Empowering teachers

In the beginning, we were the bunch of people with the desire to help teachers of the world to design pedagogically better, inspiring and effective lessons. But how to do that?

From the early on, we agreed that we wanted to equip the teachers with tools, so that they themselves could create meaningful lessons for their students. It would be easy to give ready-made models for the teachers to copy. But such an approach would undermine the creativity and talent so many teachers have. We believed that creating an easy-to-use lesson planning tool, would give teachers unlimited possibilities to create better lessons for their students that we ever could.

Even if it might sound clichéd, we loved the sentiment of an old Chinese proverb:

 “You give a poor man a fish and you feed him for a day. You teach him to fish and you give him an occupation that will feed him for a lifetime.”

We certainly wanted to provide the opportunity to learn fishing!

Coming from a certain culture, history and background, we can never know what would be the most beneficial lessons for learners in a totally different context. Yet the local teachers have all the necessary knowledge about the situation in their own school and own students.

What we can, however, do is to provide teachers with tools that are scientifically proven to promote learning, and let the teachers use these tools the best way they can. Giving the net or the fish-trap or the fishing rod would not be enough. We wanted to pass on the art of successful fishing.

We wanted the teachers to have understanding of the learning process and how to plan efficient and inspiring lessons themselves. This is how we did it:

• We wanted the teachers to have the latest knowledge about the factors that really promote learning and therefore included a short introduction to modern, research-based pedagogy (presented by short videos) in the app.
• We wanted teachers to have a simple way to plan an efficient and relevant lesson structure and thus created a tool with “building blocks” to design versatile and purposeful lessons.
• We wanted to give them plenty of different ways to actually carry out their lessons and therefore included loads of different activating and efficient teaching methods to the app.
• We wanted teachers to be able to share their ideas and learn from others and decided to have a possibility to share your own lesson plans and to browse the database of lesson plans of other users.

For us, teachers are the key to quality education. We want to empower them.