About the Project
Million Sparks Foundation is a Non Profit NGO focused on enabling the lifelong learning and continuous capacity building of teachers and school leaders with an objective to impact the life and learning outcomes of Children. Million Sparks Foundation uses ChalkLit a mobile application platform to enable the professional development of teachers at the national and global scale it requires.
Context and Issue
Education has been ailing with several problems. In the long term each of these problems need to be solved. Research has shown that teachers are the single most important determinant of life and learning outcomes of students. However, the current teacher education and in service professional development is not in line with the requirements of the current times. There are two large gaps in education in the context of teacher education which does not allow them to prepare their students for the future workforce effectively 1. Skill Gap : The best of what today’s education systems have to offer is not delivered equally to rich and poor children owing to a gap in teachers skills. Existing teacher training and capacity building methods will take a 100 years to fill this gap. The teacher training methods need to be leapfrogged and scaled. Teachers need to be enabled to provide inclusive education. 2. Skill Uncertainty : A child born today will enter the workforce in 2045. There is no certainty on what skills will be required for this child to enter and succeed in the workforce and have good life outcomes. Nearly all education systems globally are narrowly focused on Numeracy and Literacy which are very much required but are at best hygiene in the context of the future workforce. Education systems need to reorient and teachers capacity has to be built towards broad set of skills and competencies especially the ability to self learn, social skill, emotional skills, life skills, gender, financial literacy, vocational skills, entrepreneurial skills, resilience, ethics, appreciation of sustainability and SDGs. If the above gaps are not filled we will be unable to fulfil our promise to our future generations.
Solution and Impact
1. Trainings : These trainings are offered online on both Scholastic and Co-Scholastic topics. These training are created for all grade and help teachers with classroom that have multiple level of children. These trainings are highly interactive and evaluate a teachers progress during the training at various states to assure that the required learning is taking place. We have partnered with the government and school associations and these organization provide certification to the teachers.
2. Teacher Tools : The platform provides very well structured enhanced lesson plans and annual plans for a teacher’s tactical need of delivering a great next class supports. These lessons are across K-12 and teachers can select language, grade, subject, topics and sub-topics for which they need these lesson plans that are developed in partnership with subject matter experts, highly experience teachers and educators.
3. Teacher Community in the form of a Social personalized peer to peer microlearning network on which teachers are daily provided a broad set of inputs around best best practices of other teachers, news, pedagogy, concept, SDG, Life Skills, subject, puzzles, opinion polls, state announcements etc.
More than 570K teachers are using the platform for their own life long learning and continuous capacity building and impacting at least 20M children annually. The project aims to provide 4-6 training each year to every teacher and expose them to extremely interesting and relevant topics which they can inform their children and their communities about. The Government of Delhi conducted an independent research study based on a classroom observation tool. This tool was developed by Google.org, and Mission Measurement that was further enhanced by the Government, the National Council of Education Research and Training, and the Jamia Milia University.
Some of the key findings were:
– ChalkLit Teachers are 20% more prepared with lesson plans
– Teachers are 30% more likely to address student misconceptions
– ChalkLit Teachers are 28% more likely to use multiple teaching strategies and address varying learning styles
– ChalkLit Teachers are 22% more likely to connect topics to real life
– Students are 10% more likely to participate in class owing to new teaching strategies.
Future Developments
1.Development of a crowd sourced teacher led video development platform to ensure that content can be made available in the vernacular
2. Enhancements to ensure that the teacher can invite parents and students also to come and start using the chalklit platform
3. Developing interfaces to ensure that end beneficiaries and their authorities or content providers are able to better track the usage of the platform and the consumption of trainings and content by the various stakeholders – teachers – students – parents – school leaders
4. Develop automated tools to perform measurement and evaluation
5. Make the platform into a set of libraries so that it can be used to create other instances of lifelong learning platforms that can be customized to address the requirement of other verticals such as healthcare, vocational, blue collar workers, youth, etc.