Pedro Siciliano, MBA ’24: Giving Teachers the Time to Teach

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Pedro Siciliano, MBA ’24 | Photo by Misha Bruk

When Pedro Siciliano encounters obstacles or moments when things do not go according to plan, he has a powerful motive to push forward: the fact that his company, Teachy, is saving time for more than 300,000 Latin American teachers. And by helping these teachers to enhance their educational effectiveness, the Teachy model is also improving educational outcomes for their more than 5 million students.

For Brazilian-born Siciliano, education has always been of critical importance. His grandmother was a teacher, and his mother instilled in him the value of learning. “She was a huge inspiration and example to me,” he says. “She taught me how important education was.”

In addition, the teaching that Siciliano did his undergraduate studies at Instituto Militar de Engenharia, Brazil’s prestigious engineering school, his assignments as a McKinsey business analyst, and his work at Brazilian digital education company Descomplica all convinced him that in order to transform education, you need to support and empower teachers — particularly in emerging economies.

Without the digital tools that are available in wealthy countries, he says, teachers are forced to rely on time-consuming paper-based processes for everything from creating class content and grading students’ exam papers to the reporting and administrative tasks required by their schools.

“Growing up in a developing economy, it was pretty clear how education could make a difference in your life,” he says. However, he argues that current models leave teachers with insufficient time to focus on their students. He points to McKinsey research showing that teachers in developing economies spend 20 hours per week completing complex, bureaucratic tasks that do nothing to enhance student learning.

Arriving at Stanford GSB, Siciliano knew he wanted to start an ed tech company. And as he began to explore the sector, he discovered a gap in the market. “I noticed that there were very few solutions addressing the problems facing teachers, instead of students, so I started to dive deeply into that.”

That deep dive resulted in Teachy, which uses AI to bring together everything teachers need on one easy-to-use AI platform while enabling them to build highly personalized learning programs for their students. “We want to give teachers a one-stop shop that delivers far more in terms of workflow and instructional quality than generic AI models can offer,” says Siciliano.

The Problem

For more than 70 million K-12 teachers around the world, half of their work time is spent outside the classroom on bureaucratic activities such as grading, sourcing materials online, preparing quizzes, and writing hundreds of reports. This work is generally unpaid, is extremely burdensome, and is not where teachers add most value for their students.

For the 50 million teachers in developing countries, few digital tools are available to help with lesson planning, and those available are expensive (accounting for 5-10% of a teacher’s monthly income) and outdated.

Moreover, most teachers’ pay is so low that many have to take a second job to make ends meet. In fact, in Latin America, where the average teacher’s salary is just $500 a month, nearly half of all teachers have two or more jobs, says Siciliano.

This puts extreme stress on individual teachers and contributes to a global shortage of teaching professionals as more leave a job that offers so little pay for such hard work. Between 2015 and 2022 attrition rates among primary teachers almost doubled, according to UNESCO, the United Nation’s education, cultural and scientific arm, with teachers often leaving the profession within five years of entering it.

For students of the future, the figures are alarming. In 2024, UNESCO found that by 2030 the world will need 44 million additional teachers to achieve universal primary and secondary education. Demand is highest in sub-Saharan Africa, which needs an estimated 15 million new teachers by 2030.

Having been a teacher, Siciliano sees a clear link between the pressures teachers face and their ability to perform to their best ability, or even to remain in the job. And as a Brazilian, he is aware of the difference between the US, where access to connectivity and mobile devices is the norm for teachers, and developing countries, where it is not as widespread —especially in younger, lower-income populations.

“I saw the impact that access to cutting-edge software, when it is truly built for developing countries, has on industries such as fintech and online payments. So it could also be transformational on student learning curves,” says Siciliano. “That made me want to change this situation and build something that could change teachers’ lives.”

The Solution

If teachers could complete all their out-of-class tasks faster and more easily, they would have more time and energy to focus on the critical interactions with their students during the classes themselves. That is the rationale behind the solution developed by Siciliano and his Teachy co-founder and chief technology officer Fábio Baldissera.

Using generative AI models that have been trained on the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (Brazil’s national curriculum), the Teachy platform enables teachers to create educational content in a matter of minutes from a proprietary database of more than 1 million teaching materials that have been vetted by teachers and more than 40,000 lesson plans verified by the Teachy team. It also generates supporting texts, tables, slides, and videos.

The platform also helps teachers to grade assignments rapidly, even when they include open-ended questions. And critically, since Latin American students do not have widespread access to mobile devices, the tool even grades exams submitted on paper by enabling teachers to take photos of the documents and upload them to the Teachy app. As a result, the company has cut more than 80% of the time teachers would once have spent on out-of-class planning, grading, and administrative work.

Using the app, teachers can easily create content that is tailored to each student’s strengths and weaknesses —something badly needed in the developing world where, as a result of the COVID pandemic, some students missed 1-2 years of classes because they lacked access to devices or connectivity at home, says Siciliano.

The app also matches resources to students’ specific needs, and the data it generates provides insights that help teachers to improve their effectiveness while tracking student performance over time. “You can really understand where students are doing better or worse and prepare specific materials tailored for those with special learning needs, differentiating content in a matter of minutes,” says Siciliano.

Meanwhile, to ensure there is a “human in the loop” (the idea that people must always supervise the development and use of AI), teachers can monitor and provide feedback on what the platform produces. They retain full control of how they personalize their lessons, choose learning methods such as lectures, debates, or blended learning, define their rubrics, and edit the final results.

“We see ourselves as teachers’ assistants, relieving them of tasks that they do not enjoy and that add less value for students,” says Siciliano.

Since maximizing access to its tools is a priority, the company uses a model that offers basic weekly access for free in perpetuity. Those paying for its premium service — both teachers and schools — gain no-limits use of all its tools.

“Access is the most important thing,” says Siciliano. “And in Latin America, we believe it’s the only way to scale our impact and ensure that every teacher and every student has access to world-class lessons.”

The Innovator

For Siciliano, Teachy is not the first education-focused organization he has created. Long before moving into the startup world, he launched an initiative that helped hundreds of young people gain free admission to some of Latin America’s top colleges. However, he knew that ultimately this was not how he could create far-reaching impact and wanted to explore the potential of business to do so.

However, at the time, Brazil’s start-up industry was nascent compared to that of Silicon Valley, with its decades-long track record of innovation in business and technology. “That’s why I went to McKinsey. It seemed like a way to learn about business for someone without a clear reference within the family,” he says. “And I saw how it was possible to do big things in education.”

His time at Descomplica, where he got to know its founder and CEO Marco Fisbhen, was also transformational for Siciliano. “That opened my mind,” he says. “Marco was an amazing mentor. He understood how big things could be, but also what it takes to build those things.”

It was while at Descomplica, watching how it helped millions of students to get into some of Brazil’s best schools, that Siciliano saw the potential of business to achieve scale while also delivering essential services with significant social impact.

In the mission to scale, Siciliano and his team have already made rapid progress. Teachers from more than 50,000 schools now use Teachy, accounting for more than 300,000 individual teachers. In addition to the original Portuguese content, it now has English and Spanish versions and it has users in more than 170 countries on all continents.

In addition to Siciliano’s SIF fellowship funding, the team secured $1.6 million in funding in 2023, which it is using for further growth. “And we are open to raising another round over the next year,” says Siciliano.

For Siciliano, Teachy is much more than an AI tool. It is a way to streamline the entire teaching workflow, giving teachers better insights and helping them prepare lessons 10 times faster than they could without the app. “Teachers can focus on the needs of individual students using quality materials, models, and data they can trust,” he says.

For him, empowering teachers has a ripple effect, improving prospects for schools, communities, and countries around the world. “When you bring more joy and impact to teachers’ work, giving them a reason to stay in the job, it’s not just teachers’ lives you are transforming,” he says. In Latin America alone, he points out, there are 120 million students who could benefit from improved pedagogical content. “We need to help teachers around the globe to reclaim their time to help their students,” he says. “Teachers change the world. We are here to help them do that.”