"A teacher is a compass that activates the magnets of curiosity, knowledge, and wisdom in the pupils."  Ever Garrison, a world-renowned author and educator, eloquently points out that teachers are cardinal to the learning process in a child's life during their formative years and beyond. However, a plethora of research studies across the globe have highlighted the exponential discrepancy between students unable to avail educational opportunities and a capable teaching workforce that can bridge this gap. Given the state of education in India, teacher quality is constantly being compromised, where teachers are not hired, supported or trained adequately. Thus, this crisis in education cemented by the poor learning outcomes reported can only be overcome by strengthening existing systems through professional training and capacity building, coupled with improved workforce planning, deployment, and management.

It is against this backdrop that the Million Sparks Foundation works towards improving learning outcomes in children by capacitating and training teachers. Started in 2016, by Dr. Abhinav Mathur and Dr. Mona Mathur, Million Sparks Foundation is on a mission to impact the life and learning outcomes of 300 million school-going children through capacitating 10 million teachers globally by 2025 through their collaborative mobile application platform 'ChalkLit'. The vision behind ChalkLit has been to create a deep and vast scale of impact across government and low-income schools across India. ChalkLit provides comprehensive capacity building programs for teachers, school leadership and administration at scale through partnerships with state education departments and school bodies. It also offers platform & services to other NGOs, content, and implementation partners in the education space for online and blended programs. The embedded content development framework allows modular structuring of the content suitable for self-paced mobile learning. The training platform comprises of  annual lesson plans, daily updates and a large teacher resource base for peer to peer training. The program requires a budget of 15 million by 2025 to support 10 million teachers and costs 1 dollar per teacher every month.

Over the last three years, Million Sparks has rigorously improved upon their comprehensive capacity building inputs, spilling into largely three core areas. The first is to provide long term skill building through deep conceptual and pedagogical training that is offered by the state as mandated training. Secondly, ChalkLit has enabled short term improvements in-class delivery by providing enhanced lesson plans and annual plans for a teacher's tactical need of delivering a great next class. Lastly, ChalkLit has paved the way for a personalized peer-to-peer micro-learning community and infrastructure that provides daily dose of short bite-sized content that includes teacher best practices, education news, conceptual and pedagogical inputs, interesting activities, videos, teaching-learning material that teachers can consume in a few minutes and make their classroom interesting and relevant. To ensure state of the art resource material for a diverse group of educators including experienced teachers, mentors, practitioners, and content experts, Million Sparks devised a 11-point framework that includes content revisions, learning outcomes, concepts to be taught, teaching methodologies, addressing misconceptions, activities, teaching-learning material, evaluation approaches, and quizzes and assignments. Catering to such a vast audience has allowed the organization to partner and collaborate with other government and non-government bodies to build engaging and interactive micro-learning modules.

^{Teachers use ChalkLit to hold discussions and learn collectively}

The content on the platform can be categorized under the broad thematic areas of teacher tools, training and teacher community. The teacher tools section of the platform contains subject-specific K-10 resources, enhanced lesson plans, comprehensive teacher support with integrated enterprise messaging and notification engines and a personalized and interactive gamified experience ensuring high completion rates. The training section includes multi-grade, multi-level scholastic and co-scholastic content coupled with certification by credible agencies upon completing the training. The teacher community section has been curated to serve as a social personalized peer to peer microlearning network and resource base on best practices, news, pedagogy, concept, SDG, Life Skills, subject channels that can be used by the stakeholders. The platform also has State and NGO partner owner channels to facilitate post-training follow-ups and reinforcements.

Initially supported by Google.org, Central Square Foundation, and Gray Matters Capital, the ChalkLit program has been well received and the organization has made great strides in expansion over the three years – now working with six state governments. With collaboration at the heart of the program, the ChalkLit platform has been adopted by the governments of Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Goa, Haryana, Odisha, and Uttar Pradesh to successfully train 235K+ teachers and impact more than 15M+ children. The organization has also been approached by other states in India such as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chandigarh, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, and the North East to use the platform to teacher capacitating. The organization is also exploring collaboration possibilities across 6 African countries and the initial conversation has been promising.

Through the ChalkLit program, Million Sparks Foundation has created a tremendous impact by capacitating over 220,000+ teachers across 60,000 schools, thereby impacting the lives of 14 million students. The Delhi State Council of Education Research and Training, with support from the Indian Statistical Institute, and the National Council of Education Research and training conducted an independent research study to measure the impact of the program. After evaluating 151 classrooms across Delhi, they deemed the intervention to be extremely effective as it successfully improved classroom practices and uplifted the pedagogical knowledge of teachers. Million Sparks is also contributing towards all SDGs by going beyond capacitating teachers.

Million Sparks' ChalkLit program has enabled teachers to reflect on their motivations and existing skill-set while setting goals for the future and recognizing their pivotal roles as facilitators in the process of learning. They are now more focused, confident and invested in the learning process. Priti Pandey, a teacher from Sadallapur Block, Bisrakh shared her experiences on building capacities through ChalkLit. She says, "When I got on the ChalkLit platform I was taken aback by all the resources available. Thanks to the resource aids available I was able to make my classrooms engaging and impactful. Through the teacher community, I was able to interact and learn from experienced teachers. Eventually I was able to find my definitive style of teaching. I found the 'holiday homework' resource material very helpful and incorporated them into my teaching lessons. I also started holding discussions on these new interesting topics with the other staff members so that we can grow together."

Priti is one among a bountiful cohort of teachers under the ChalkLit program who have transformed classroom education into engaging discovery-led learning for students. Million Sparks Foundation recognizes that literacy is the ability to read and write, whereas education is about using these reading-writing skills to improve lives and make meaning of the world around us. As actress Josie Bisset says, " Dreams come to a size too big so that we can grow into them". By working with children in innovative and informative ways, the ChalkLit teachers can transcend the boundaries of a four-walled classroom, giving them space to explore.

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Impact-Story is a series on development and CSR interventions leading to some impacts on the ground. If you have a project, innovation or intervention that has changed the lives of a few people or a community, please share a brief note at csr@ngobox.org. Our Team will get back to you after validating the information for a detailed coverage.