3 Lessons Learned From Implementing EdTech Tools in Schools

For 2 years before pursuing a master’s degree at Penn GSE, I worked with a private school conglomerate in the Philippines to help students become workforce ready to reach their career aspirations. With four separate schools, each with distinct traits and cultures, our organization had over 60,000 students, around 800 faculty members, located in 4 different provinces in the Philippines.

As a large organization, international EdTech providers would often approach us with their solutions. From a high-level perspective, these providers offered thoughtful and scalable solutions that had the potential to solve real problems in education that we saw everyday on the ground.

However, as we started to introduce these solutions in classrooms, we quickly learned that there were more layers and steps towards implementation than meets the eye and getting stakeholders within the school to use and adopt the solutions took longer than expected.

With the benefit of hindsight, I would say that there were at least three major lessons learned from this experience, which I believe startup EdTech companies can use as a guide to plan for a successful implementation with their school partners.

Lesson 1: Teachers are key drivers of change in schools

Teachers are the most crucial stakeholder for a successful implementation in schools and more often than not, onboarding programs require a big chunk of time and attention from teachers who have already extremely packed schedules.

Ensuring that at the onset, the design of your onboarding program accommodates teachers' schedules and capacities, will give your company a greater return on your investment in the long run.

Getting teachers onboard as collaborators, partners and champions on the ground will give you greater chances for success.

Lesson 2: Top-down approaches to implementation does not always guarantee success

Viewing schools purely in business terms may very well be counterproductive.

Organizations who are working within the education industry have two main goals: a) achieving student learning outcomes and b) achieving sustainability through stable revenue sources.

While schools also have business goals, they are not built like typical corporations. There may be a hierarchy in place, but very often these relationships are far less formal than those in corporations.

From an EdTech point of view, what this means is that to be successful you have to take into account the informal and formal nature of these relationships. A simple top-down approach will not work because there are also cultural and social equations which come into play in every school community.

Which brings me to my final point.

Lesson 3: Successful implementation is typically driven by trust between collaborating organizations

Very often, there would be a wall of mistrust between the EdTech company and the faculty. In the education conglomerate I worked with, the distrust did not necessarily come from negative places, but rather, a sincere desire to see students succeed.

Teachers often feel that their opinions were not taken into account while designing the software, or that the solutions provided were not based on data from the ground.

On the other hand, EdTech companies, who are more dynamic and agile, feel that their solution would adapt to real-life problems on the ground if teachers would give it a chance in the classroom.

How can CoTeach help?

CoTeach was formed in part to build a bridge of trust between EdTechs who create solutions and the teachers who use these solutions.

At the heart of it all of course is the student, the citizen of tomorrow, and the change maker.

With a innovation partners who can help your company ground your solution in schools, you may be able to trickle down your solution to students who need it most and guarantee a pipeline of success stories that can help you scale your company worldwide.

CoTeach offers teacher tech support, digital transformation training, and data management solutions to help your company reach your next 100,000 customers.

Book an appointment with a CoTeach Innovation Partner to learn more.