Building A Utopian Classroom through Personalisation
My journey of discovering the magical possibilities of Personalisation in the classroom
A Redundant Teacher
‘A teacher’s job is done, when she becomes redundant to her class’
A trainer tossed this explosive bomb of an idea in the midst of a gathering of teachers — several years ago in the course of a Teacher Training session — and immediately all hell broke loose.
Stunned veteran teachers shook their heads in complete disbelief.
Indignant teachers shouted down the trainer, shooting arrows of anger at this ‘blasphemy’!
Rookie teachers looked on curiously, wanting to explore the idea, but cowering down under so much open hostility.
Until one extremely brave and open minded teacher dared to ask for explanation.
The trainer, heaving a sigh of relief at this opportunity, explained what she had meant. She said that when kids worked on their own; when they figured out what they needed to do on their own; when kids helped kids and learning happened independently without the teacher - then, and only then could it be said that true learning has happened and that the teacher’s job was done.
This idea stayed on with me for years. With time, the initial skepticism and disbelief wore down and I began to see the truth behind the statement. If my kids didn’t need me at all, then it actually meant that I would have given them all the tools needed to help themselves. Isn’t that the purpose of education — acquiring strategies and tools to deal with the situations that life throws at us?
And so I realised that being a redundant teacher was actually a great idea.
If my kids didn’t need me at all, then it actually meant that I would have given them all the tools needed to help themselves.
But the problem with being redundant was that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t really be one. For most of my teaching career in different organisations here in India, I had taught a class of extremely disparate kids — age wise, maturity wise, skill wise and motivation wise too. How could I choose content that was at the right level for all of them to work independently on?
In fact I realised that no classroom is homogenous. Even in the same age group, children come in with widely varying skill levels. Any lesson plan I designed would only cater to some of them. How could I make it work for all?
I discussed my dilemma with fellow teachers, educators, and senior trainers but the only suggestions I got were around adjusting my expectation from different kids. This seemed good on paper, but in an actual class it never worked for me.
I spent years trying to find the answer to this problem. I could see the light beyond the tunnel — I could see that becoming redundant was, in fact, the way to achieve Utopia in my class and my life as a teacher. A Utopia where…
Where kids fall over themselves in their rush to come to school,
Where kids have to be reminded to put down their writing tool!
Where learning is a scream,
An experience akin to eating ice cream!
Where the only noise is the whoop of joy!
At mastering a new concept using a toy
Where discovering facts is the norm
Thus attaining a happy and stress-free form!
My inability to go down this path would wear me down periodically into believing that my ambitious dream was just what Utopia is supposed to be — a lofty idea with no basis in reality. I would alternate between asking myself skeptically — ‘But does Utopia really exist? Of course YES, it can!’ the ever- hopeful side of the teacher in me would state with conviction. ‘It may be tough to reach, but it will be doable.’
So with this bit of ping — pong style back and forth argument within my own being, I finally landed at Mindseed.
Landing At Mindseed
And what a landing it was. What I saw at Mindseed was nothing short of a miracle. I found that my ‘hopeful side’ had won. Utopia was attainable! And the means to this Utopia was… Personalisation.
While I had heard of the term ‘personalised’ education earlier too, I didn’t really know how it worked. As I watched video after video of personalised classes, visited school after school, spoke with teachers about it and observed these classes myself, I realised that in a personalized class,
- All children worked at their own paces, starting at a different point on a defined Learning Arc
- Each child was given what he or she needed to build up a skill and move ahead on the Learning Arc step by step -with different material and scaffolding
- Each child would be completely engaged in doing the activity assigned to him/her instead of either getting bored or struggling with it
The really magical thing was that this was not just happening in one classroom led by a great teacher, or in one school led by a committed Principal. It was happening in all of the more than 30 preschools (since then grown to more than 40) we were running at the time.
That’s when the penny dropped for me. I finally figured out where I was going wrong as a teacher in all those years that I had tried to achieve Utopia in my classroom. See, what I was doing was — I planned ONE LESSON for the entire class, and expected that all of them understand it. In other words, despite cribbing about our education system being unfair and imbalanced, I propagated the same in my class.
Personalisation was happening in all of the more than 30 preschools we were running at the time…
I made the fish climb trees and elephants fly in the sky! Was it any wonder then- that I could never become redundant in my class?
So I dived right into this wonderful opportunity. Working alongside a great team of educators and teachers, I spent a couple of years becoming deeply involved in driving personalisation for each of the 3000 children studying in our preschools. And I saw some fantastic gains in learning. Kids at age 3 could read their own names; they even read some of their friends’ names. Kids wore their own shoes and ate their own food. 5- year olds wrote their own stories!
This. Was. An. Outright. Jaw-dropping. Magical experience!
And then we became even more ambitious. We wanted to replicate this magic in Vishwajyot — our K-12 school too. This time, I chose to lead the charge. This was my chance to truly achieve the Utopia that I had been dreaming about for all these years.
Taking up the challenge at Vishwajyot
Soon enough though, the skeptic in me came out and mocked - Can you now?A high school comes with its own set of challenges and the roadblocks were sky high. For instance-
- The number of kids in a section of the Grade 1 class was almost double the size of a Mindseed class.
- We weren’t dealing with content heavy subjects in preschools. However in the High School- for the primary grades, personalising content had to be thought through differently.
- In the preschools I had been working with teachers who were already trained to ‘be redundant’ in the classroom. Here, I would be guiding a group of teachers through a veritable identity change.
I rolled up my sleeves and one by one, went about demolishing the barriers. My first collaborator was the Grade 1 mentor- Sunanda. A passionate teacher herself, she was able to look past the mountains of difficulty and see that this approach of personalizing education was beneficial to the child. After many discussions and meetings, the format of the content began to emerge. Here is what we did -
- The existing curriculum was split into arcs or paths- depending on what aspect of the subject a particular path was dealing with.
- We then broke up these arcs into bite -sized objectives (levels) and put them in a sequential order.
- We then wrote strategies in order to master each of the objectives (or levels).
The next step was to take all of this to the teachers. We did and gradually won them over. This did not in any way mean that problems ended hounding us.
While the teachers went to class with new dreams in their eyes, soon they encountered difficulties. They had to deal with multiple lessons at one go. They were stretched thin. So as they teetered delicately in class, some plunged in despair. Some decided to give it up. Some resisted. Some sulked. Some even took that out on us, surreptitiously.
But we plodded on. We co-taught teachers, observed, gave feedback, listened to them, and then reworked our plans. Each time a problem cropped up, we went back to the design board to see how it could be fixed.
My biggest learning from this experience was the importance of setting micro-processes in the classroom. For eg, every day, the children were supposed to sit in different groups depending on the level they were practicing at. Teachers initially gave verbal instructions in their class — but this increased chaos and took up a lot of the learning time. So we came up with a velcro board system — the teacher would update this at the beginning of the session, and the children were trained to check their position for the day before taking their places.
My biggest learning from this experience was the importance of setting micro-processes in the classroom.
Finally results started coming in. We saw classrooms full of engaged kids. We saw peer learning. We saw kids trying to figure out things on their own. We saw children mastering concepts and moving ahead at their own pace. Here’s what a personalised Grade 1 classroom looks like now.
And at the end of the year, we saw almost 40% of the grade 1 kids moving past their expected milestone. And what was more important! They were happy doing that. They loved their Math classes! A testimony to that was the small write up the kids wrote on the last day in grade 1.
Math held the place of honour as one of their favourite things to learn!
Finally, I had my first taste of success achieving Utopia in the classroom. This journey has been nothing short of miraculous for me as an educator. I am now working on bigger and more exciting challenges -of scaling up personalisation across subjects, grades and the other high schools that we run. And I am raring to go!
