From Memes to Practice Sheets: How We Transform CoLearn Teachers to be Pros!

In Indonesia, where there is a well-known shortage of qualified teachers, it is challenging enough to find teachers who master STEM subjects well, let alone find those who are able to understand and engage students. 

Understanding and engaging students, therefore, become even more important in online classes, which is a different beast in and of itself.

Around the world, we hear problems of low student engagement in online classes during the pandemic. On one side, online classes offer various tools that extend lesson plans beyond the conventional textbook-based offline classes. On the other hand, because students might struggle more to focus on their screens, interactivity in online classes needs to be done differently to keep students engaged. Equipping the teachers with awesome tools, without developing their skills to connect and engage differently, will not help both teachers and students significantly.

At CoLearn, we relentlessly develop these important teaching aspects to ensure our teachers can effectively teach and engage students online.

Akademi Guru Juara - Bootcamp to Level Up New Teacher Recruits

Imagine basic training in the military, short and intense, to shape all new recruits from all sorts of backgrounds to have basic competencies to be effective soldiers. In a similar way, our new teacher recruits attend a 3-week boot camp before they ever interact with our students, where we intensely train them to perform the basics of how to teach online the CoLearn way: highly interactive and motivating. 

From effective pedagogy to smoothly sliding in cool sounds in the middle of the class (like a pro radio DJ), the teacher recruits do it all. Two basic criteria that we look for in new teacher recruits: strong subject matter expertise and actual teaching experience (informally or formally). There is no time for the recruits to doubt their Math knowledge because there is a lot to learn beyond the subject matter. This is why we look for recruits who genuinely enjoy interacting and getting to know students. 

After surviving and passing the boot camp, recruits graduate to be Mentors who will support our Guru Juara (Champion Teachers) in the classes, lead practice sessions, and be coached by our senior Guru Juara to follow in their footsteps in the coming months.

Professional Learning Community to Foster a Culture of Collaboration in Improving Instruction

Information about best practices in teaching is already accessible everywhere. The challenge lies in helping all, not only a few, teachers to implement them well consistently. One of the proven ways to improve instructions is by having teachers learn from their peers who teach within the same context. This is why, at CoLearn, we are building a Professional Learning Community (PLC) for our teachers.

Through PLC, our teachers can collaborate with each other to transfer knowledge of what works within our context, which is online classes for STEM in Indonesia. PLC is a great way to improve instruction because the teachers share a common goal of improvement that CoLearn sets, so they are all motivated to help each other improve. This collaboration happens through biweekly feedback sessions--where our teachers share the best implementation of teaching practices--and our teacher portal that hosts sample class recordings, a library of activities, and other kinds of materials.

Results from these sessions also inform our second initiative: Teachers Professional Development (TPD).

Weekly Development Program that Focuses on What We Need to be Good At

In addition to the learning community, we also bring outside perspectives at least quarterly to speak at our Teachers Professional Development (TPD) session. Each TPD session is designed to help teachers improve one of these three competencies:

1. Cultivating personal connection. Under this theme, the TPD session trains our teachers to leverage their “Kakak Persona” and their ability to connect with individual students in a large classroom. Personal connection is important because students are more likely to be comfortable asking questions when they learn from someone whom they feel is less of an authority figure. With strong personal connections, students trust the teachers more and will show more engagement in learning.
2. Improving learning outcomes. Under this theme, we challenge our teachers to unlearn and relearn topics that are being taught in order to comprehend topics in a more fundamental way. Our teachers learn to break topics down into stages so they can tailor delivery based on students’ reasoning levels. Teachers who have this skill are able to explain fundamental concepts to students which could endure their understanding more than just memorizing formulas or equations.
3. Interactivity. Under this theme, we teach teachers to involve students in the process so they are more immersed in their learnings. We believe that attention is key before learning happens, so teachers have to be able to implement various activities that improve meaningful interaction.

We have different TPD topics every week, from fun topics (“The Art of Meme”, “How to be Funny with Punchline”), subject-specific topics (“Geogebra”, “Mathematical Reasoning”), to pedagogy topics (“Scaffolding Delivery”, “The Importance of Reflection”). So far, we have organized more than 40 TPD sessions. The average rating our teachers gave this weekly program is 9.5 out of 10. Moving forward, we intend to make the development program even more robust.

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We are still hiring Guru Juara! If you love teaching and you resonate with the way we work, join us by registering for Akademi Guru Juara at CoLearn: rebrand.ly/AGJLI

About the Author

Angie Tanaja is the Teacher Performance and Development Manager at CoLearn. He is responsible for managing CoLearn's teacher professional development programs and ensuring our teachers' continuous improvement.

About CoLearn

Founded in early 2020 and backed by some of the world's best venture capital funds, CoLearn's mission is to make Indonesia competitive on the global stage. It is our goal to enhance STEM education by providing the best educational content and technologies.