On a Tuesday morning, a teacher moved between two grades in the same classroom — Grade 1 on one side, Grade 2 on the other — trying to keep both going without losing either. One Grade 1 child was falling behind, and the teacher knew she couldn’t sit with him for long. She paired him with a more confident classmate and asked that child to take the lead. The idea hadn’t come from a circular or a training. It came from a two-minute video shared on her school’s WhatsApp group, shot by a teacher in Hargaon village in Uttar Pradesh’s district Sitapur. The classroom looked exactly like hers — familiar walls, the same wooden benches. It didn’t feel like an instruction to follow. It felt like something she could choose and own.

Why peer examples matter 
For most government school teachers in remote districts, the job of a teacher has always been a solitary one. Limited feedback, no peer learning, no real conversations about what actually works in classrooms like theirs. What comes instead are directives — circulars and training programmes from the state, from mentors, from outside experts — quietly received yet often ignored. Not out of defiance, but out of a weariness that comes from years of advice untethered from the reality of a single-teacher school, a multi-grade classroom, a child who hasn’t eaten breakfast, or a classroom that empties out every harvest season.

This is where peer sharing and learning can play an effective role. When a teacher finds a way to solve a problem her peers face every day, they often film it — a short video, shot on a phone — and this gets circulated through WhatsApp groups and YouTube across the district. 

Since 2024, CSF has been partnering with the district administration in Sitapur to support academic monitoring and review mechanisms, strengthening school and block-level instructional leadership, while keeping data fidelity at the center of it all. 

All of these efforts ultimately converge in one place i.e. the classroom, where they shape how a child learns. 

The District Magistrate in Sitapur has formalised this sharing of videos into a monthly ritual: teachers submit their best practice videos, and every District Review Meeting now includes a public felicitation of the teacher and her school. However, the real shift happens when a teacher in a remote village watches one of these videos on her phone. She doesn’t see an expert or a directive. She sees someone from her own community, in a classroom that looks like hers, solving a problem she recognises. Peer to peer, not top to bottom.

How this approach creates a ‘nudge’
Classic behavioural economics describes nudges as directives engineered at the top. Administrators are the ones designing the choice environment: they select the role model, craft the message, stage the social proof. What happens in the example shared above is different. The nudge here is emergent, not engineered. But the underlying mechanism remains the same. 

Behavioral economists have long argued that beneficial social norms are best reinforced by drawing attention to positive influencers, especially those that people can identify with, those in the same geography or circumstance. The World Development Report 2015 documents a study in rural Ethiopia showing villagers short documentaries of people from their own region who have escaped poverty — not outside experts — measurably increased aspirations and changed behaviour within six months. The proximate identity of the role model was central to the effect (Bernard et al. 2014).The UK’s Behavioural Insights Team documents the same pattern: norm-based messages work best when the reference group is socially close – residents responded more to energy comparisons with their own community than with strangers (BIT, 2014). 

What we saw playing out in Sitapur follows a similar trajectory –  – the teacher in Hargaon is not an expert flown in from a training institute, he is a proximate “other”: same kind of school, same constraints. The self-shot videos create social proof — a teacher sharing how she sends a child home with a hand-drawn note — written by the child herself — to make sure her parents show up to the next PTM.

When these videos are watched by another teacher sitting hundreds of kilometers away – dealing with similar challenges – and they see a peer succeeding, the behavior becomes imaginable, achievable, worth trying. When the District Magistrate publicly recognises those teachers, it signals that the behaviour is seen, valued, and worth repeating.

The insight here is clear — people are more likely to alter their behaviour when the “others” belong to their community. 

Implications for policy and practice
Decades of research in behavioural science indicates that directives and suggestions from an “out-group” — people perceived as outsiders to one’s community and context — often trigger psychological reactance, an instinctive resistance that makes people less, not more, likely to change. Social proof, on the other hand, works in the opposite way. When behaviour change is modeled by someone from within the group, in conditions the observer recognises, the resistance dissolves. 

What districts in Uttar Pradesh are doing — using zero-cost, WhatsApp networks to circulate self-shot videos and onboarding the administration to celebrate rather than just inspect —  is a model that can be replicated by any district. 

Key design choices to consider, when building this at a district-level: 

• Encourage teacher‑generated content: keep videos short, problem‑focused, and authentic.
• Build minimal curation: nominate a rotating teacher‑editor or mentor to surface high‑value clips.
• Pair visibility with modest incentives: public recognition at district meetings reinforces social proof.
• Monitor equity: ensure teachers from less represented or marginalised communities get equal visibility so learning spreads inclusively.

A small, locally generated nudge — when combined with recognition — can shift teacher behaviour by making good practices visible, relatable and replicable. The ingredients to drive this change are not exotic, but are rooted in enabling and appreciating the backbone of any education system – its teachers.