Nexus of Good: Igniting aspirations

By catalysing career growth, earnings opportunities and global recognition for teachers through its certification, CENTA, now the world’s largest such platform serving 1.5 million teachers, has created a unique model where teachers ‘pull’ for learning. Teachers engage on byte-sized micro-resources on their own, every day, supported by personalized tech, leading to a whopping 8 million learning engagements by teachers in a 12-month period!

An IIT Delhi and IIM Calcutta alum from the 90s, CENTA’s founder and CEO Ramya Venkataraman had a 15-year career with global major McKinsey & Company before starting CENTA. “But education was what I wanted to work on, literally since my high school…”, she says, “…initially I thought I would run a school, but over time, I wanted to do something at systemic scale… what that something was, I wasn’t clear about”. Luckily, after 10 years of working across several industry sectors and geographies, Ramya got the opportunity to build McKinsey’s education practice during her last 5 years with the firm – an experience that gave her an in-depth view of various aspects of the sector: teachers, schools, governments, foundations, donors, investors and so on.

As global research has established, Ramya also learnt that teachers play the biggest role in quality of education. However, what she found out is that as a society or as system leaders, both private and government, we keep saying that teachers should get trained, teachers should improve their pedagogy, teachers should use technology; but we never try to answer the question, “What is in it for teachers?” or “How can their own career, earnings or even just social respect grow as a result of doing a great job?” (questions that are considered normal in other professions). As a result, there is often no pull for training from teachers, at scale, and the profession is not even seen as a career by many.

Centre for Teacher Accreditation (CENTA) Private Limited was set up 9 years back, to address this piece of the jigsaw and make teaching a more aspirational profession.

There are four main aspects to CENTA’s model:

(1) Certification of teaching competencies: Through a robust, scientifically designed assessment, mainly the CENTA Teaching Quotient (TQ) test, CENTA® certifies teachers on their competencies. This certification, available in 40+ subjects and 10 languages, is based on ‘CENTA Standards’, India’s first teacher competency framework, which was presented to all States through a knowledge partnership with NITI Aayog and subsequently also fed strongly into the National Professional Standards for Teachers under NEP 2020, where CENTA’s founder was a committee member. CENTA® also achieved ‘certification trademark’ status in end 2019.

(2) Opportunities based on the certification: CENTA works with private schools, governments, EdTeches, universities and foundations to create career opportunities, earnings growth, recognition, etc. for certified teachers. A flagship annual initiative is CENTA’s International Teaching Professionals’ Olympiad (TPO) – the world’s largest competition for teachers – whose winners’ experiences include being part of a global masterclass in Oxford University or a summer internship in the University of California Santa Cruz, being felicitated by cricketing legend Brian Lara, receiving large cash prizes from Reliance Foundation and so on. Well beyond International TPO, CENTA’s certification is used by private schools for recruiting, by several State Governments in teacher selection/promotion for specific posts or teacher awards, by international EdTeches for finding online part-time teachers from India (contributing to the country’s “export of services”), etc.

(3) Personalized, self-driven, tech-based continuous professional development: Given this wide range of opportunities, teachers want to work on improving their competencies and achieving the certification. CENTA App supports this through its own micro-learning resources and longer training programmes, and also by accrediting teacher training programmes of other organizations and individuals.

Recently, certain reputed philanthropic organizations, for example, Rotary India, have been taking this model to specific geographies and teacher segments.

(4) A global teacher community: The 1.5 million teachers served by CENTA come from every State/UT of India; in addition, the company also has a growing international presence with 100+ countries represented on CENTA App. Teachers find it powerful to be able to interact with someone from across the country or globe and exchange learnings and experiences. “I still remember the weekend when a group of passionate Physics teachers started discussing a problem on Friday evening… when I saw the group again on Sunday evening, they were still discussing it!”, says Ramya.

Some teacher stories

Kumud, a Delhi government teacher, comes from a family full of engineers and doctors. She insisted on becoming a teacher. After global recognition through the CENTA certification, she found that her profession suddenly got attention from her entire family. “Suddenly, the conversation at dinner was about my work also and not just that of my siblings and cousins. My social circle now sees teaching as a valid profession”.

Pinki, now in a Kendriya Vidyalaya, is the daughter of a security guard, who stood outside a school and dreamt that one day, his daughters would work inside. He worked hard to educate them and Pinki pursued a degree in teaching. Twice in a row, she achieved one of the top ranks in the Hindi language track of CENTA International Teaching Professionals’ Olympiad. When she was felicitated by the then Secretary, Ministry of Education, her father broke down holding the Secretary’s hand and told him that his dream had come true.

Manoj, who now works in a reputed organization in Dubai, could not pursue a B.Ed. for various reasons, though he was passionate about teaching. Based on his CENTA certification, he went to Oxford University for a global English masterclass. Soon after, the Indian arm of a UAE-based school group recruited him with a temporary posting in Kerala and a move planned to Dubai soon. “My career trajectory completely changed”, says Manoj.

The way forward

There are about 90 million teachers globally today, and estimates suggest another 70 million are needed in the next 10 years. CENTA aims to serve at least 15 million teachers across emerging markets in Asia and Africa. The organization aims to fundamentally change how teaching is viewed, and make it more and more aspirational, along with deepening its early analysis of how this is eventually impacting student learning and quality of education. Teacher certification, careers, learning and community will remain the pillars of the model, with each of these adapting to changes in employment models, technology and other influences. CENTA also aims for this community of teachers to be highly self-driven and voting with its feet for what the future of teaching and future of education will look like – a true Nexus of Good.

Views expressed are personal