CHENNAI: Artificial intelligence may soon help government school teachers draw up lesson plans tailored to the learning needs of individual students and groups, using classroom data entered by them.
An AI-powered teacher-support tool, VallamAI, developed by Madhi Foundation, is currently being piloted in seven districts, covering 2,100 teachers, 150 instructional coaches and around 60,000 government school students.
The tool focuses on foundational learning, where children in the same classroom can be at vastly different learning levels, a challenge commonly faced by teachers in government schools. VallamAI is designed to help teachers identify students who require additional support, understand specific learning gaps and decide on suitable remedial measures.
Teachers can assess students through speech, multiple-choice questions or by manually entering scores. The platform can then group students according to their learning levels across subjects and generate individual insights into the areas where they need support.
The system is also intended to reduce the time teachers spend on evaluation and analysing data, allowing them to focus more on instruction and remediation.
VallamAI also features an AI chatbot that teachers and instructional coaches can access through text or voice. The chatbot provides guidance based on teacher handbooks and foundational learning frameworks, helping users decide on the next course of action during classroom teaching or coaching sessions.
For instructional coaches and education officials overseeing multiple schools, the platform brings together data on teacher performance and classroom outcomes to identify teachers who may require focused support. This could enable more targeted discussions instead of relying solely on broad classroom observations.
The application also generates insights from assessment and classroom observation data, flagging learning gaps, patterns, areas requiring improvement and progress over time. This is expected to reduce the need for teachers and coaches to manually sift through dashboards and reports.
In recent years, governments have strengthened curriculum frameworks, teacher training, assessment and monitoring systems under foundational literacy and numeracy programmes for Classes 1 to 5. However, ensuring that these interventions translate into changes in classroom practice remains a challenge, particularly as teachers often have limited time for assessment and remedial teaching.
Madhi Foundation works with government education systems to strengthen foundational learning and improve classroom practices. In Tamil Nadu, it has been involved in the implementation of the government’s foundational literacy and numeracy programme, Ennum Ezhuthum.