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NEST and TARA
Discover how Teach For India and Gooey.AI deployed AI agents to support Fellows with real-time, personalized teaching guidance. This case study is designed for educators, university leaders, and organizations in the education and social impact sectors, to learn how AI can strengthen teacher training and classroom outcomes.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
100+
Workshop Participants
24
Member Organisations in Stakeholders Consortium
6
Workshops
2
Roundtable sessions
Teach For India (TFI) is one of India’s leading education nonprofits, working to eliminate educational inequity by placing exceptional graduates as Fellows in under-resourced schools. Operating across 8 cities, the Fellowship reaches tens of thousands of children, building a generation of leaders committed to transforming India’s education system.
Theory of Change
The Problem of Under-supported Classrooms
The context
Teach For India places hundreds of first-time Fellows in under-resourced classrooms nationwide. Fellows are responsible for everything from lesson planning to managing diverse learning levels. This demands timely, high-quality support at scale.
The problem of limited bandwidth
Instructional coaches play a critical role, but each coach supports 15–20 Fellows across multiple schools. This makes it difficult to deliver consistent, on-demand guidance, especially when Fellows need quick, reflective answers or reflective input during classroom planning.
The need for AI solutions
As the program expanded, Teach For India needed a way to offer every Fellow immediate, personalised, and reliable support. Deploying AI agents became a strategic solution to reduce bottlenecks, and improve classroom experience.
Background & Needs
Accelerator-led approach
In 2024, TFI joined the Rockefeller Accelerator, supported by Gooey.AI, exploring how low-code AI tools could strengthen teacher training and classroom outcomes. Using our platform, they piloted two types of AI agents over WhatsApp - NEST and TARA.
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Ground realities
Teach For India Fellows teach grades 1 to 10, managing classrooms of 40–80 students, either as class or subject teachers. As many Fellows are first-time educators working in challenging environments, they often struggle with lesson planning, classroom management, and addressing wide learning gaps.
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Interventions & Process
Deploying AI agents
Using Gooey two WhatsApp-based AI agents - NEST and TARA were built and deployed to support TFI Fellows. TFI ran a pilot with 20 Fellows which showed the AI agents were used mostly during lesson planning, when Fellows were feeling stuck, or after tough classes, providing timely, personalised support.
Building N.E.S.T
N.E.S.T or Nurturing Educator Supporting Tool helps Fellows reflect by asking deep-dive and clarifying questions such as “what happened?” and “what are some common moments where this has happened?"
Designing T.A.R.A
T.A.R.A or Teacher's AI for Reflection & Action is an AI teaching assistant that gives solutions or ready-to-implement strategies quickly, and based on the knowledge base we uploaded.
Outcomes
Highlights of AI agent usage
Fellows shared that NEST asked a lot of clarifying questions while TARA pointed to a lot of resources. Both agents were empathetic and conversational and Fellows used them to create structured lesson plans aligned to classroom needs. TFI further plans to scale to a 100 Fellows, and then to all TFI Fellows.
Low-code AI built by SMEs
Through Gooey.AI’s low-code platform, Teach For India’s subject matter experts were able to build and iterate AI tools themselves without needing technical expertise. Further iterations include Classmate AI, which combines both the speed and depth of NEST and TARA. Our AI solutions were tailored to provide onground and scalable support to teachers in under-resourced schools.
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Stakeholders’ feedback
Nitesh Mukherjee
Senior Manager, Digital Transformation at Teach For India
"It has been a great learning experience. The sessions are thoughtfully designed to gradually expose us to the platform’s capabilities and allow us to try them out ourselves. I learnt how to enable my org teams to also leverage the platform to build at least a basic version of an AI assistant themselves instead of being dependent on a tech team. I am also taking away lots of sparks in terms of features and processes."
Senior Manager, Digital Transformation at Teach For India
"It has been a great learning experience. The sessions are thoughtfully designed to gradually expose us to the platform’s capabilities and allow us to try them out ourselves. I learnt how to enable my org teams to also leverage the platform to build at least a basic version of an AI assistant themselves instead of being dependent on a tech team. I am also taking away lots of sparks in terms of features and processes."
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