TeachUNITED Students Are Gaining Years of Extra Learning

Meet the Teachers Making It Happen

We publish new data on how TeachUNITED-trained teachers are changing outcomes for students often. However, our most recent results are some of the strongest yet. Our latest evaluation of partner schools across Latin America and Africa found that TeachUNITED significantly accelerated student progress in both foundational literacy and mathematics. We’re thrilled to share those results alongside a few of the educators who are driving this impact.

TeachUNITED students gained 2.3 additional years of reading growth and 3.6 additional years of math growth compared to students in control schools, both highly statistically significant results from a rigorous three-year evaluation.

From the Bottom of the Rankings to a Top 5 School

Two years ago, Qurus Secondary School in Karatu, Tanzania, received a certificate. It wasn’t the kind anyone wants to hang on the wall: “unsatisfactory performance,” based on a 44% pass rate on the 2022 national exam.

Chesco Sowo, a former TeachUNITED participant, now a TeachUNITED coach and head teacher at the school, worked to improve the school’s performance. He started by listening. “I decided to learn from the teachers and observe how they worked with the students in a classroom,” he says. “I found there was a gap, and as a trainer, I needed to fill that gap.”

He began running regular coaching sessions with teachers, walking them through strategies to build student engagement and helping them shift, in his words, from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. Teachers picked up new tools along the way. Leonard Shungu, a teacher at Qurus, started using a strategy called “Turn and Talk,” which gives students time to discuss a topic in pairs before sharing with the class.

“Since we started using TeachUNITED’s teaching methods,” he says, “they have transformed the way I teach. And also, increased a student’s eagerness to learn and demonstrate their ability in the classroom.”

Students noticed the shift too. “These methods have been very helpful,” one student says. “They’ve boosted my confidence and expanded my skills.”

Two years later, Qurus climbed from the bottom of the district rankings into the top five. “This training needs to reach every corner, to every school, to every teacher,” he says, “so that I can impact every student, because they are the future generation.”

The Numbers Behind Stories Like Chesco’s

Students in schools with TeachUNITED-trained teachers showed strong, compounding growth across several foundational literacy and numeracy skills.

• Reading: TeachUNITED students gained 2.3 additional years of reading fluency growth (words per minute), plus a 2.2-year advantage in phonics and decoding, skills that help a student sound out an unfamiliar word.
• Math: TeachUNITED students gained 3.6 additional years of math growth overall, more than three and a half years beyond what’s typical for a student. That includes real gains in more challenging skills: 2.1 extra years in advanced operations and 2.2 extra years applying math to real-world problems.

Supporting Early Childhood Educators Halfway Around the World

In the Mayan-speaking communities of Kustunich and Ticul, on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, TeachUNITED’s coaching model looks a little different. Here, the focus is on supporting the teachers who work with children as young as one year old, often teaching in two languages.

“Indigenous early childhood and preschool education faces unique challenges,” says Maria Gelly Alonzo, a TeachUNITED coach working in the region. “It requires more than traditional methods. It requires a deeply human, community-centered approach.”

For the educators doing that work, the coaching has meant something more personal than a new lesson plan. “Among the conversations, the recovery of ourselves as teachers has emerged,” one educator shared. “The course is helping us recover that part of ourselves.”

Even veteran teachers are learning new techniques. “Even for teachers with over 30 years of service, integrating technology and new pedagogical strategies has opened new horizons for indigenous education,” TeachUNITED Coach Cotty Trujillo Sosa says.

The effects reach beyond any one classroom. A director participating in this program shares, “Everything that I am learning in this course is allowing me to improve professionally and equip myself with the knowledge that enables me to be a capable person and, above all, a guide for the teaching staff under my leadership.”

“When we support a principal or a teacher in the Mayan region,” Gelly adds, “we don’t just transform their classroom. We create a leadership network capable of guiding an entire school community into the future.”

Accelerating Learning for Girls

One of the clearest results of this study is how much TeachUNITED-trained educators accelerate learning for girls. Across reading and math, girls in TeachUNITED classrooms significantly outpaced their peers in similar schools outside of the program, and by a wider margin than boys did compared to their peers. Compared to female peers in control schools:

• Girls gained 2.7 additional years of reading fluency growth 
• Girls gained 4.3 additional years of math growth

Boys also made excellent, statistically significant gains of their own (2.0 years in reading, 3.0 years in math). But girls posted the largest gains, evidence that TeachUNITED classrooms are accelerating learning for girls in core foundational skills. 

The Bottom Line

Training a teacher through TeachUNITED gives every student in that classroom a multi-year head start, not just incremental progress. Scaling this model turns years of learning stagnation into years of verified growth for kids in Tanzania, in Mexico, and beyond.

Want to learn more? Read the White Paper or reach out to learn about partnering with us.