the Government of India to assist and advise the Central and State Governments on policies and programmes for qualitative improvement in school education) and DIKSHA  (India's national teacher training platform) to be able to formulate a national policy and approach towards teacher professional development in India.

4.           We are driving the next wave of enhancements to DIKSHA, the national technology platform. CM Rise has been the pioneer of teacher adoption on DIKSHA, paving the way for other states to learn and implement this solution. As part of the next frontier, we will be working closely with the DIKSHA team to shape the national platform so that it can emerge as a stronger solution and an international example of open-source adoption of technology for societal improvement.

We measure our progress by tracking our reach, engagement, and the change in teachers' knowledge under the purview of our programmes.

To do this, we use a mixed-methods, pre-post design approach to evaluate the programme's impact using a combination of quantitative and qualitative tools. The core of the evaluation will be based on the 'Teacher Professional Standards/Teacher Competency Matrix' (TCM) framework which we have developed and shared with the state officials of the government of Madhya Pradesh. The TCM maps out a series of domains and sub-domains we expect a high performing teacher to display. Each domain and sub-domain is also mapped to a set of 'Knowledge, Skill, and Mindset' indicators that we expect teachers to demonstrate as a result of the teacher professional development component.

The impact evaluation for the CM Rise program will be done on a course-series by course-series basis. For each course-series, we define a set of series learning outcomes which is mapped to a set of 'Knowledge, Skill, and Mindset' (KSM) indicators based on the TCM. The changes in the teachers' KSM are the main outcomes that we will measure. To conduct this analysis, we take the approach of stratified and selective sampling to identify a representative sample of districts to assess the teachers.

Schedule and tools

Evaluation of any course-series will take place across four phases:

• Pre-Course Series, where we measure the existing status quo or baseline and needs in terms of the teachers' KSM vis-à-vis the course outcomes

• During the Course Series, we collect feedback from the teachers and other stakeholders about digital courses and support services. It is also an opportunity to conduct a midline that is relevant for longer course series

• Immediate after the Course Series refers to the two-week period after the series ends. The purpose is to conduct an endline and measure any immediate and noticeable change in the teachers' KSM. It is an indication of the effectiveness of the course series

• Distance from the Course Series refers to the time period of one to six months from the course-series. The purpose is to evaluate the sustainability of mindset and practices

The outcome of each course is measured using a combination of 5 tools – a survey with teachers, in-course assessment, focus group discussions, post-work evaluation rubric, and classroom observations. However, the use of such tools is based on the course requirements. Not all tools are used to evaluate the effectiveness of all courses.

• Survey: This is primarily used to assess the teachers' skills and mindsets, particularly their readiness toward change. This is utilised twice before the launch of the course series and immediately after the course series. Each survey is designed based on the course-series outcomes and approved by the training cell at the state

• In-Course Assessments: These assessments are conducted before and after every course in the series. These are used to assess the improvements in the teachers' knowledge

• Focus Group Discussions (FGDs): The FGDs are facilitated to primarily measure the teachers' mindset and sustainability of their practices. FGDs are typically conducted during the baseline and a few months after the course series ends

• Classroom Observations: Classroom observations are conducted when possible to assess the teachers' skills and practices as well the elements in the physical space that they facilitate as they interact with students to bolster their learning

• Post-Work Evaluation: Teachers are encouraged to submit a post-work for each course providing them with an opportunity to apply their learnings from the course. Post-work will be evaluated during the course series and immediately after the course series

The CM Rise programme aims to create a high-quality teacher for every government school student in Madhya Pradesh. The programme aims to create a government schooling system where every child is highly engaged in the classroom. The programme is building a cadre of high performing teachers that will enable improvement in student learning across the ~100,000 schools in the state.

Towards pursuing the long-term impact of ensuring that every one of the nine million students in the state has access to a high-quality teacher, we are intervening at different levels of the government education system. The primary activities of the programme are mentioned below:

1. Blended Training: We are conducting digital and physical teacher training sessions through digital teacher training courses, post-training course support and assignments etc. These activities are being conducted closely with teachers and academic officials.

2. Coaching: We are building the competencies of the middle management of the government education system to provide constructive feedback to teachers through classroom observations and coaching sessions.

3. Learning Communities: We are nurturing a learning community in the system through regular professional learning communities that are being held to create an ecosystem where peer learning happens regularly, best-practices are shared seamlessly, and teachers across the 52 districts have discussions on teaching practices.

4. Monitoring: We are enabling the system to integrate feedback mechanisms to improve teacher development processes. Towards this, we are rigorously tracking teacher development information and empowering the system to leverage the data in making key decisions.

5. Enabler Initiatives: We also undertake various enabler initiatives to deepen the systemic impact of the programme further. Towards this, we are working on a technology tool to support teacher professional development, creating systems of rewards and recognition and building capacities of various institutions like the District Institute of Education and Training etc.

The outputs that we aim at through these activities are:

- Teachers undergo rigorous training

- Teachers regularly attend follow up activities through post-training implementation

- Support processes for institutional teacher professional development are designed

- Government officials provide teachers with sustained and useful mentorship and feedback

- Sustained change in the teachers' Knowledge, Skills, & Mindsets, defined by an aligned "Teacher Competency Matrix" Institutional changes in the quality of teacher professional development

The short-term outcomes that we aim to achieve are:

- Sustained change in the teachers' Knowledge, Skills, & Mindsets, defined by an aligned "Teacher Competency Matrix"

- Institutional changes in the quality of teacher professional development

At Peepul, we look to serve every last child and teacher in the government system. Towards this, we leverage technology as a critical enabler. For instance, we have used streamlining communications to reach remote areas, making data-based monitoring seamless, increasing teachers' ability to diagnose learning levels accurately, etc. These enable us to scale our work efficiently and ensure we reach underserved communities in far-flung remote and rural areas, especially in our work across the 265,000 teachers across 58,000+ villages and 52 districts of Madhya Pradesh.

Given that our work is with communities who have very low access to technology like smartphones, or do not have the resources to afford internet data packs etc., we are often forced to innovate with our approaches. In the CM Rise program, we have leveraged simple tools like Microsoft PowerPoint and at-home voice recording to create high-quality animated videos. These videos were used in 40+ digital courses in the CM Rise project that have seen immense success across 265,000+ teachers. When the pandemic struck, WhatsApp was a common and accessible means of communication that was used to exchange information and updates. To cut through the clutter of messages, the Team innovated formats (e.g. attractive posters, GIFs) to build brand awareness and affinity towards the project.

We also try to utilise government technology resources maximally. We also help shape them towards enabling teacher and student access and engagement through active feedback loops. For instance, we have built the CM Rise Digital Teacher Training in Madhya Pradesh on the national DIKSHA platform owned by the Government of India. Adopting such technologies also allows us to penetrate into remote regions since these are already embedded in the government education system. As part of our programme rollout, we are understanding the scope for strengthening the platform as well. With the help of teacher feedback, we are able to recommend features and addition which will improve the learning experience of teachers.

We are also working on a technology platform for data-based monitoring. We are building monitoring tools that support the measurement of teacher behaviour change (across knowledge, skills and mindsets) that improve teaching-learning. This technology platform can be a breakthrough in teaching learning by automating the need-based learning journey of teachers as it can potentially tailor personalised learning journeys based on the feedback they receive from School Leaders, School Inspectors, Academic coordinators, etc. It will also empower them to access courses based on their needs in consultation with their mentors.

As part of the program, we have also been working on strengthening the technology infrastructure within Madhya Pradesh towards enabling an improved Professional Development journey for teachers. As we realise this enmeshes and links to other school processes, we are taking a wider lens to the problem. Towards this, we developed a wireframe so that we have a  gamified, guided learning experience for teachers.

m-ShikshaMitra is an existing app of the Education Department in Madhya Pradesh that has been traditionally the one-stop shop for most things teachers need (attendance, programmatic surveys, etc.). Our work with m-ShikshaMitra has involved researching and working towards enhancing the current functionalities of the application and its utility for teachers and education officials. The wireframe we built bridges the gaps identified within the current application, providing the users with more actionable information on different school processes and helping guide them on their administrative tasks. We have also worked on integrating a teacher's professional development journey within the application to ensure m-ShikshaMitra serves as a holistic platform for a teacher's administrative and learning experiences. The wireframe covers the roles and responsibilities of both teachers and education officials since they are both users of the application. 

The enhancements to the application are built on design principles that will create a gamified and guiding experience for teachers and education officials, to ensure they engage with the application to actively perform their administrative duties and participate in their professional development.

The core components of the enhanced application are:

1. An Integrated Dashboard that provides actionable information to teachers and education officials from all data sources within the Madhya Pradesh school system
2. A Teacher/Leader Professional Development Gamified journey to engage teachers/education officials in their learning and implementation practices
3. An Action Tasklist which notifies the user of their upcoming/ongoing administrative and academic tasks, also linking them to their professional development journey
4. A Teacher/Leader Competency Map which allows a user to track their competencies as per Professional Standards
5. A Nudging mechanism that guides teachers/education officials on areas of their professional development and encourages them to complete their tasks
6. A Rewards and Recognition mechanism through a Leaderboard and a personal User Profile

At Peepul, we have a strong focus on ensuring that our work culture and programs incorporate values of diversity, equity and inclusivity. We are an organisation that is driven by women of colour, with 75% of our leadership being women. Even in our programmatic, we look at our beneficiaries as active partners and not merely our beneficiaries. Driving a high rate of beneficiary participation in our work is a success indicator for us. We have therefore designed our hiring strategy to ensure that the community's voice is well represented. Through carefully thought-out strategic decisions, we have strived to ensure that the community's perspectives, and opinions are accounted for.

To illustrate with examples, at our exemplar model schools (one of our core programs beyond this application), which are laboratories of innovation, it is of prime importance to co-create our intervention with the community (particularly parents) and account for their voices. The success of the exemplars feeds into all our programmes through our codification efforts. Therefore, we hire Assistant Teachers who support the main teachers in day-to-day tasks and belong to the communities that our children hail from, thus ensuring that the community is a partner in the learning journey of the child at each step. We also ensure that the community can interface with our implementation team members. E.g. our community officers are hired from similar socio-economic backgrounds as the families. We also have Community Champions in each community we work with who act as a link between our schools and the community while also driving awareness amongst them.

Even while interfacing in the broader government education system in our scale programmes, we carefully hire individuals with the necessary background to engage with middle and lower-level government officers. At each step, our hiring strategy ensures that our beneficiaries can resonate with the person they interact with while we are able to integrate their voice into our decision-making and programme design

Within our organisation, we strive to ensure inclusivity in terms of opinion, gender, religion etc. Even our holiday list is prepared considering the diverse nature of our workforce ensuring that all religions and their major occasions are incorporated by the yearly calendar, and that is not informed by the religion of the majority.

We respect the opinion and voice of every employee in our organisation, and actively create spaces to invite their point of view. We ensure this through platforms created to attain this, and by putting in place policies to support it. The creation of a safe space and a safe working environment is central to this. The second point of our "Peepul Team Values Agreement" states 'respect and celebration of differences' acknowledging that 'it takes people with different ideas, strengths, interests, and cultural backgrounds to make Peepul succeed'. We thus make diverse – contrasting or otherwise – opinions to be central to our success.

The fifth point calls for 'Consciously starting from a place of trust in our relationships and assuming positive intent' and affirming that 'We welcome questions and encourage healthy debate and differences of opinion'. We actively invest time in creating platforms where the Team's diversity can inform decision making. We start our days with 'Daily Stand-Ups' to map how the day looks like across Team, and bring in the necessary alignment wherein every individual expresses their point of view and seeks support. We have quarterly Townhalls, where the Team is informed on the quarterly journey of the organisation and suggestions are factored in for the way forward. We have yearly Retreats with the entire Peepul team which is a step-back and time for reflection on the past year. The Retreats are leveraged to ensure adequate feedback is garnered and opinions are invited on the strategic direction of the organisation. Apart from this, we invest time in training our teams to build their knowledge, skills, mindset and even confidence to contribute to discussions about the organisation and programmes.

CM Rise is a flagship programme of the government of Madhya Pradesh that is building a holistic teacher development ecosystem in the state to improve student learning. It has been designed and implemented in partnership with Peepul as the chief strategy and implementation partner. Below are the key aspects of our business model.

Customers - Serving the bottom two deciles of India's population: The programme serves nine million children in government schools across the state of Madhya Pradesh (Indian district that is ~1.2x the size and population of the United Kingdom). In India, public schools are the only possible outlet for accessing high-quality education. The children that we serve belong to the bottom two deciles of India's population in terms of income and social privilege. The state that we work in is the second most poor district in India as per the Global multi-dimensional Poverty Index, 2018. A large number of our students are also from protected caste and tribal designations.

Our service - Building an education system that cares for each student: The programme works towards creating high-quality teachers for every one of the nine million students in the state of Madhya Pradesh. The programme takes a holistic approach to developing a teacher professional development ecosystem in the state where every teacher has need based and contextual support. The programme takes a systemic approach focusing on multiple leverage points in the government education system to shift the system towards focussing on student learning.

The programme has built out the digital teacher training competencies of the government education system, creating a blueprint for national replication. It has already received a wide range of accolades with 85% of the 265,000 teachers in the state enrolling and completing the digital teacher training courses.

Our strategy - High-Leverage Model: The programme is implemented through a high leverage model that takes the support of existing government resources. The government puts in 10x cost support (existing government resources and fund allocations) compared to our project costs. Therefore, our interventions have exponential impact per rupee as working with the government allows us quicky and seamless amplification through their existing systems. The programme has also deepened the application of the DIKSHA platform, which India's national teacher training portal for teacher development.

Our Impact - Rigorously tracking teaching-learning data: We have a detailed Theory of Change informing the programme design based on which we continuously track the programme progress. Throughout the two years of the project, we have tracked multiple indicators to understand the impact. Through analysis of the post-work of the teachers, and the in-course tests we have been able to also gauge the shift in knowledge, skills and mindset of the teachers undergoing the courses. We have also witness change in classroom behaviour and management by teachers in line with courses learning through our intensive field visits.

In the time since launch (since May 2020 till December 2021), the programme has seen immense success on consumption and engagement; below are some metrics for the 47 digital teacher training courses rolled out so far:

Uptake:

• -265,000+ schoolteachers across Madhya Pradesh enrolled in the digital teaching courses, at 87%+ course completion rates.
• -Cumulatively, CM Rise has delivered 22.5 million+ learning hours
• -Total number of course completions as part of the program stand at 10+ million

Engagement:

• -In  a phone survey across an 1100 teacher sample, 80% of teachers showed intent to continue these courses
• -Our state-wide YouTube Live trainings for the digital courses, have had 70,000 live viewers per session, and more than 2,00,000 total views, on average.

Learning

• - Average post-course assessment scores for the courses are at 70%, indicating significant knowledge retention and improvement of core concepts across all courses
• - Further, in specific courses, we have also been able to track the improvement in the teachers' knowledge levels before the courses and after the courses. The average score improved from 56% in the pre-course assessment to 69% in the post-course assessment
• - For each series of training, we also map out the expected outcomes for teachers in terms of their knowledge, skills, and mindsets. As part of a digital training course on 'Home-Based Learning', our study showed that teachers showed improvement across all our knowledge indicators and some of the skill indicators. For example, while 71% of teachers acknowledged that part of their role in home-based learning was to customise content even for children without smartphones during the baseline, 79% reported this in the endline.

Peepul in a not-for-profit organisation with a social purpose towards attaining goals in the domain of education. We are registered as a society under the society registration act 1860, under the constitution of India.

Given the nature of our organisation wherein we don't sell any service, or make any profits, we rely on grants and donations. Towards this, we actively pursue corporates, foundations, HNIs and implement a crowdfunding strategy to sustain our work.

Since we deploy a high leverage model, ensuring that we can efficiently utilise government resources, we are able to manage our costs in a manner that we can work in a lean setup. Throughout the year, we invest time in creating a pipeline of leads, and engaging with them to unlock capital for our impact projects.

As an organisation, we have developed our fundraising capabilities over the years and built a diversified and stable portfolio of partners who support our projects financially. Many of these partners have supported us in shaping our impact, and with whom we have multi-year agreements towards supporting our work.

Towards ensuring that we have ample financial resources to sustain our impact, our budgets have grown rapidly over the last three years. From a 5 Cr operating budget in 2019, we have grown to an 11 Cr operating budget for the years 2021-22. In addition, we have also built a corpus of funds that gives us financial security and flexibility to pursue our programmatic goals and objectives in line with the needs of our beneficiaries.

We are supported by a wide array of partners. We have corporate partners who support our work as per the Corporate Social Responsibility Rules under the Companies Act 2013, Constitution of India, these include entities like Bank of America Ltd, State Bank of India, Garter, Mercer etc. Many of these partners have been supporting us for a long time reinstating their faith and belief in our cause. We also have renowned Indian foundations that support us like the Central Square Foundation, and NCore. We also have a number of members of the Big Bang family of funders supporting our work – Mulago Foundation, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, David Weekly Foundation etc. Many of our funders are our partners with whom we have established long term relationships, which allows us to plan aggressively to combat the issues we are solving for.

We have dedicated fundraising and finance teams in place who work in tandem to ensure that the organisation has rigorous financial planning towards achieving our outcomes. We engage in timely reviews of our cash flows, fundraising pipelines etc. to ensure that we are on track and cover any financial gap that is visible in our strategies. We also focus on ensuring that we have a diverse group of partners supporting us so that our portfolio remains relatively stable and immune to market disruptions. Based on these exercises we continue to pursue our robust pipeline of funding opportunities.