Digitization of the classroom observation and mentoring system in Bangladesh: Transforming primary education in Bangladesh through EdTech

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Digital Frontiers in Teacher Education

Proposal

Background:
USAID’s Esho Shikhi Activity (2022-2026) is a five-year activity focused on improving the learning outcomes of marginalized Bangladeshi children in crisis-affected, underserved communities. Esho Shikhi supports the government’s Directorate of Primary Education (DPE) by enhancing mentoring skills and competencies of education officials and head teachers through training on classroom observation and mentoring approaches. The main objective of this work is to support educators to improve their teaching processes, which will ultimately lead to increased opportunities for students to learn.

Challenges Faced in the Classroom using Observation & Mentoring Tools:
Mentoring is increasingly recognized as an effective form of continuous professional development for teachers. The Classroom Observation and Mentoring Tool (COMT) developed under Esho Shikhi was designed to guide head teachers as mentors. The COMT includes specific teaching behaviors to identify during classroom observations, while providing scripted mentoring prompts to encourage teachers and guide them to reflect on and improve their teaching practice. However, routinely observing all teachers in a school can be a time consuming and difficult task for head teachers. Furthermore, it can be difficult to manually track teachers’ progress, analyze data from all observations, and determine further mentoring needs accordingly. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that the process is made more efficient for teachers and head teachers.

Innovative Solutions through DCOMT:
To address these challenges, Esho Shikhi developed a digital Classroom Observation and Mentoring Tool (DCOMT) in late 2023, to be piloted alongside the originally developed paper-based COMT. The DCOMT was developed for use with Tangerine open-source software to streamline classroom observations and mentoring through an easy-to-use, robust, and technology-driven platform that supports both offline and online use on Android, Mac and Windows devices.

The DCOMT facilitates real-time and asynchronous classroom observations, enabling head teachers to collect detailed data on priority teaching areas during lesson delivery. Head teachers, as well as education officials, can easily review and access data that has been synced from individual tablets to the server in order to analyze data as part of planning and prioritizing resources, further supporting all teachers’ professional development.

The Esho Shikhi team conducted initial field testing of this system in six schools and adjusted the DCOMT based on feedback from head teachers. In March 2024, Esho Shikhi trained head teachers from 72 schools on the updated DCOMT and conducted a follow-up pilot.

Successes of the DCOMT Pilot:
Like paper-based COMT, this digital tool was designed to capture information on five priority teaching-learning activities, determined by Esho Shikhi in consultation with DPE: 1) Safe and inclusive learning environment; 2) Bangla language teaching; 3) Teaching strategies to support students; 4) Questioning as a teaching technique; and 5) Formative assessment. Preliminary findings from data collected from March 2024 to July 2024 show improvements in safe and inclusive learning environments, from 64% to 70%. Teaching strategies to support students improved from 46% to 49% and the use of questioning as a teaching technique improved from 55% to 63%.

The system offers features to generate automated feedback prompts on priority areas selected by head teachers to support mentoring dialogues. Additionally, the DCOMT can analyze classroom activities and provide actionable insights into teaching learning effectiveness. Furthermore, the DCOMT ensures data privacy and security, adhering to stringent protocols to protect sensitive information. Its intuitive interface and customizable features make it adaptable to various educational contexts, beyond just Bangla subject teaching for Grades 1 and 2. The DCOMT can easily be adapted to higher grade levels and additional subjects through minor customization. As a result, head teachers can perform classroom observation and mentoring activities with minimum time, effort, data analysis and progress tracking.

The DCOMT represents a significant technological advancement in the education sector. By providing a comprehensive framework for classroom observation and mentoring, it empowers head teachers to refine teachers teaching practices, ultimately enhancing student learning experiences and outcomes. This panel will elaborate on the methodology of data collection for Esho Shikhi’s DCOMT follow-up pilot and present an analysis of the findings and their relevant applications across various contexts in the Bangladesh education system.

Authors

• Ranak Chandra Mohanta, Winrock International

• R. Drake Warrick, Winrock International