What we do?
Million Sparks Foundation is a non-profit organization with an objective to impact teacher and school leadership capacity through continuous professional development at scale in collaboration with state education departments.
We provide a teacher capacity building platform and related services to impact the 10 million Government and low-income school teachers in India to improve their classroom practices by providing content, peer to peer micro-learning network, training on both scholastic and co-scholastic topics at scale, employing our award-winning mobile application platform- ChalkLit. ChalkLit provides resources which include:
1. Trainings- Deep conceptual and pedagogical inputs in the form of state-mandated trainings
2. Teacher Tools- Enhanced lesson plans and Annual Plans for a teacher’s tactical need of delivering a great next class in a specified period
3. Teacher Community- Daily dose of short bite-sized content that includes teacher best practises, education news, pedagogical inputs, interesting activities, videos, teaching learning material that teachers can consume in a few minutes and make their classroom interesting and relevant delivered through a personalized peer to peer microlearning network
The platform is now being used in 6 states and has already impacted more than 2,30,000+ teachers and 16 million children through our offerings in 3 languages which are now being scaled to many more. We aim to reach 10 Million teachers and impact the life and learning outcomes of 300 Million children by 2025.
Why we do it?
One of the key targets for India under SDG4 is to ensure that all girls and boys complete equitable and inclusive quality primary and secondary education leading to a good life and learning outcomes. However, as per the ASER report 2018, around 75% of children in Class 3, and over 25% in Class 8 are unable to read textbooks meant for Class 2 level. The draft National Education Policy 2019 acknowledges teachers as that most fundamental agents of change to transform the teaching and learning processes that improve learning outcomes.
India has more than 10M teachers that are distributed widely and 90% of which are not trained regularly. Most trainings focus narrowly on literacy and numeracy while the future workforce would demand many more skills from students - Critical thinking skills, problem-solving skills, awareness of SDGs, and life skills.
Traditional offline teacher trainings follow a ‘one size fits all’ approach and have several inherent disadvantages - availability of quality trainers, cost ineffectiveness, lack of infrastructure, and are scholastically focused - unable to provide the breadth of knowledge, scale, quality, convenience, or frequency required.
The one ray of hope is the expected near 100% adoption of smartphones by teachers by 2022. We have combined a state of the art training delivery platform with a partnership with state governments to launch official trainings combined with processes that make it convenient for teachers to access and complete trainings and content.
