Story of friendship & competencies unfolding at Puma Bangalore

Pranav and I go back 11 years now! Not that we have kept in touch always. We met at manipal and we were classmates in first year. Post that we went to pursue different streams in engineering & different type of jobs & fields- of course, friendship remained intact.

One fine day this summer I get a message from him saying that he and his team at Puma wanted to explore volunteering in education field.

Firstly I was delighted that he thought of me & made this call, secondly I thought it is great experiment to carry out around building competency mindset & forging more friendships towards building India where every child is competent enough to take shot at any opportunities.

With this intention, we put together a broad agenda which had enough space for emergence & new energy.

How the day unfolded was classic- all of us checked in on how we are feeling & our previous experience of volunteering. We opened up session with thinking around how ‘Educated individuals’ should look like. It was amazing to witness how we all agreed that recall & read/write is not only the skill that needs to be built, but various others like being empathetic, problem solving, making informed decisions, story telling , estimating, predicting & computing skills are very important as well! We asked ourselves if our classrooms are building these skills as part of learning outcomes.

From here we spent time understanding what National Curriculum Framework in 2005 said about learning and outcomes in school. To get a hang of it, we tried designing our classroom for teaching a concept. It was super fun to hear and give/receive feedbacks for 4 approaches which was presented by 4 teams among the volunteers- gamification to role play to jaadugaar- everything came in!

What was remarkable was the way everyone picked the lens of seeing education through building competencies and empathy towards teachers and topics… We concluded the meet with following resolution:

1. Further developing the design for topics like measurement, money, time, fraction & other competencies

2. Identification of space to pilot the design

3. Talking about building competencies Vs rote learning (memory based assessment) to our colleagues and other stakeholders.

4. If anyone is looking to donate for any occasion, this is the link !

5. Jaideep would be happy to further discuss and deliberate with any thoughts team is developing

I personally enjoyed every minute of this session -close to 3 hours — felt like a moment. I look forward to regroup and work on resolutions we made.