Monitoring and evaluation at a scale....

     I stumbled upon a job opportunity with an NGO EdTech recently and the expectation was how to monitor and evaluate teachers/educators in Govt. schools at a scale that is across India. Yes I agree it is quiet a challenge when we hardly take a sample size of sessions to monitor. It will be easily skewed towards that particular session's performance and not really going to be a true judge of all sessions.

    Nevertheless, if we are to go ahead with this sample size sessions, I was on the thought process of how to approach this problem. Here is my two cents:

   (i) Let me first define what indicators to look for in a teaching/facilitating sessions. Different category of indicators are involved here -  (a) Instructor/Teacher   (b) Learner/student  (c) Tools utilized  (d) Teaching methodologies applied.   But ultimately the bottom line questions are - 

                     "Did the learners learnt how to apply the knowledge gained?"  

                      "Was the learning outcome met?"  

                      "Can the learners create something new from the knowledge acquired?"

     (ii)  Next comes the way to collect these indicators...i.e. the data. Do we have means to collect this data from various sources?  Would a simple Teacher/Instructor observation form (google form) suffice for Teacher indicators? What about the student or learner's indicators?  We would obviously have a database of projects, feedbacks, observations from all 4 category of indicators.

       Post data collection, the real challenge is to look for best practices in those to mimic across all sessions and locations.

     (iii) Third part comes the analysis of the data collected to derive meaningful information like best practices applied, best teaching methodology applied on that topic, best projects that students did etc.

From a leadership team perspective, they would definitely look for dashboards with schools/district/state levels to see the classroom effectiveness to learn better.  

     (iv) Finally comes the CSI (Continuous Service Improvement), using the analyzed data for improving the classroom effectiveness. Yes it could involve more teacher trainings, inspiring students to   do more, better tools to use, best teaching methodology for that topic etc. 

       With all this said and done, it is easy to formulate a prescription after a year's monitor and evaluation with improvements implemented. But the real challenge would be not to make it so structured in approach that the teacher/instructor loses the freedom and make it a monotonous task.

      Oh, I totally forgot the last part, narrating the story of all these helped us in making an impact to schools at a minute level, then the progress towards the district and then the state. Believe me, after this it is all about marketing the stories to appropriate levels to further the trust already gained.

P.S. To build something at this scale, I also took the help of ChatGPT to get some perspective. It did add a lot of value. Few of the thoughts above are help from ChatGPT too.