Teachers don’t get feedback on their teaching (Teacherspace)
Jesper Bergmann - Co-founder and CEO at Teacherspace
Teacherspace makes it easy for teachers to get quality feedback on their classroom by providing them with mentors and unique qualitative and quantitative insights.
He is based in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The full transcript of the podcast can be found below for those who prefer reading rather than listening.
Let’s start with how come you ended up in EdTech, and I know you have a bit of a career in the teaching space.
Maybe just to start off, a lot of it is by coincidence and by chance and by pursuing what I'm really passionate about. But I never had a career plan of any kind. I've never, had a plan to work with education. I studied international business, way back and went on an exchange program to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
And came across Teach for America, which must be around 15 years ago. And was really fascinated by this idea and concept. Kind of forgot about it for some years. Went back, finished my graduate studies, and then I worked for a couple of tech startups in Copenhagen and was really excited about working with developers, engineers, working with a small team who were really passionate about trying to solve difficult problems.
And then after working in technology for a couple years, I co-founded Teach First Denmark, basically based on this idea we first came across in the US, which was about; what if you could increase social mobility, recruit some of the most brightest and most motivated with different and diverse backgrounds to go into the classrooms where they're needed the the most.
And I just had a wonderful time for seven years. Was the CEO and co-founder of Teach First Denmark, which is a nonprofit, part of a larger global network of nonprofits. And then I left that about a year ago. And I didn't know what to do and I actually pursued lots of different options, talked to lots of different people also outside education, also outside technology.
And then I just couldn't let go of this idea that I didn't feel like my work within education was finished. And it's something I'm really, really passionate about. So you could say I ended up in EdTech by this strange combination of first working with some technology startups, then working with education for a long time, but not in sort of an EdTech setup.
And then trying to marry those two, to hopefully like a wonderful combination. So here I am, you know, I'm in our basement office and everything. So, yeah, that's how I ended up there.
So let's dig deeper into what you're up to at the moment, and specifically what's the problem that you're trying to solve?
Yeah, so it's incredibly difficult to be a teacher. And when I refer to teachers, I mean K to 12 teachers, so elementary schools, that's the only area I know about and am familiar with. So it's not high school or university education. But it's incredibly difficult to be a teacher, I would say anywhere in the world.
And particularly, it's incredibly difficult to be a new teacher. I can't think of a field where the gap between what you study and how you study for it and what the actual work looks like is bigger. Many teachers just end up, starting out really passionate about wanting to work with kids and inspire them, and then they leave shortly after disappointed, burned out, didn't feel they made an impact and could make the difference they wanted.
So, the big problem we are solving is saying; how can you better support teachers? Because I think all the good ideas and interesting ideas you can come up with learning and different kinds of approaches to educations. As I see it, it all starts with the quality of the teachers. And so you have the big problem is it's super difficult to be a new teacher. The other big problem is there's a global teacher shortage. So everywhere in the world, give and take, this of course varies very much by geography within a country as well, but it's really difficult for schools to recruit teachers. So it quickly creates this vicious cycle that you have new teachers starting. Ideally you should really support them, give them lots of feedback and help them. But, you just don't have enough teachers. You don't have the bandwidth or flexibility. So, lots of teachers end up leaving.
And as a principal, this is a huge problem to you and it's one of the most core problems to the education system in general to solve. And we're really excited to try to solve that with the help of technology, not by replacing teachers or trying to automate their work or anything, but really by trying to understand what does it look like to be a new teacher in a school.
What is the current feedback process like in Denmark, which I guess is probably among the better countries around teacher support?
I'll share a funny anecdote. I was speaking to a teacher the other day who has been teaching since 1987 and we asked her about feedback and she said, you know, 1989 someone came into her classroom and she said the person said she was doing alright - no one's seen her teach since.
The standard for most teachers is that they don't get any kind of feedback on their teaching. They might get support in terms of how do you make photocopies, when do you have meetings, how do you plan lessons or that. But, where all the root to your problems is, and also the solutions are is in the classroom, and teachers just get so little feedback. And when they do it, it's so rare that it's difficult to follow up on. So for example, I know a lot of principals, they try to see their teachers teach once a year. And that's nice, but it's not nearly enough to actually then make some meaningful steps to improve. So the general situation is just that it's very rare that anyone gets concrete feedback on their classroom. And that's the problem we are trying to solve.
So one question around the company; what stage are you at right now?
So we built the MVP in this no code tool, and we tested that with the first users and tested all our basic assumptions and we are just about to relaunch that, where we rebuild it from scratch and about to launch our first mobile app in early 2023. And in terms of funding, we've actually been really lucky to get some soft funding. So a grant from the Innovation Fund, Denmark, where me and my Danish co-founder can work full-time until summer of 2023. So we expect to start fundraising in early 2023, but so far we are good on the funding side and very early stage with the product.
I know you've just been through this; how did you find your team and put it together in the right way?
I'll start off saying, I knew from Teach First Denmark, I was one of the co-founders, we were a group of good friends and I knew I could have never done that on my own. I really relied a lot on the support of the other co-founders. So I knew from the minute I knew I wanted to try to start something again, I knew I wanted to start it with someone else. And I started out talking to a lot of teachers I knew from the Teachers Denmark program, just asking them about what kind of problems they felt were really big and also universal. And one that came up fairly often as well was kind of onboarding and how difficult it is to start out as a new teacher.
And then I already knew Frederik, who's one of my co-founders from he was a teacher in the Teach First Denmark program and a big football fan as well of the same football team, AC Milan. So we knew each other pretty well and I started out just talking to him about the idea and whether he would be interested in considering trying to start a company if we could sort of validate that lots of other people also saw potential.
That was early this year, February, something like that. And then we started meeting pretty regularly. He was still a full-time teacher until this summer. And then you could say sort of in parallel to that, I knew I wanted to start a technology company. Frederik is also an engineer and a quick learner but, not a software engineer.
So I knew from the start I wanted to have a technical co-founder for the CTO role. So ever since March this year, I've probably met 20 to 30 potential CTOs, for the co-founder role. And earlier this summer, we found a perfect candidate through this Y Combinator have this co-founder matching. That's where I met most of them. I also talked to some people in Denmark. Quite quickly we decided that we would be willing to consider anyone within a few time zones to sort of expand the potential talent we could work with. Yeah, so actually this past weekend we just had our first in-person meetup in Copenhagen with our families and everything.
So now we've got a great teacher as part of the team responsible for the product, and a great, CTO responsible for the tech. So yeah, I feel incredibly excited about the team and I'm really happy that we tried to take this approach of not only seeing this as optimizing for some kind of company success or something like that. But, really trying to say how would you pick a good friend? How would you find someone you would actually like to have their families over have dinner, just hang out with them and not talk about work? So I'm really happy we chose to not compromise on that kind of chemistry in the team.
And if you look at that and other things in the company, why do you think you will succeed? What's the difference between what you try to do and what others are doing in the market?
I have this kind of hypothesis or thesis that a lot of people who know a lot about technology, but don't really understand teachers and learning will fail by trying to create products that are way too techy or think that anything can be solved by another app, another machine learning feature or automating something teachers do. Good teaching is incredibly unique in many ways, it's incredibly complicated. All those McKinsey, other consulting companies reports, it's always when they talk about which jobs will be taken by robots and automated, the teaching and nursing and child caring is always the least at risk.
Some of the approaches that I don't believe in is where you just try to think that if you have this great technology, teachers will be better off. We really understand teachers and how pressed they are on time. For example, how efficient it needs to be. And the problems you have to solve for them. And then we understand schools and principals really well, and when a teacher leaves, it's really, really expensive. It's like 20,000 euros to replace a teacher leaving. But, then there's also all the sort of non-financial consequences of parents asking why is the teacher leaving again? Principals having to deal with, before someone leaving, maybe they become sick or maybe they ask for reduced time. So I think we try to really solve this at the core, which is also really difficult and we'll take a really long time.
So that's also one other reason why we'll hopefully succeed, that we are very humble I would say. We know how difficult it is to really change something in education, so we don't try to pretend this is a quick fix or this will be a miracle or everything will change overnight.
And the follow up question to that; do you think there's an advantage coming from Denmark and the Nordics, which has a very good reputation in terms of say, K-12 in particular with innovative learning methods et cetera?
No, not in particular. Actually, I spoke to someone in the UK yesterday, and to be honest, they seem much further ahead in many aspects in terms of how rigorous they are in thinking about the evidence behind their methods. A lot of the solutions that work pretty well locally are very country specific. It's content based. It's digital learning platforms and materials, which is pretty difficult to scale. Where our approach from the beginning has been that we want build something which will work equally well in a classroom in Denmark or Bulgaria or Spain or Sweden. So we think a lot of the sort of method and technology will be transferrable.
And then it's about the implementation. You'll probably hear a lot of people say this, but I think Covid and being forced to become very digital very quickly has pushed this field forward in a short time span, but I still think there's a lot of work to be done. And there's something ironic about it; I've watched four hours of video from classrooms this past couple weeks, and that means I've watched more video than most people who study to become a teacher. They spent four years studying for a teaching degree and I'm not a teacher. I've watched more footage of classrooms than they have.
We are just at the beginning of trying to think about what could a much better experience and support for teachers look like. So it's super exciting to be in this field.
And when you look back over the last year, maybe two years, what's been the biggest challenge in creating the company and and how did you solve it?
I think there was one of trying to figure out what are the assumptions or hypothesis that are so critical that if it turns out that we're not right on this, we might as well just not start the company. It doesn't make any sense. It could sort of kill us before we got started. And some of those concerns very early on were very much related to consent from parents. Would parents basically be willing to accept that their children's classrooms are being recorded to support their teacher? And GDPR, data security, data privacy, it's a big topic all over Europe. And then there's also this aspect of, would teachers want this? You know, of course we come with this idea that you should get feedback on your classroom, but would they actually be interested in that.
So some of the big challenges were trying to figure out how could we learn enough about those risks that we could feel comfortable moving forward. And thankfully we've seen that parents will give consent for example because it's more of a communication challenge than a consent challenge really. It's more about saying we want to support your children's teacher. It's a closed platform. It's secure. And then with GDPR it's just about how you design your product and systems you choose from the beginning. Thanks to you actually and the EdTech Garage I had a great chat with Jens from Curipod early on, who shared some of their challenges.
And I'll say that's probably the biggest challenge overall is that the whole school system and educators are just so incredibly busy that it's really difficult to get time with them and they have so many priorities going on. That's actually the biggest challenge is having enough patience to see that it's not because they're not interested, but they just have so much going on, and teachers as well, so you really have to find out how do you implement it? That's our big challenge.
And on that, because we've heard that a lot from founders; how do you get access to schools? What's been your best way in? When are you able to open the door?
To begin with, I've mostly used my network and people I knew already and one of the reasons, I haven't talked about that at all actually, but one of the reasons I was really excited about this working and why this can become a great company, was that at Teach First Denmark, they still have a really, really great mentoring model and feedback model and some of that used videos as well, and we would sometimes have principles asking if they could basically pay for a mentor for some of their other teachers. I'm incredibly proud of what we managed at Teach for Denmark and principals ended up paying a lot of money to hire a teacher because it's just such high quality. So that also convinced me that if you solve a big enough problem for a school, they also take the time to listen to you.
And currently in Denmark, I think all of them, when you ask them, is it easy for you to recruit a new teacher and what does your retention look like? And then say, we think we might have something that can help you with those two areas. Then they're willing to listen. And then the other thing we've learned, which I guess is in a lot of industries, is that, of course it helps to be referred by someone and focus on some of the schools where it's just incredibly difficult to recruit and retain teachers.
So essentially you're helping them solve one of their biggest pain points.
That's what we're hoping. And then I might just add, I still have a very soft spot and I care very much about the whole inequality part because the other big problem, and this has been shown by very rigorous Danish research, but basically the strongest teachers based on their qualifications typically also work in the schools with the students with the strongest backgrounds. So you have these reinforcing loops basically, where if you're born by parents without an education, grew up in a social housing area somewhere you are less likely to meet those teachers who you know did really well and will give you a better start. So we are also very mindful about that a lot of the schools we hope to help will be the schools who actually have lots of challenges already.
And when you look forwards, what is keeping you up at night?
I was thinking, I know what wakes me up during the night, and that's my kids mostly. So I sleep pretty well typically. But, it's definitely delivering on all these promises. A lot of what I've also shared here on this podcast it's ideas we have, it's what we want to do, it's what we are certain we are able to do, but we are really excited about actually getting to try it out in practice.
It's the whole implementation. It's seeing what will it look like when people, and when teachers interact with the product, what features will they really use and enjoy? What won't they care about? What's the right sort of frequency between feedback sessions? So I'm just incredibly excited about soon launching the first version of our product and seeing how it's received and then learning from that.
And finally, is there any advice that you would like to give other EdTech startups just getting started?
It's helpful in the very early days and in the beginning to be very open to lots of different advice and input and basically talking to as many different people as possible. So I, for example, I talked to also a bunch of different people through EdTech Garage. I talk to different principles. I talk to a lot of my former colleagues from the Teach for All network, other startup CEOs. And very often my experience is reaching out to someone, asking them kindly to spend some time with you if you have some sort of a concrete ask is looked favorably upon. So, I've had really good experience just contacting people and trying to be very ambitious or be very optimistic in terms of who can you actually get a meeting with. And then I also think in particular in education, you just need to be very patient. So, I don't think you should be discouraged by things taking a long time. That's almost like a feature, not a bug sometimes, because so much in education is actually all these promises of quick fixes, all this bad software that's not being used or maybe good software that just doesn't solve a real problem.
So I think it's really about being patient. And maybe other listeners of this podcast also goes to Twitter, goes to the same circles for advice. All these fast growing tech startups, product market fit, explosive growth, all this. And it helps in education to also ground yourself and say maybe it looks different and maybe it requires a different way of thinking in terms of what does product market fit look like, for example, how long will it take to accomplish when your customers are public and have a very different approach to buying new products than selling to startups or something like that. Be patient, but move as fast as you can if that makes any sense.
