In the short span of six months, 4 Taleemabad schools have popped up in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. In the next 2 months, 6 more are expected, with the number swelling to 40 by the start of the next school cycle in March.
It’s incredibly exciting to witness what happens the moment a school signs up with Taleemabad.
First, they get an on-demand, expertly crafted teacher training program. Teacher training has always been disliked by teachers – who wants to sit for 7 hours on a weekend and be overloaded with theories and approaches? We design teacher training with the same philosophy that we design student courses. Training is bite sized and game-based, doesn’t take more than 10-15 minutes every week, and available via a dedicated portal to the teacher at opportune moments. We build around our teachers. Hear them talk about how difficult it is to turn it around, and how we help them do it.
Second, each teacher gets a step by step, minute by minute lesson plan for every class that she teaches. It’s available on the click of a button, and is as easy as following a recipe. This means that within a few weeks, schools that had focused on rote learning earlier are now pushing project-based, activity-driven and understanding fueled lessons, using some of the most modern, research-backed tools for teaching. The energy of the school picks up, attendance rises and word of mouth lands more admissions. See a lesson plan demo below:
More importantly, see what it does in real life. Here’s a school that rote learned Math/Science before, but within weeks of becoming a Taleemabad School is now teaching Math and Science in an interdisciplinary way (called SMATH), helping students learn by doing; creating projects and experiments to supplement their learning. The students in the video are building constellations (Science – Solar System) using their knowledge of Angles (Math). They’re also building models of the earth and tilting the axis angle to see how heat/light gets affected.
Third, every school gets the Taleemabad brand. It helps them stand out, and helps us use our national reach (1 million Taleemabad App downloads, 8 million weekly TV + radio subscribers) to route admissions to these schools.
Fourth, but most importantly, all of it is driven via Taleemabad technology. Schools run lesson plans, attendance, test scores, fee payments through the Taleemabad Learning Management System. Lesson plans extensively leverage Taleemabad’s massive content library (600+ videos for all subjects, 40,000 assessments), so that teaching quality rarely dips from school to school. When children go back home, the same content is available via broadcast TV and radio, as well as on the Taleemabad Learning app. Soon, homework will be assigned via our LMS, delivered to every home via a notification on the Taleemabad App.
Using technology in this way means i) rapid scaling can become possible, reducing operational and monitoring overhead ii) the wealth of data on teachers/students can help us design experiments/interventions well in advance, and iii) give school level data in a consolidated, crisp form to school owners so that they are empowered to act early and act fast to improve learning/reduce attrition/dropouts, as well as build sustainable businesses.
Over the next 5 years, we aim to launch 1000 of these schools. This certainly means that we can’t do it alone. At scale, all potential options will need to be pushed: whether it is existing schools, entrepreneurs looking to open new schools, or even the public sector looking for public-private partnerships to improve learning outcomes in a cost effective way.
If you’re interested in joining our team, read the following document and get in touch. If you’re a school owner/teacher who wants to adopt this method, or and entrepreneur who wants to open a new school, reach out to us at sales@taleemabad.com. If you’re an investor and would like to participate in our round (opening in August), I’d love to talk to you, and am reachable at h.yasin@orendaproject.org.
Let’s change the future of education in Pakistan!
2022-07-13
