Excerpts from her conversation with Ashutosh Tiwari: TFA’s mission is to eliminate educational inequity around the world. How do you aim to do it? All over the world, we have seen that kids’ socio-economic background predicts their educational outcomes, which have an impact on life outcomes. It’s a deeply systemic problem, which exists for many reasons and to which there is no one single solution. We believe that the only thing that is fundamental to any solution is to channel the energy of our best possible human resource. In all of the different countries – Pakistan, India, China, Nepal and others — where there are Teach for All partners, they are working to channel the energies of their countries’ most promising future leaders, initially through a commitment to teach for two years in the high need communities.The partners also invest a great deal to develop those teachers so that they have an immediate impact on the kids they are teaching. That experience ends up being a foundational one for a life of leadership and advocacy. Ultimately, we are working to generate a group of leaders who will act with great convictions and urgency to address the systemic issues of educational inequities in their countries.Wendy observing a TFN Fellow's classroom.In Nepal and in Asia, bright young people do not go into high school teaching, and those who go do not necessarily view themselves as leaders. Given this, what sort of leadership paradigm do you have in mind when you talk about teachers as leaders? There are different conceptions of leadership all over the world. What we mean is that to really solve the problem, we need people at every level of the educational system: in the classroom, as school principals, as people running school systems, as civic leaders, as leaders running companies, and as our political leaders. We need them all to understand what you understand once you teach in a high-need context. That is, it is possible for kids to achieve even if they face extreme poverty, lack resources and have low expectations. Our conception of leadership is to have people in positions of responsibilities in the educational system and across sectors who share that understanding to work together to educational inequities.Teaching successfully is also an act of leadership in the context of where we work. Teaching kids with low expectations and with fewer resources is always a challenge. Most successful teachers go way above what is required to create a vision as to where they want to take the kids by the end of the year. They figure out ways to get there against difficulties. They expand the opportunities. They get the kids on a mission. Rallying others to meet a vision by working in a relentlessly goal-oriented way is leadership.Educational systems and institutions are different around the world. How has the TFA model of training graduates to teach for two years worked in different countries? It would not have made sense if we had expanded the Teach for America model to countries outside of the US on our own. We started Teach for All after we started meeting people from India, Chile, Lebanon who were determined to launch the TFA model of teaching in their own countries and were looking for help. These were local social entrepreneurs who had the vision of ending educational inequities in their home countries but needed support with regard to how to achieve their vision.Though it is true that on a country to country level, there are indeed many cultural and systemic differences, what we have learnt over time is how similar and shareable some of the solutions are. We have learnt that the factors that make remarkable teachers are similar across countries.The challenges of developing partnerships with government agencies are also similar across countries. Though we do not use a cookie-cutter approach, we are finding that our realities are far more similar than our differences. This has fueled our optimism that we can actually help create a network of like-minded organizations that can share and learn, and accelerate the needed changes to address the inequities in education around the world.Wendy at TFN Fellow's classroom.Wendy at TFN Fellow’s classroom. From your 24-year experience, what traits and characteristics have you found to be predictive of most effective teachers? There are traits, and there are approaches. On the approach side, we see that teachers who develop close relations with their students and the families have a deeper understanding of local contexts. This knowledge helps them be effective teachers. We find that most successful teachers across our networks have their head around where they see their students in the next ten years if something does not change. They then ask themselves what they can do now to get the kids on the path to a better future. They thus help expand the opportunities so that the kids get on a trajectory of life that has more options for success.We have found that perseverance is a predictive trait. When faced with problems, the effective teachers do not blame the kids, the parents, the school or the school system. Instead, they do what they can to fix the problems. As such, the people who really excel as teachers relentlessly focus on getting better so that they can succeed with their kids.But we do not assume that these approaches and traits are necessarily universal. Each partner program has its own teacher selection models and training curricula. It tests the competencies for itself in its own contexts. What we do is help with what questions to ask, provide exposure, share answers and solutions that others have developed, and let each country’s program build on others’ success and examples.In Nepal, parents can be reluctant to have their high-achieving sons and daughters teaching high school. They would rather have their children complete all aspects of higher education and get ready for the urban job market with a clear career path. From what you have seen around the world, how do you convince such parents that it’s worthwhile for their kids to spend two years of their life teaching, say, English, math or science to deprived students in rural Nepal? Doing this well takes time and evidence. As Teach for Nepal gets into its second year of operations, it is important to ensure that the initial groups of selected students have excellent experiences, and that their parents come to appreciate the work they do. These then provide realistic and powerful testimonials to others about the transformative nature of teaching for two years. Over time, with the build-up of enough such examples, a persuasive case could be built and explained to parents and others. That said, there might also be issues around safety and remoteness, which are relevant. These need to be addressed well.For college graduates, the next two years may look like the rest of their lives. But we all know that deciding what to do next after college is the first of the many decisions we will make throughout our careers, which go on for three or more decades. I believe that teaching for two years can truly be a path with no regrets, for it is a way to gain foundational experiences in working with students, understanding and addressing educational inequities, exercising leadership and developing deep bonds with others who share the same passion for the improvement of education in the country. This is a short term investment that has the potential to make huge immediate impact, and but will also pay off for the teachers themselves over a long haul.Wendy with Teach For Nepal Fellow Rijuta Maharjan at her home-stay room. Wendy with Teach For Nepal Fellow Rijuta Maharjan at her home-stay room.You are no stranger to controversy. In the US, Teach for America has been variously criticized for being “an elitist program” which places “ill-trained young teachers” in difficult schools where “teachers who belong to unions are then replaced”. How do you respond to such criticisms, knowing that in five to 10 years’ time, TFN may face similar criticisms here? Critics may not fully understand the actual mission of our programs. We are not saying that these Fellows are going to change the world or the country through two years of teaching. We are also not saying that these Fellows make better teachers than veteran teachers already at schools. We are also not saying that six-week summer training for our teachers is better than other trainings for teachers that are out there. We are also not replacing teachers because unless the schools want us, we cannot legally go to those schools to teach. Most of these criticisms thus come from perceptions.We have to get centered on the fact that we have an unacceptable crisis in our countries, where kids in low-income socioeconomic brackets and remote locations are four-grade level behind kids who come from privileged backgrounds. For them to break the cycles of poverty, a good education is important, which helps them access opportunities for advancement.It could be that some people believe that we first need to solve the problem of poverty before we tackle the challenges of education. But we see educational problems as problems we can bring within our control, if we channel enough talent and leadership into it. So, we are out there, alongside banks and consulting firms, asking college graduates to take their first step to a life of leadership and advocacy by helping us solve the problem of this magnitude.We need to do this responsibly. We think there are many paths to teaching, and that there are experienced and effective teachers at schools. We consider TFA one source of new teachers, who the schools decide to bring in. Most of our training is in-service in that there are ongoing training programs – the investment we continue to make — throughout the two-year cycle. We have found that 60 % of our alums stay in education, and many others work in related fields of educational policy, law, entrepreneurship and the like.