Inspiring Teachers

At Inspiring Teachers, our mission is to enhance the educational experience by empowering teachers, school leaders, and parents with the tools and insights to ensure every child achieves their full potential in foundational literacy and numeracy. Our vision is to transform educational practices through innovation and technology, making quality education accessible and effective for all students, regardless of their background.

Our Core Values:

• Learning: We value curiosity and practical learning. We encourage our team to learn by doing and to seek feedback constantly. This helps us understand more and grow together as a team.

• Resourcefulness:  We see challenges as opportunities to get creative and find solutions. We combine our different skills and ideas to solve problems, which makes our team stronger and more innovative.

• Teamwork: We support each other and work together to achieve big goals. By helping each other and building trust, we accomplish more together than we could alone.
• Trust: Trust helps us communicate openly and share ideas freely. We build trust by listening well, making our work transparent, setting goals and making ourselves accountable. We also celebrate our successes, share experiences, and enjoy our work together.

Shivam Rawal will be the engagement manager for the LEAP Project and will lead it through its various phases: Discover, Design, Delivery, and Dissemination. Shivam's involvement with Inspiring Teachers began in 2021 when he served as the Lead Author for the Assessment Informed Instruction Practitioners Guide at the Central Square Foundation. Since joining our team in 2024, Shivam has been instrumental in supporting our monitoring, evaluation, and program improvement agenda.

Shivam's expertise in assessments, program design and managing education evaluations has been crucial in refining our approach to educational interventions, helping to enhance the impact and efficacy of our programs. 

We are a dynamic, remote, full-time team that brings together experienced educationalists, designers, technologists and teachers.

Dr Emmanuel Larbi Mantey is our Program Director and leads our programs, while Shivam Rawal leads our testbed learning projects,  supporting our monitoring, evaluation and program improvement agenda.  

Regina Mensah leads the implementation of the Inspiring Reading Program, and Hannah Salt is the Instructional Design Lead for it. Meanwhile, Tom Lewis is a co-founder and Head of Product, and Lukasz Labedzki is the Lead Engineer for the SmartCoach Platform. 

Dr Monica Lambon-Quayefio and Professor Jason Kerwin of the University of Washington support our research agenda. Both Monica and Jason are JPAL-invited researchers. Inspiring Teachers is led by CEO Simon Graffy, who co-founded the organisation with Head of Product Tom Lewis.

All of the above team members will be involved in delivering the program as part of our LEAP Project. However, we anticipate that Shivam Rawal, Dr Larbi Mantey and Simon Graffy will be most involved in supporting the LEAP team. 

A literacy assessment app enabling teachers to assess, regroup students, and create report cards to involve parents in learning journeys.

Over 93% of children in Ghana are enrolled in a school, but just 2% of second-grade students can read at grade level, less than half can read a single word, and just a quarter can answer a basic conceptual maths question. 

The crux of the issue is that teachers don't have the tools or training they need to assess their students and tailor their teaching to meet them at their level. The result is a situation where many children are in the classroom but left behind, unable to read from the board or access grade learning materials. 

This situation has persisted because school leaders and district officials do not get actionable data on student progress in early-grade reading. In effect, Without accurate and timely data, it is difficult for them to effectively support teachers and intervene where necessary. 

Additionally, many parents are not adequately informed or involved in their children's learning journeys, particularly in reading. This lack of involvement means that children miss out on crucial support at home, further hindering their literacy development. 

The result is that most children in public schools are not building the foundational literacy skills they need to succeed in later grades. While the majority of teachers and school leaders aspire to impact their students' lives significantly, they find themselves constrained within a system characterized by low trust and minimal accountability in educational delivery. As a result, teachers frequently lack the support necessary to be effective, which perpetuates a cycle where educational challenges are not adequately addressed, and student outcomes do not improve. 

These problems call for an approach that enhances support for teachers, empowers school leaders to better oversee and assist classrooms, and actively involves parents. By addressing these key areas, the foundation can be laid for a more robust educational system where all children can achieve their full potential.

To address the educational challenges in Ghana, our solution introduces a multi-pronged approach that equips teachers with effective assessment tools, enabling parents to participate actively in their children's education and providing school leaders and district officials with the data they need for informed decision-making

Our solution equips teachers with literacy assessment and student tracking tools via SmartCoach, designed explicitly for low-resource classrooms. This tool enables teachers to regularly assess every child in their classroom and take action to target instruction better to support struggling learners. This ensures that teaching in the classroom is more effective and tailored to student needs.

In addition, the solution provides parents with reading report cards to help them support their child at home. This enables parents to understand their child’s reading progress and get their child to do level-appropriate reading practice at home. Through this, children’s reading skills are reinforced at home, so they become more fluent.

Moreover, it equips school leaders with tools for supporting assessment-informed instruction in the classroom. School leaders coach and monitor teachers to ensure they assess children and target their instruction. As a result, children learn to read faster in the classroom and catch up if they have fallen behind.

Finally, the solution provides district-wide dashboards for district officials to enable data-driven support for teachers. District staff use data to prioritize school visits and better target their support to ensure effective program delivery. This results in officials focusing on supporting teachers to improve learning outcomes.

In conclusion, our solution is strategically designed to enhance the educational landscape in Ghana by integrating tools and resources across multiple levels of the educational system. This holistic solution addresses immediate educational needs and lays a strong foundation for a sustainable and progressive educational environment where every child can thrive.

Our organization, Inspiring Teachers, in collaboration with the Centre for Professional Development, Training and Education (CPDTE), has engaged in multiple forms of research and evaluation to establish and enhance the effectiveness of our educational solutions. The goal of these efforts is to improve learning outcomes for children in Ghana by addressing key barriers to quality education. 

Initially, we conducted foundational research, including comprehensive reviews of national assessments and existing literature, to understand the depth of the challenges in Ghana's education sector. For example, the 2018 National Assessments revealed that only a small percentage of second-grade children could read at the grade level, with even fewer able to read a single word or solve basic math problems. 
 
We have actively engaged in formative research, utilizing usability studies, feasibility studies, and case studies. For instance, we have launched the Inspiring Teachers Peer Coaching Program and Platform in several schools across Ghana and received positive feedback, which has informed the continued development and scaling of the program. Our learning assessment tracking solution, including the SmartCoach app and other tools, has also been created based on the formative research findings. 
 
For summative evaluation, we have planned robust monitoring and evaluation systems, including the implementation of student oral reading fluency and literacy assessments to gauge learning gains and the use of surveys and focus groups for program feedback. Moreover, a prospective partnership with a research institution for a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the program's impact is in consideration for the demonstration phase. 
 
As we move forward, we will continue leveraging our research efforts to actively pursue a learning agenda that includes optimizing teacher-led assessments, integrating mobile technology in structured pedagogy, and exploring innovative testbed programs in low-fee schools. 
 
These comprehensive research initiatives underscore the dedication of Inspiring Teachers and CPDTE to continually strengthen the evidence base of our solutions, ensuring that our programs are not just effective but also responsive to the needs of Ghanaian educators and students. 

Since January 2024, we have been gathering weekly assessment data from the 7 testbed schools in Cape Coast Ghana, where we have been trialling our Inspiring Reading Program; so far, we have been able to conduct 1,568 literacy assessments with 442 learners across 20 classrooms. 

We have seen a strong uptake of our program by teachers, and our early analysis suggests that students in our treatment group are becoming fluent readers faster than those in our 8-classroom control group. At this stage, our goal is to hone the program and our tools, but we hope to prove this in a larger research project starting at the beginning of the next academic year. 

By September 2025, we aim to have a full year of treatment and control data for comparison and we hope to show a large effect size on student oral reading fluency as well as other measures of foundational literacy. If we do, this would be consistent with the wider research, which shows that children learn more when they are consistently taught “at their level” and that systematic phonics instruction can accelerate children’s progress towards achieving fluency if implemented effectively in the classroom. 

Through our testbed programs, we have seen a strong uptake of SmartCoach and our paper-based assessment-informed instruction tools, and it was, in fact, feedback from teachers that led us to develop our digitised assessment tracking tools. Although we are yet to roll out app-based dashboards, we expect strong demand from school leaders and officials who, during our consultations, have repeatedly expressed enthusiasm for these features on our roadmap.  

Although we are only now launching report cards, other programs, including the EGRA PLUS project run by Research Triangle International in Liberia, have demonstrated that they can be a highly effective program component. Schools we are supporting already provide report cards. However, these just rank students against their classmates and do not include more actionable measures of literacy, such as reading fluency or phonics skills. Our hypothesis is, therefore, that by providing clearer report cards that include recommendations for how parents can support their child’s reading, we will be able to better engage parents as contributors to their literacy learning journey. 

The technology access surveys we conducted during our formative assessment show that over 90% of teachers in the school we support in Ghana have smartphones, and all schools in Cape Coast have adequate GSM network coverage, but most teachers frequently run out of mobile data. With these constraints in mind, we built SmartCoach as an offline-first application and have used compression software to ensure that syncing data and content is as cheap as possible. 

At Inspiring Teachers, we have been systematically working to remove barriers to scaling our organisation's impact. We believe that to scale, our approach needs to be Simple, Cheap, Highly Effective, Manageable for delivery government and Evidenced (SCHEME). 

This makes building strong evidence of the cost-effectiveness of our program and proving the validity of our assessment tools our strategic priority, which means that engaging in a LEAP Project would be particularly valuable for our team. 

Having secured a JPAL research partnership and with a funding pathway to 180 schools over the next three years, we have an opportunity to begin a research-led scaling journey in Ghana. We hope to use the LEAP project to prove that student progress data gathered by teachers using our tools is a valid way to track foundational learning outcomes and, therefore, can justifiably be used for decision-making at the district level. 

Demonstrating that our approach gives district officials reliable data on learning and that that leads to better teacher support and improved outcomes would enable us to make a case for rolling our approach out across whole districts, creating a pathway for long-term scaling of the approach by Ghana Education Services. 

The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic has created a situation where smartphone access is nearly universal among teachers. There is a strong demand for technology-based solutions to improve foundational learning outcomes, but very few proven tools exist. We believe this has created a window of opportunity for tools like ours to be scaled if they have a strong evidence base. We are therefore seeking to participate in the LEAP program to refine our approach, deepen our evidence base and build a larger demonstration program with the government. 

The tools we have built and continue to develop have the potential to be implemented to improve learning outcomes in education systems across Africa, and through a LEAP Project, we hope to take important steps towards setting our approach on a path to improving learning at scale in Ghana and other countries across the continent. 

1. How effectively do teachers implement smartphone-based literacy assessments, and do these assessments inform their understanding of student literacy levels?
2. To what extent do the data from these assessments influence the actions of teachers, school leaders, and officials in providing targeted support and interventions for students who need it? 
3.  Are parents satisfied with the information provided in report cards, and does providing our report cards increase the frequency and quality of reading practices at home?

We hope to use our LEAP project to run a 12-week implementation research project where we trial and create a case study around running a fully-featured rollout of our SmartCoach-powered Assessment-Informed Instructional Approach. 

We aim to do this during the second 6 weeks of the first term of the Ghanaian academic year by working with 7 Sandbox schools that are already receiving the Inspiring Reading Program. These schools are in Cape Coast. 

At the end of the project, we hope to co-host a webinar with the Institute for Education Planning and Administration (IEPA) and use that moment as a strategic engagement opportunity with Ghana Education Services. 

Our LEAP project will fall into four stages (Design, Deliver, Develop, and Disseminate), with the LEAP team playing a critical role in each. During the design phase, the research framework will be defined, and survey tools will be developed to be used for monitoring the pilot. We anticipate this will involve desk research and collaboration with our team as well as analysis of our methodology. 

In the Deliver Phase, Inspiring Teachers will implement the SmartCoach assessment solution in the 7 sandbox schools, ensuring that teachers, school leaders, parents and officials are equipped and supported to implement the approach. As part of this, our team will manage data collection.

During the Development phase, we hope our LEAP team will lead the creation of a white paper designed to communicate our approach and lessons learned from our case study to a wider audience. This might include an initial literature review, a summary of our approach and then an overview of the methods and findings from our case study. We anticipate it might include analysis of usage and assessment data, as well as learnings from surveys run with teachers, school leaders, parents and officials. 

If appropriate, the paper might include a cost-effective analysis and recommendations for potential expanded implementation in partnership with IEPA and Ghana Education Services. Finally, during the dissemination phase, we hope our LEAP team will help us co-host a webinar with the IEPA, aiming to communicate the learnings to a wider audience. As well as developing the white paper, in preparation for this webinar, we hope the LEAP team will be able to develop a presentation on the project and identify and invite stakeholders from both within and beyond Ghana.

During the LEAP project, we hope to learn more about the practicalities of implementing our approach and identify opportunities to improve it.  

In addition, through a case study evaluation of the project, we hope to test our hypothesis that: 

1. Assessments gathered by teachers using our tools are valid and lead to better-targeted teaching.
2. Parents who receive the report cards take action to support their child’s learning.
3. School leaders will use our tools to coach and monitor teachers, ensuring they assess children and target their instruction. 
4. Officials getting data from the use of these tools provide better-targeted school support

Achieving the above would put us further down the path to having an approach that is simple enough, cheap enough, and that has been demonstrated to be both highly effective and manageable through a delivery model that could be replicated by the government. 

In addition, we hope to use this project to refine our assessments report cards, identify opportunities to make SmartCoach ever more intuitive for users and ensure our dashboarding tools are giving teachers, school leaders and officials the insights they need to take coherent and aligned action to support improved teaching and learning. 
Moreover, insights gained from the evaluation of our report card system will be pivotal to enhancing parental communication strategies. We will also develop parent-focused guidance materials, leveraging the increased engagement to reinforce reading practices at home.

Beyond our users, we hope to use the white paper we develop as a tool for Ghana Education Services decision-makers in our work so as to set the stage for future partnerships and collaborations during scaling. 

The overall intention is that through the process of this project, our team will grow its capacity and that we will emerge equipped to run termly mini-implementation research projects in our testbed programs. 

We hope this 12-week LEAP Project sprint will help us grow as an organisation by helping us refine our approach to supporting teachers, parents, school leaders, and officials and by getting us ready for a future scaling partnership with Ghana Education Services. 

At the program level, we believe having a team of engaged experts supporting us in running a pilot and producing a case study will help us validate and demonstrate the potential of our tools. 

Specifically, by demonstrating that teacher-led literacy assessment data can be more accurately and efficiently gathered and acted on when gathered via SmartCoach, used to produce report cards and made available in dashboards, we hope to prove the concept for a more integrated approach to literacy programming.  

In addition, by showing that teachers, parents, school leaders and officials value our tools and use them consistently in efforts to improve learning, we hope to demonstrate that they are easy to use and are ready to be successfully deployed on a larger scale program with a more rigorous evaluation. 

By implementing our approach and producing a case student, we hope to generate evidence that equipping school leaders and officials with real-time data on learning can catalyse a shift away from the current low-trust accountable approach towards more purposeful and data-driven teacher support as a mindset for foundational literacy program delivery. 

In doing so, we hope to both refine and streamline our approach while at the same time building a persuasive case for a larger trial and partnership with Ghana education services. 

Achieving these outcomes would position Inspiring Teachers teachers for larger funding partnerships and mean that our LEAP project was a timely boot camp for our organisation in its transition towards a larger scale impact for children across Ghana.