Improving Education Quality through Teacher Training
Even though access to education in India has improved, quality remains a concern. According to 2015 statistics, only 16% of Grade 10 students are at grade level in math and over half read below grade level. Subpar education means limited job prospects — only 2.3% of the Indian workforce has undergone formal skill training. Improving the quality of education starts with improving the quality of teacher professional development in India.
Learning Links Foundation Empowers Teachers
Learning Links Foundation (LLF) is one of India’s most respected education organizations with one of the largest teacher professional development networks. Overall, the nonprofit’s vision is to improve literacy and numeracy amongst adolescents studying in government schools of India.
High-quality teacher professional development is the starting point for all of LLF’s interventions. Their flagship STEP (Student Teacher Empowerment Program) program provides teacher capacity enhancement, classroom observation of teachers, and personalized mentoring. By training over 2 million teachers, LLF has positively impacted the education of more than 16.4 million students. Over 80% of the teachers trained by Learning Links Foundation reported improvement in their instructional skills. These skills result in better student retention and lower dropout rates.
Team4Tech Helps Launch Online Coursework
Learning Links Foundation is deeply invested in building teacher capacity but has been limited by its resource-intensive, in-person training. To scale and reach more teachers, Learning Links partnered with Team4Tech in 2020 to launch a massive open online course (MOOC) for its teacher professional development curriculum. Because 99% of teachers in India now have smartphones), offering digital training unleashes huge potential in rural areas.
Over the next few years, Learning Links aims to partner with Team4Tech to develop a dashboard for government officials who support schools. This dashboard will monitor teacher activity and usage of the teacher development courses, as well as document feedback from observations. The plan is also to use data science to extract insights on teacher performance that can help inform future training and development needs and requirements.
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