How to overcome fastest growing national crisis of delivering quality education?
{Following is textual transcript of speech by Akanksha & Jaideep, at Cisco Bangalore to mark occassion of AIC N/Core Tech cohort incubation graduation day- Soiree- held on 26 July 2019}
<jaideep speaks>
Good evening! I am going to take you to small village of Uttar Pradesh with me. And tell you a story of 7 year old Shadab. Shadab is a mischievous young boy. He takes advantage of being the youngest in his family and find happiness in each moment life offers him. He loves to run around and play. Every morning, he comes running to school with his 3 siblings. He cleans his classroom with his friends and they spread the mats. As soon as his teacher walks into the classroom, Shadab is ready with his notebook. He has been writing Hindi alphabets for the last six months and can now copy them.
He can read & write- For too long now, we have associated learning outcomes with only literacy. Shadab can read words, paragraph and stories without being able to comprehend it. He will read out entire pages without being able to extract the basic information from it and therefore unable to share the text in their own words.
would you be happy if your child just learns to read & write?
Shadab is just one of the lakhs of students whose learning achievements are going down as they go higher. And 70% of Indian children are enrolled in government schools.
This is precisely the problem, even though NCF, NCERT & national education policy mandates building competencies, inability to make this happen in classrooms is becoming fastest growing national problem.
It is leading to generation coming out who are unemployable and lack positive life outcomes. We are becoming nation of literates, not nation of learners & laurates.
We are unable to locate the Shadab’s and enable them to navigate path of their choice. They can recall but cannot analyze, estimate, create & many other learning capabilities.
Hi! I am Jaideep and we at Tarkeybein are trying to solve this problem with collaborators, technology & Partners. I invite my colleague Akanksha to take you through what is required for this big change
<akanksha speaks>
So how would competency based learning look like? Think of grade 2 classroom where Shadab’s teacher wants to introduce the concept of ascending and descending order, she is well aware that some children are still struggling to recognise numbers.
She decides to introduce this concept by asking her class to arrange themselves in the order of smallest height student to the tallest. And then again in order of their increasing ages. She divides them into small groups and gives each group a different activity to arrange from small to big, short to tall, less to more. And in the smaller group, children learn from each other and their teacher gets the time to observe a few of them deeply to understand their learning need and style.
And to ensure every child learns, she ensures that the ones who are struggling with numbers, get to practice writing numbers and seeing the ascending order within that. And the others get to practice more challenging problems.
Children built competencies of analysis, classification, team work and counting skills.
In this real classroom experience in one of the govt school of UP, teacher executed meaningful learning because she planned keeping competencies in the centre. The content came from state textbooks and no extra resources were required.
We have seen success of this approach in more than 1000 schools and have convinced 2 state govts to take this approach forward through their department.
We hope that this happens in every classroom of 12 lakh govt schools of our country. To scale this, we are working on two things
Technology: which acts as a tool for teachers to assess competencies and plan for each child in her classroom
Partnerships with other organisations in education to take the competency approach to every village. We are building common frameworks that others can build on for their context. Currently we are in 3600 govt schools in 8 states, in the next three years we want to partner with 100 orgs who will take this approach forward.
Because only then we can realise the vision of building India as a country of learners.
P.S: We got mentioned in Times of India as we graduated!
If you resonate with our work, want to implement this model in your community, want to support this initiative, do small giving or just want to drop in some encouraging words, we invite you to write to us at jaideep@tarkeybein.org :)
