Teacher Innovator Program

55% of India’s children faced learning poverty, pre-Covid. One in two school-going 10-year-olds can not read simple text and three in 4 are unable to do basic math. If children do not gain these foundational skills by the age of 10, the doors of learning are likely shut for them forever.  

The pandemic has exponentially exacerbated children’s learning losses, with barely 8% of rural children engaging in any learning at all during the school shutdowns, as per the recent SCHOOL survey. An earlier study by APU reported that over 82% of children had lost one critical ability in Language or Math during the pandemic.  

A year of learning loss is huge for children from disadvantaged communities and will widen inequities. Globally, the World Bank estimates up to 5.5 million students dropping out and facing substantial learning losses. This will have a lifetime impact on the civic and economic participation of a generation of disadvantaged students and increase their vulnerability to exploitation. The OECD pegs the economic losses from 1/3 year of learning loss at USD 6,368 billion in India. The disruption to learning is already greater in India, and these losses will grow proportionately if left unaddressed. 

Teachers matter most to student learning. CEQUE upskills teachers to adopt effective teaching methodologies that impact student learning.  

Its flagship Teacher Innovator Program (TIP) is a 3-year quality professional learning program for government and low-income private school teachers. Its components include a well-defined Teacher Education Curriculum, School Leadership support and Community Participation.  

TIP partners with district education departments and intensively coaches teachers through its ‘Learn-Do-Lead’ model. Teachers learn and adopt innovative teaching strategies in language and math to measurably improve student learning outcomes. Further, a subset of the most pedagogically sound teachers is trained as teacher leaders to serve the longer-term teacher training needs of the district. 

To address the specific issue of learning loss due to school closures, TIP is additionally supporting teachers through a team of community workers and a curriculum for building foundational literacy and numeracy. 

TIP is cost-effective at 3% of the annual per-child-spend in government schools in Maharashtra.  

CEQUE also strengthens the in-service teacher education ecosystem through: 

a.             Skilling cluster resource coordinators in academic leadership to provide academic support to teachers

b.             An open-source high-quality video resource repository on best teaching strategies, for teachers, to learn from - anytime, anywhere.

We wish to upskill teachers in government and low-income private schools and impact the student learning outcomes of children from the most underserved and marginalized communities. Through our flagship Teacher Innovator Program, we aim to upskill 8000+ teachers over 5 years from 2700 schools impacting the learning of 250,000 children. In addition, at the end of the 5 years, our goal is to create around 2000 pedagogically robust teacher leaders to sustain the impact in a district and empower the district to serve its longer-term needs of improving the quality of education.

 Currently, our work is in 6 blocks in Maharashtra. At the end of 5 years, we intend to reach 27 blocks in and outside of Maharashtra.