Data Scientists at the Hartree Centre North East Hub worked with Teacher Success Platform (TSP) to develop a ‘teaching mentor’ chatbot for education providers, that was able to provide instant feedback in real life classroom situations.

Challenge

Teacher Success Platform (TSP) is a spin-out from the University of York that provides teacher recruitment and development tools to teacher training providers, charities, and government ministries of education. Their products offer classroom simulations that help education providers recruit and develop effective teachers, mentors, and school leaders. Current feedback on the exercises completed are based on a user’s response patterns, but the feedback is static (from an item bank) and not interactive. Their customers required greater interactivity and customisation of the feedback that they received.

Approach

Data Scientists at the Hartree Centre North East Hub worked with TSP to explore how to address this business challenge to ensure teachers were receiving just-in-time feedback in real life situations. After outlining the goals, the team were able to focus on how natural language processing and large language models (LLM) could assist with teacher training and how a potential model could fit within the existing framework that TSP has created. The first part of the project was all about understanding TSP’s existing data and processes. This allowed the Data Scientists at the North East Hub to create a prototype chat application to explore the possibilities in both the open source and proprietary model spaces. The work then focussed mainly on successive rounds of prompt engineering to craft and hone a ‘teaching mentor’ persona with which a learner could interact.

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Benefits

The prototype created has given TSP the ability to understand the possibilities and challenges of using an LLM powered chat interface within their existing application. The team now have a greater knowledge of the importance of careful crafting of prompts when working with LLMs and  they also have a firm base to start integration with their platform for pilot testing. Since the end of the project, TSP has been able to start introducing the teaching mentor into the UK market and have begun thinking about how to expand this further.

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“The team at the Hartree Centre North East Hub enabled us to quickly and safely explore the possibilities of using LLM powered chat interfaces within our platform to improve the interactivity and impact that our platform can have in the learning outcomes for trainee teachers.”

- Robert Klassen, Founder of Teacher Success Platform

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“The support has been absolutely invaluable for helping us to clarify our own ideas and to make sure that what we are doing is different from the rest of the market. I would recommend anybody has a go at seeing what potential they could encounter through using the Hartree Centre North East Hub.”

- Rebecca Snell, Education Consultant at Teacher Success Platform

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Further Information

This work was completed as part of one of our collaborative data projects. The projects are up to 12 weeks in duration and give you access to a wide range of expertise across our team of data scientists and data engineers. We will work alongside your team to scope your data science or engineering project, build a prototype solution, and explore options to deploy it within your organisation. You can learn more about them on our webpage here.

If you would like to learn more about the Hartree Centre North East Hub or our collaborative data projects, please get in touch with us at: hello@hartreenortheast.uk

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