Report: Bangladesh Digital Platform for Teacher Development
Executive Summary
The purpose of this TA was to adapt and deploy a digital platform for use by teachers to regularly assess student learning and to adjust their instruction to students’ needs. The platform will also be used by teacher coaches to regularly monitor teachers’ practice and provide mentoring and teacher support under the country’s emerging Continuous Professional Development (CPD) framework. ADB has decided to pilot Tangerine:Teach and Tangerine:Coach as core elements of this digital platform for teacher development and in support of the country’s Fourth Primary Education Development Program (PEDP4). Tangerine:Teach and Tangerine:Coach are part of the open-source platform Tangerine, developed and maintained by RTI, and already used in dozens of countries around the world for the same purpose. A Phase 1 proof of concept implementation in 2021 in ten schools in Bangladesh confirmed viability of the use of the platform in the context. In Phase 2, running from March-December 2022, the initiative was piloted in 110 new schools in 26 Upazillas of Bangladesh and revised in preparation for scale up to 1,000 schools next. The TA included modest preparatory support to the Bangladesh Directorate of Primary Education (DPE) for scaling the initiative to an estimated 1,000 schools under their own leadership in late 2023. The TA for this phase started in November 2022 and ended in September 2023. This report is an overview of all completed activities and results and presents challenges in the implementation of the TA as well as recommendations for DPE’s scale up of the platform to 1,000 schools and beyond.
A total of 110 schools, 440 teachers, and 104 in-service coaches participated in Phase 2. During that time, teachers conducted a total of 10,992 unique and complete (removing all partial and duplicate records) formative assessments in Bangla and 15,471 unique and complete formative assessments for Math. The in-service coaches conducted 1,405 lesson observations, of which 296 were virtual observations. BacBon also hired Master trainers, 11 who served as full-time coaches supporting the in-service coaches. These full-time coaches conducted a total of 150 classroom observations, including 82 virtual observations. These data suggest an extremely high acceptance rate of the Digital Platform by its users. These results were confirmed in documented school visits including teacher, head teacher, and Upazilla education staff interviews, conducted by ADB consultants and staff throughout Phase 2 implementation, as well as field visits and interviews conducted by the RTI team in October and November 2022.