By 2019, the World Bank’s PRIEDE project had exceeded several of its goals. Aiming to improve Kenyan students’ base math skills, it had distributed over 3 million textbooks, appraised nearly 30,000 teachers, and its national student information system had registered 96 percent of all students nationwide.
But in 2020, the program requested $9 million more to rollout a teacher training campaign. Halfway through, it had recorded a 2.5 percent decline in the grade 2 math skills it was trying to improve, having omitted to train educators on how to use the new resources effectively. The decline was eventually recovered but the project ultimately concluded that distributing materials had almost no positive effect on learning outcomes.
A Major Problem
It is notable that even in 2020 the World Bank introduced targeted teacher support only after a key indicator declined. More concerning is that it’s not an isolated case.
Teachers are consistently under-prepared to incorporate tech tools into their classrooms. Governments and development organizations have financed material distribution without similar investments in training educators on how, when and why to use these tools. In 2020, only 10 percent of Kenyan teachers were using the more than one million laptops distributed through a Digital Literacy Program between 2016 and 2018.
Rwanda, an African edtech leader, plowed on with the (formerly) UN-backed One Laptop Per Child initiative without explaining how teachers should work with them. And U.S. schools regularly pay for tools but not for educator training.
Although it’s vital for true results, teacher training is often neglected due to its relatively high cost, time commitment and hard-to-measure immediate impact.
Survey after survey shows educators’ deep dissatisfaction with the amount of support they receive, especially when it comes to integrating technologies into their classrooms. The Promethean State of Technology in Education UKI Report found that over 64 percent of U.K. educators were dissatisfied with the training they received; only 15 percent believed they had received satisfactory training in edtech.
Bart Epstein, CEO of the U.S.-based EdTech Evidence Exchange, sees it as a major problem, especially given that more schools are using technology following the pandemic. “Too many schools think the cost of training and professional development and support are optional,” Epstein has told EdSurge. He adds that schools might spend $125,000 for a license, but decline the $25,000 training package offered along with it.
Scaling and modernizing training schemes, when they are implemented, are also a challenge. “Legacy teacher training in the U.S. is outdated,” with little hands-on learning, says Taylor Chapman, partner at the higher education investment fund SEI Ventures. “This is a key area for innovation.” Some companies are beginning to emerge but many of them offer simple online certifications that are overall of low quality.
Teachers Want Solutions
“Before the pandemic, one of EdTech founders’ greatest challenges was engaging teachers with digital tools,” said Thiago Rached, founder of Brazilian writing-improvement tool Letrus, at the LATAM EdTech Show. This also cropped up in our interviews with Chinese teachers in early 2020 about the shift to remote learning. But “that’s completely changed. The pandemic got teachers to understand there’s no way back from tech and that it can help them in many ways,” Rached says.
Teachers are eager for training opportunities. Initially worried about how to incentivize educators to attend training sessions, Misan Rewane, the co-founder of West Africa Vocational Education (WAVE), noted how enthusiastic educators were about the initiative. “Teachers generally want to do a good job, they just don’t have a lot of time,” she says.
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