What We Learned From 40 Teachers, and What We Built Because of It
Reflecting on the EdTech Teacher Co-Creation Sprint, and introducing the TIDA Checker
For eight weeks, 40 teachers from across Kenya — from Kisumu to Garissa, from primary classrooms to TVET colleges — joined an experiment of a different kind. Not a training or workshop, but a sprint built on a simple premise: teachers shouldn't just receive professional development, they should design it.
The Teacher Innovation Design Approach, or TIDA — five stages, Reveal, Reframe, Run, Refine, and Radiate, that turn a teacher's own classroom hunch into something they can actually test.
We came away from the sprint with a shared evidence library of micro-experiments, a stack of teacher reflections, and one insight that kept resurfacing in different words, from different teachers, in different regions:
"The Canvas made me realize I could run small tests in my own class, no need to wait for training." — Teacher Wycliff, Nakuru
Teachers didn't need to be handed more best practices. They needed the confidence, and a light enough structure, to test their own ideas against reality.
The gap we noticed
Watching teachers move through TIDA, one thing stood out. The Reveal and Reframe stages, where a teacher surfaces an assumption and turns it into something testable, worked best when teachers had something to check that assumption against. A colleague's experience, a webinar or a hunch from their own practice.
What was often missing was easy access to the research itself. Not because teachers didn't value it, but because — as we've written about separately — educational research is scattered, dense, and rarely written for someone planning tomorrow's lesson. Teachers have historically had to trust intermediaries — consultants, PD providers, edu-influencers — to tell them what the evidence says, often long after that evidence has been simplified, reframed, or oversold.
The sprint proved teachers don't want to skip that step. They want a faster, more honest way to take it.
What we built
So we built a small tool to sit inside the TIDA cycle itself: the TIDA Checker.
Here's how it works. You tell it which TIDA stage you're at — Reveal, Reframe, Run, Refine, or Radiate — and describe your idea in a sentence or two, the way you'd say it to a colleague. The tool builds a structured prompt tailored to that stage, which you paste into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity.
- At Reveal, it asks the AI to interrogate your assumption: what does the evidence actually say, and what's just popular belief?
- At Reframe, it helps turn that assumption into a hypothesis narrow enough to test in two to four weeks.
- At Run, it helps you design a lightweight, resource-realistic way to collect evidence in your own classroom — the kind that works with one shared device and unstable Wi-Fi, not a research lab.
- At Refine, you describe what actually happened, and it helps you tell signal from noise.
- At Radiate, it helps you write up what you found honestly — without overselling a single classroom trial as universal proof.
There's no login, no data stored on our side — it simply builds text on your device that you take wherever you want to have the conversation.
Try it, and tell us what's wrong with it
We built this from what the sprint taught us, but it's a first draft, not a finished product. We'd rather hear it's clunky now than assume it's perfect.
Try the TIDA Checker → stempathy-africa.odoo.com/the-tida-checker
Whether you were one of the original 40 or you're meeting TIDA for the first time through this post, we want to know: Did it help you think differently about an idea before you tried it? Where did the prompts feel off, generic, or disconnected from your context? What would make you actually reach for this before your next micro-experiment?
Give us your feedback →
The sprint reminded us that the future of teacher-led innovation in Kenya — and everywhere — depends on teachers having real access to evidence, not just confidence in their own judgment. This tool is one small attempt to close that gap. Help us make it better.
The TIDA Checker was built by STEMpathy Africa, in partnership with EdTech East Africa, drawing on the Teacher Innovation Design Approach and inspired in part by The Evidence Checker, a similar tool built for teachers by Jim Hewitt and Nidhi Sachdeva at OISE.
