From the app to the classroom

A funder seldom sees the step that matters most in teacher development: the moment a teacher turns what she learned into a lesson. In 2025 we set out to watch that step.

In September and October 2025, six Foundation Phase teachers from five schools in a pilot we ran in KwaZulu-Natal each taught a lesson built from a kolab. module. Each grade from 1 to 3 had two teachers, one teaching Mathematics and one teaching English.

The teachers chose the skill themselves, from their own planning for the term. We matched it to the corresponding module on the app, the teacher watched it, and our field facilitator brought a resource pack drawn from the same module: printed activity worksheets, a short guide to running the lesson, and feedback forms for the teacher and the learners. We built everything in the pack from the module, so what the teacher taught matched what she had learned.

The lessons were ordinary CAPS work. A Grade 1 class solved money problems with totals and change up to R20. A Grade 3 class of 26 learned to tell 12-hour time on analogue and digital clocks. Class sizes across the six ran from 26 to 38.

We told the teachers they were not being assessed; they were assessing us. Each completed a feedback form on her own straight after the lesson, with no kolab. staff present. All six gave the top score on all six questions, from the clarity of the module to whether they would teach the skill our way again. That is the 100% figure in our Teaching Experience Report of October 2025, and its scope belongs beside it: six teachers, five schools.

The learners answered three questions of their own, with smiling and sad faces in place of words: did you enjoy the activities, did you learn something new, and was the lesson easy to understand. Every learner who completed the form chose the top answer for all three. A few learners in each class were absent on the day, so the forms returned ran from 20 to 35 per class.

Six teachers is a small study, and I offer it as a picture of the method at work in real classrooms. For a funder it shows something practical. A teacher can take a kolab. module from her phone into a lesson the following week, with materials in hand, and the teachers told us the printed pack made the lesson quicker to prepare.

That step, from a phone screen to a full classroom, is the one a funder is paying for. We built kolab. around it.