The United Nations has described the global scale of education disruption from COVID-19 as “unparalleled”. The 2019–20 Coronavirus pandemic has affected educational systems worldwide, leading to widespread closures of schools, universities and colleges. While students across the board have been impacted by the pandemic, it is important to explore the severe impact on children from marginalized communities in many countries of the global south, including India which, at 260 million children, has the largest school-going population in the world.

As the impact of the pandemic unfolds, it is becoming abundantly clear that traditional learning models and schools have ill-equipped us and our children to understand, make meaning, respond and adapt to the uncertainty and vulnerabilities emerging from the current crisis. The last few years have seen the discourse around education reform moving towards making children work-ready for jobs of the future. An approach that has become outdated due to 3 – main reasons:

• The future is already here:The often-repeated assumption that children would have to face an uncertain job market and a fast-changing world a few years from now is already a reality, and this uncertain future is changing as we speak. This is a time to self-reflect and critically examine — have we done enough to prepare our children for this unprecedented situation?

• Entrenched systemic inequalities have deepened: The current crisis has further thrown up the systemic inequities in our society with the poor and marginalised being affected many times over than the average population. When an eighth-grade student we heard from, who shares a smartphone with her family of four – the family has to make a  tough choice between buying an internet-package and essential groceries – is not allowed into her online class for being five minutes late, are we not perpetuating the same systemic biases we held offline on the online world? What could be the role of education in changing this reality?

The need to shift mindsets

The pandemic and its impact on educational ecosystems require for us to reflect on the existing systemic inequities that have become more visible in the recent months. We see schools rushing for immediate solutions to sustain academics, but there are far-reaching effects on students and teachers when they are forced to adopt online learning. Our policymakers need to take into account the fact that marginalised communities do not have easy access to digital infrastructure. The need of the hour is to ensure education is available to all, rather than to ensure those who can afford education continue to receive it.

The psychological impact on children, whose lives are suddenly changed forever has largely been left unaddressed; they are expected to adapt when even we, the adults who are meant to guide young people have no clarity on what to expect from the future.

Re-imagining the purpose of education

Where do we go when all this is over? If one is ‘lucky enough’ to have not been completely displaced by the pandemic, one hopefully goes to school. But just how prepared are schools to respond to this reality? We have all experienced collective grief and loss at a global and unimaginable level. We need to let this sink in. And then, when we are ready to respond, let us ask ourselves what is the most compassionate offer we can make to our children under these circumstances? Will our best foot forward be dumping our own anxiety of ‘loss of learning’ on them? Or will we recognise that they have learnt perhaps the most difficult lesson of their lives in the last few months as they stayed put in their homes? The role of teachers in the upbringing of young people is often overlooked. 

#Whatif, instead of examinations based on rote-learning, we ask our students; ‘Do you know how to be kind to each other? Do you know how to make decisions that are good for you, your community and for the planet? Do you know how to collaborate and celebrate the success of others? Do you know how to heal?’

The need for a more inclusive policy

Current systems follow a one-size-fits-all approach, whereas the reality is that in a country like India, such an approach is tough to put into practice. We need an education system that is sensitive to the myriad impact of adversity on children from vulnerable backgrounds. When designing solutions, the needs of these sections of society deserve more attention than they presently receive. The New Education Policy, while a positive step in the right direction, once again lacks clarity on implementation. It remains to be seen how such a revolutionary step in education will affect a country as diverse and vast as ours bearing in mind that not everyone will have access to the same kind of facilities and infrastructure. Another challenge that we foresee is the measurement of success upon implementation and the way forward from there.

Kindness as the foundation of a framework for change

The framework for education should start by redefining the purpose of education to mean ‘thriving for all’. We conducted a study to better understand what it means to thrive. Are the indicators the same when children come from adversity? Do tailored approaches need to be followed to achieve desired outcomes across the board? We have found that empathetic adults and safe spaces allow young people to fully discover their potential and thrive despite coming from adversity. At the centre of this approach lies kindness and the willingness to listen, holding spaces for young people to express themselves and be treated as unique individuals. 

Academic outcomes can be affected by several factors that are out of the control of educators. Scoring high marks does not necessarily mean that a child is prepared for whatever the future may throw at them. Adopting an approach that places thriving at the centre of education is much more inclusive and helps young people seek a more meaningful engagement with life.

The post Why we need to re-define the purpose of education appeared first on India Leaders for Social Sector.

Summer always brings back childhood memories of long school breaks and anticipation of what the next year at school would be like. Yet, this summer, most children are simply longing to go back to school – and we have no idea when that will actually happen.

With schools shut for almost three months, children have been suddenly forced to adapt to new ways of learning. Some of them have been accessing learning through phones and laptops. Several private schools have shifted to online classes. My niece in Grade 3 now knows more about Zoom and Microsoft Teams than me; she and her classmates have also figured out how to privately message each other without getting caught by the teacher!

Despite the classroom going online, one thing hasn’t changed: the teacher is still the one speaking and most children—now outside the four walls of the classroom—are still zoning out. If they were doodling and daydreaming in the classroom, they are doing that sitting in front of computers. Some are also finding it difficult to adapt to the new normal. I heard my five-year-old nephew, whose kindergarten classes are now on Zoom, tell his mother that school isn’t for him as listening to his teacher gave him a splitting headache. My niece, on the other hand, wants to go back to school because she misses her friends. The daily interaction and engagement with other children, the foundation of all learning, has taken the biggest hit in the current context.

New medium, old thinking

Besides their online schooling, my niece and nephew are doing a lot more on their own. They have designed their own games using discarded and old stationery items. Their boredom is giving them the freedom to experiment and explore. Observing that they are learning a lot more from each other has reaffirmed my belief that learning can happen anywhere, anytime and through anyone.

The sad part, though, is how our society still perceives learning. Many well-intentioned parents, for instance, feel that children are not learning enough during their online classes. They are therefore adding to the burden on their children by having them attend tuition classes on Zoom so that they can ‘revise’—basically try to recall, repeat and memorise—what was taught at (online) school earlier.

[Also read: ‘The spirit remains the same, the ambition is bigger’, with Safeena Husain from Educate Girls]

Our collective obsession with revision, recall and memorising is deep. As a result, this crisis innovation of online schools has ended up becoming a continuation of the old offline classroom. We have transferred all the flaws of the physical classroom to the online space. 

We forget that learning can only be facilitated. And both the classroom and online meeting rooms are mediums through which students can either be instructed or provided with opportunities to explore, question, share and understand.

Teachers are struggling equally in this transition. They need support and spaces where they can discuss their issues and concerns, especially in the new context where the challenge is more in terms of engaging with children in a medium that is unfamiliar.  At the India Education Collective, our approach towards teacher empowerment has been to facilitate monthly teacher meetings at the cluster level, wherein teachers collaboratively solve their challenges.  It is difficult to replicate the engagement and interaction using current technology tools. The importance of peer learning and support amongst teachers is and will remain an important process for any effective education system. How are we thinking of addressing these kinds of requirements?

Re-thinking how our children learn

For those of us who earnestly desire a transformation in education, the question remains: How do we create meaningful learning opportunities for all children whether through online or offline platforms? Moreover, how do we serve children who have no access to online platforms? Only one-fourth of our children reportedly have access to online learning tools. What is happening to their learning when schools remain shut?

Whilst we have faith that their imagination would have helped them find resources within their environment to continue their journey of exploration, we also know that isn’t enough. Besides nutrition through the mid-day meal, the regular interaction and engagement for learning in the schooling environment is equally important.

We need to be prepared for multiple scenarios. Students may return to the classroom with limited ability to ‘bring back’ what they had memorised before schools shut. Instead, they will carry new knowledge into the classroom: children do not waste time; they observe, engage, play and imagine. And when they come back to schools, they will bring all of this with them. Are we willing to broaden our notion of learning to include these fundamental abilities of observation, asking questions, interpretation and more?

Many schools reluctantly cancelled end-of-year examinations in the last academic year because of the pandemic and lockdown. The reluctance came from the over-dependence on exams being the singular source of information to know how much the student has learnt (or, the ability to recall). On the other hand, if the entire year had held evidence of learning through different mechanisms that documented ‘learning with understanding’ and ‘learning by doing’, the system could have handled the ‘evidence’ part of learning with ease and conviction to transition the students to the next grade. Even though moving the students to the next class was an important step towards freeing both children and teachers from the dreaded exams, it did not quite change the system. Will the online medium point us to a new lesson to be learnt as schools think of restructuring their scarce time in 2020?

The reverse migration that we have been witnessing in recent months will bring more children to rural government schools, which are already under-staffed and under-resourced. Student enrolment will increase. The fears caused by this communicable disease will also increase among students and teachers. With a whole new set of dynamics at play, schools in general and rural government schools, in particular, will need a lot of our attention if we are serious about rebuilding our education system.

We have been given a moment to pause and reflect on how we have approached and understood learning as a society. The new context is challenging us to reimagine our education system; it is presenting us with an opportunity to observe how children learn, think, explore and question. Will we make the most of this opportunity?

The post What the lockdown is urging us to learn about learning appeared first on India Leaders for Social Sector.

Nine months into her job, Safeena decided to switch to the development sector, first volunteering with International Development Exchange and then joining Child Family Health International, where she was the CEO and Executive Director by the time she quit to move to India to set up Educate Girls. Over 11 years, the non-profit has brought 380,000 out-of-school girls into the education system and is now dreaming a bigger, more audacious dream.

Educate Girls has just become the first organisation in Asia to be named an Audacious project. The Audacious Project invites visionary social entrepreneurs and non-profits to dream bigger and to shape those dreams into viable and sustainable multi-year plans. The project invites donors to pool resources and work together in service of these ambitious ideas. 

In this interview with ILSS, Safeena speaks about the journey of Educate Girls, the lessons learnt from implementing the world’s first development impact bond in the education sector, and the dream to impact over 16 million children in five years.

Why educate? Why educate girls?

Having worked in the health and social justice space during my years with International Development Exchange and Child Family Health International, I was also acutely aware when I came back to India in 2004 that I owed this big journey to my education. I grew up with a lot of difficulties—having seen poverty, violence, and so on—but I was able to overcome all that because of my education. That’s why I wanted to do something in girls’ education.

Girls’ education is the closest we have to a silver bullet to address some of the most pressing problems in society. It helps solve nine of the 17 global sustainable development goals. Once you educate a girl, she’s 200 percent more likely to educate her children.  You can address so many issues with it– nutrition, malnutrition rates, stunting, immunisation, and so on. Climate scientists recently rated girls’ education as Number 6 out of 80 actions that can address climate change — higher than electric cars and solar panels!

It’s also the right and the moral thing to do – it’s about justice and equality.

You chose to work in some of the toughest regions of India as far as girls’ ability to access education is concerned. What took you there?

When I decided to start working in India, I asked the Ministry of Human Resource Development to tell me the most challenging areas for girls’ education. They gave me a list of 26 critical gender gap districts, nine of which were in Rajasthan. I decided to go there since, from the very beginning, I was thinking of building a programme that could be scaled to the most difficult geographies.  

We started with 50 schools, went up to 500 and then covered an entire district. Since the government described the problem with the district as a unit, we made that our unit of replication too. We started adding more districts. The underlying factor working against girls’ education was patriarchy – it was a mindset issue and since mindsets feed off each other, it was not enough to work in a subset of villages; we had to work in ALL the villages. Only then would mindsets change, and the entire district shift to a different equilibrium.  

What ambition did you set out with when you started Educate Girls in 2007? Does that ambition look different from where you are today?

When I started out the ambition was to take these critical gender gap districts and saturate them completely. Even today the spirit remains the same, but our ambitions are now much bigger. We want to work with 16 million children in the next five years—over the next five years, we’re going to triple what we have done in the last five years.

Earlier we would use government data, but now that we have 10 years of our own household-level data and we are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to be able to predict for our hotspots and do precision targeting. Adopting a results-based approach allows us to look at the sharpest tools to get to the result.

What does the journey to 16 million kids look like? What would it take Educate Girls as an organisation – internally as well as externally – to achieve this?

A lot of things will need to change. We will need to become growth-ready to scale exponentially; internal proceses and systems will have to be tightened. Adoption of technology—digitisation, automation—in our core programme and our support functions will form the backbone of this kind of scale and growth.

The biggest factor as we scale is our people. How do we ensure that everybody stays mission-aligned as we scale? As a founder, it is my job to ensure that our five-year vision and strategy is aligned to the cause. As a founder and at the board level, it is also our responsibility to ensure that there is no mission drift or mission creep.

How do the challenges faced by a founder change as an organisation moves from start-up to scale-up?

At the early stage or the test phase, the problems I faced as a founder were very much about finding that early stage seed funding – and the right funding that knows that it is seed funding and will give the room to iterate, evolve, fail, rebuild and get stronger. That’s where Dasra helped me – I was their first giving circle. That three-year pool of unrestricted funding was a lucky break for us.

Talent was another challenge – nobody wants to join you when you’re starting up. I couldn’t even find members to join my board – I had to ask my husband to sit on my board till I found others! Training, capacity building, planning for scale, constantly iterating and codifying the human economics are all very challenging. 

The challenges of running a scaled-up or scaling programme are very different. Predominantly it is about managing complexity:  people, money, external relations. The challenge is to keep complexities to a bare minimum at this stage.  You want the large ship to be nimble and dynamic but the way you do it becomes a lot harder.

As a leader, what I need to control is my personal time.  At Educate Girls, we have created a structure that helps me focus more sharply and give a lot more time to critical areas such as strategy, planning and problem solving. We’ve built this organisation to be highly decentralised. We realise that the best solutions lie closer to the ground and have created systems that allow decision-making and course correction at the ground level. As you grow, you also need to watch out for mission drift and remain a learning organisation.

What made you think of going the development impact bond (DIB) route? What would be the key learnings for Educate Girls and for the rest of the sector from this effort?

As we started scaling rapidly, I wanted to ensure that we were scaling quality and outcomes rather than activity. Whether we scale to 10 girls or 10 million, I wanted the DNA of the organisation to deliver to the result. That’s the main reason I went the DIB route.

Let’s look at the results. We were able to enrol 92 percent of all out-of-school girls over three years. In terms of learning gains, we achieved 25 percent of our learning targets in Year 1; by Year 2, that was around 50 percent; by Year 3, we achieved 160 percent of our learning target. The overall learning gain in the final year alone was equal to an additional year of schooling for a child.

We could achieve this because we were very focused on the target. The key was that everybody knew what the destination was. The teams closer to the ground knew exactly what they had to do to get to the target. So, it led to high decentralisation, accountability and financial and operational flexibility. It meant that we were not holding our teams accountable to the line item on the budget, we were holding them accountable to the result. The field teams also became much more data oriented as a result of working this way.

All this was possible because the funding was multi-year, flexible and focused on a result rather than an activity. In traditional funding too if the grants move from activities to outcomes, the results would be much higher.  Donors will achieve much better results when they hold organisations accountable to results rather than prescribe what to do with the funds.

Do you see the pay-for-success model becoming more popular in the sector?

DIBs are very high-stake transactions. They are still evolving, and it will be a while before we see these instruments scale or become mainstream. What we need to do right now is take those elements of the DIB that get us closer to the results faster and see how they can be integrated into traditional approaches. That’s a more scalable model.

The DIB approach is great for R&D, it helps us find the shortest and fastest way to get to our results and then embed the learnings in our regular programmes. It encourages innovation and risk-taking; it allows you to iterate and course-correct. However, It’s not appropriate for all kinds of organisations. It is best suited for highly measurable programmes and fairly mature organisations.

How does Educate Girls support its leadership team?

The biggest bottleneck is the founder. So more than anything, over the past year I have invested in mentors and coaches, who help me be of best use to the organisation. Our team members also have mentors who they reach out to for guidance. Besides, our board members have taken on the role of mentoring some of our team members. We’ve made a conscious choice to build our board to support and protect our strategy and organisation.

What are the things that give you hope about girls’ education in India?

Despite all the challenges and barriers, every single girl I have met so far wants an education. No girl has ever said to me that she wants to be confined to the home, cooking, fetching water and grazing cattle. No girl wants to be married at a young age and raise children. She wants to go to school. This for me is the greatest source of hope!

The post ‘The spirit remains the same, the ambition is bigger’ appeared first on India Leaders for Social Sector.

I recently picked up Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which I had first read as a teenager, and re-read the following from the preface:

“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.”

It’s only now, 30 years since I first read them, that I have realised the impact that these powerful words had on me at a subconscious level and how they influenced the choices I made in my adult life.

The context of the times I grew up in, through the ‘80s to early ‘90s, when India saw various social, economic and cultural churns, led to the formation of views and opinions that sometimes manifested as ennui, many a times as indifference and on a few occasions as a strong urge to do something more than just being an armchair critic. The other influence has been my family background, which may not be very different from others with whom I share a middle-class upbringing in a small town. My parents studied and worked their way out of their rural upbringing in agrarian families in western UP to join academic professions in the ’60s. They laid a strong foundation for my siblings and me to be principled, curious, enthusiastic and persevering. The emphasis was always on working hard, conscientiously, never giving up, and always giving our best.

Making ‘good’ choices

Being the youngest of high-achieving siblings was sometimes inspiring, sometimes daunting. With the eldest sister serving the country through the India Police Service, the second becoming a renowned doctor and the third becoming a scientist to discover new medicines, my parents expected me to also be a part of something meaningful and impactful.

That’s why when I chose to build a career in the private sector after my MBA, my parents’ excitement was rather muted. That however changed when I was selected into the Tata Administrative Service (TAS). Even though they did not know the breadth and depth of the operations of Tata companies or what I will be doing there, they had a sense that I was choosing to work with “good” people. To this day they share my satisfaction in the choice I made to be in a group which had chosen to make the society and the country a better place, while pursuing profitable and sustainable growth.

In my early days with the Tatas I looked after a brand focused on rural markets, which allowed me to travel to the remote corners of the country, connected me to “Bharat”, and sensitised me to the realities outside the big cities. When I shifted to a more “corporate” role in the holding company of the Tata group, leading investments into technology and services companies, I drove the shift towards supporting first-generation entrepreneurs and initiatives targeted at:

1. Making
   education more accessible through use of technology and skilling
2. Affordable
   and modern healthcare delivery through a virtuous business model
3. New solar
   technology with the potential to offer power to off-grid locations at a price
   less than conventional electricity.

One project worth a special mention is what was then known as the Tata Jagriti Yatra. My conviction about the impact of this initiative led me to reach out to the senior-most leadership in the group to gain support for it. The idea of taking a group of 300-400 young social entrepreneurs on a train journey across India led to a mid-career questioning of certain choices I had made.

In my most recent role as a Partner in the private equity business at Tata Capital, I chose to lead the initiative on setting up an Africa-focused PE fund. This choice was also partly influenced by my desire to work in a space which can have large-scale positive impact on large sections of population, and at a global scale.

Taking the plunge

Looking back at the way my career has shaped in the last two decades, I can now say that, even as we are busy with our lives and going about our work, at a subliminal level we are following a certain message or a pattern in what we do. It could find its expression in our interest in certain things, in the dissatisfaction with the current way of being, in the deep joy we find in certain activities. The challenge is to get connected to yourself, listen to these messages and be bold enough to take the plunge when the time comes.

For me, this point in my life came last year, when I decided to swap my corporate career for a career in the social sector. To ensure that I made this transition in a structured manner, I chose to enroll for the ILSS Leadership Program last August. I went in tentatively and emerged confident in the choice I was making. The time spent with the cohort, with experts from across sectors, with inspiring speakers and leaders who had made such a transition themselves, helped clear the cobwebs and fears and emboldened me to take a step forward.

Late last year I joined Social Finance, India which was set-up in the middle of 2018, adding to the existing chapters in the UK, USA, Israel and the Netherlands. SF India has been mandated to establish two interventions – The India Education Outcomes Fund (IEOF) and the India Impact Fund (IIF), both targeting to mobilise $1 billion each towards large-scale impact interventions through unique approaches.

IEOF is the priority for the team and it aims to propel India towards the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through catalytic pay-for-success funding for proven education initiatives. Together with state governments and the country’s best minds, we will fund innovative education and employment readiness programs to help scale them and improve their effectiveness.

India Education Outcomes Fund (IEOF) is an early step towards a larger movement of shifting the development sector towards success-based approaches with a clear focus on outcomes rather than outputs. We believe that crowding in private capital and improving program delivery, success-based approaches can shift the risk and allow development budgets to stretch further.

Chemistry taught me that a catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a reaction without itself undergoing any permanent change. Where I differ, when told that our role can be that of a catalyst, is that we are looking to alter ourselves positively through our involvement. In that sense, it is a selfish pursuit. I look forward to contributing in every which way I can to the creation of a world of harmony, dignity and fairness for myself and others.

The post When ‘good’ becomes a career choice appeared first on India Leaders for Social Sector.

 In 2009, she founded Teach for India (TFI) to address inequity in education at scale, so that every child in the country would have access to a good education. TFI set out to do this by focusing on building a leadership pipeline for the education sector and on creating collective commitment.

Ten years on, TFI has created a successful and transformative fellowship model, an alumni network of 2500 young people deeply committed to the cause of education, and a large number of student leaders who want to reimagine education. TFI today touches the lives of close to 150,000 children through the fellowship and its alumni, and plans to take that to a million children by 2022. 

Here, Shaheen writes about the journey she embarked on as an 18-year-old, the lessons learnt along the way and what keeps her going.

When I was eighteen, I dropped out of Tufts University to follow an instinct to do something different. That decision brought me to Mumbai, where I joined Xavier’s College and soon started exploring the city, following a Times of India reporter around to get access into spaces that I wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to see.

The exploration took me to communities where I saw inequity, injustice and the many complex challenges that arise out of living in poverty. One day, I walked into a large slum community in south Mumbai and decided to start working with the children there. Fortuitously I met a girl, Sandhya, who was my age and had lived a life that was about as different from mine as one can imagine. But we shared a deep connection and she opened her home to me.  That became a makeshift classroom where I started teaching some kids.  That’s how Akanksha started.

Once I started, I realised that there were many other students in my college who wanted to do something for society but didn’t quite know what to do. Akanksha began as an effort to bring together existing resources in our country to educate our kids in a creative way.  I saw resources in terms of the skills of young people who were educated and had the ability to give back, resources in terms of empty classrooms, resources in terms of people who wanted to donate a little bit of money. The biggest resource was the minds and hearts of kids who really wanted to be educated.

Educate kids, change lives

The more I saw the needs of the communities I visited, the more I was overwhelmed by the range of needs. To me education seemed like the piece that impacted the maximum number of needs. If you can give people the opportunity to develop their own potential, they are able to use that to solve other issues. 

I had also discovered early on that my own passion and energy came from working with kids. Till today my biggest joy comes from taking a class with children and seeing their curious faces, excited about learning.

Having studied in 10 different schools and gained an exposure to different pedagogy, I believed that academics and rote learning were just not the things that kids needed in order to excel. So, right from the beginning, we did a lot of experimentation at Akanksha with the arts, holistic education, and the integration of values and character development into education, and so on.

Akanksha helped me understand who I was and who I wasn’t. The self-awareness that I gained in my 17 years with Akanksha gave me the confidence to know that this was the kind of work that I wanted to pursue for the rest of my life.

The biggest thing Akanksha did was to show me the impact education can have on kids. When you see the power of education yourself, there’s no alternative but to try and work with more kids.

Dreaming bigger, thinking leadership

After 17 years at Akanksha, during which we saw dramatic progress in the 4000 kids we worked with, I started asking myself what it would take to change the system for more kids—and Teach For India (TFI) seemed like a faster way to drive systemic change because it was fundamentally about leadership. I had experienced the dearth of leadership during the Akanksha days, when we couldn’t implement several good ideas because we didn’t have the people to do it. The best people simply weren’t coming into the education sector.

If you look at any issue in the country where change happens, there is leadership that has made that change happen. If we want to address the inequity in our education system, we need leadership across all levels of the education system to make that change happen. TFI attempts to create that leadership pipeline.

TFI started as an experiment to create a platform to bring good people—who would not otherwise have been in education—into the sector, in significant numbers, and to develop leadership in the short term and the long term. We do two things primarily:

• Develop each of our students into leaders, which is a radical, cutting-edge side of our work 
• Build the leadership of our fellows so that over the long term we create a community of alumni to work across levels of the system.

When we recruit fellows for TFI, we look for people who believe that teaching can change the nation, who want to be a part of something larger, who have idealism.  Once they come in, we orient them to be mission-driven: we talk to them about building the country, bringing about systemic change, understanding what inequity feels like and what it does to lives. We believe in collective action because even if we excel individually, we are only going to have a shot at moving the needle if we work together. That’s how TFI has become a movement.

We have 1100 fellows right now, teaching across seven cities. Then we have TFIx, a parallel program to support entrepreneurs in rural India working with much more vulnerable children.  Together, with the TFI fellows, 2500 alumni and the TFIx fellowships, we will be able to multiply the idea of a talent pipeline for the sector. Over the next five years, we aim to double the number of fellows so that we will have around 6000 fellows and alumni in the system.  We are hoping to retain 70-75 percent fellows in the education sector after they finish the fellowship. We are looking at ways to encourage our alumni and school leadership to work together, achieve collective impact.

Fixing our education by building people, relationships

When we look at education in our country, we will see how we have failed our children at every level. I strongly believe that the success of any effort finally depends on the people in the system. Why are people not aspiring to be teachers? How do we bring our best people into teaching? How do we ensure that we have good talent across all levels in the system? How do we revamp teacher education, the way we think about teachers and how we value them? 

Another important dimension is what we teach our kids, looking not just at curriculum, but how that is being delivered in classrooms, how we are building 21^st century skills into our practices.

The bureaucracy and the lack of voice across the entire system is another area to be addressed. We are not empowering people at all levels to drive change. There is a lot of untapped potential within the system, in our teachers, in our schools, but everybody is doing what the person above them is asking them to do.  We haven’t built a culture where people are excited and feel the importance of the work that they do.

We need to think about relationships in the system. The student fears the teacher, the teacher fears the head master, who in turn is nervous about the education officer.  How do we break down fear in the system and blur the boundaries between people?

We also need to rethink what we are testing for; unless we re-examine the focus on exams and theory, we are not going to change what happens in schools. We must think about holistic assessment and reduce the rote way of cracking exams, lessen competition a bit, value kids for who they are, as unique individuals. 

Reimagining the role of kids in education

I can’t think of any successful social movement where the people who are most affected by the movement are not driving it. But education is a different story altogether. When we talk about changing the education system, “we” are essentially adults. Historically, adults have decided everything to do with education—from framing policy to designing textbooks to teaching in classrooms. A child’s voice has been completely absent.

We need to stop seeing students as this mass of 300-odd million kids that need to be educated; let’s think of them as partners in driving their own learning and that of other children. Imagine a classroom where, instead of the teacher being the central figure talking to 30 children, we create space for peer-to-peer learning, where every kid is building on their strength to be both a learner and a teacher! Instead of a teacher assuming full responsibility for 30 kids, there are 31 learners who have responsibility for each other.

If you go up the levels of the system to the policy level, it would mean having kids at the table when drawing up our policies and asking them why they need to be educated, what kind of an education is relevant for them, and how can they best learn?

Essentially, this kind of community leadership is about a shift in power: we have to let go of control. But it’s tough because we are conditioned to take control.

If you look at the scale of the problem in our country, it’s simply not going to be enough if only adults—teachers, policymakers, school leaders­— are involved in changing things. And kids have a natural curiosity and willingness to do things, so why aren’t we leveraging that resource? Personally, even after 27 years in this work, I still stay connected to kids – I still go into classrooms to teach, spend time in the communities. I draw a lot of inspiration from meeting my alumni who are doing incredible work and are committed to change for kids. All this keeps me going.

The post Let’s give children a voice in education appeared first on India Leaders for Social Sector.