The best teachers don’t teach!

Hello! I’m Mayank. I joined Vishwajyot High School as a fourth grader in 2006. Back then the school was pretty young and had fewer students, the highest graders being the 7th grade students. It was a very closely knit community, something that I had never experienced before in my limited exposure to schooling. For a 10 year old kid, being exposed to a school that had a very pretty garden to roll around in, a huge playground to run as long as I could, a library that had a pretty cool collection of 3D story books, a computer lab where I could actually learn to use a computer individually and not in groups, access to all kind of sports and extra-curriculars and most importantly, frequent access to all of the above mentioned things (not just once in a week). School never seemed boring for me (pretty sure it’s the same for everyone else at Vishwajyot), rather I looked forward to going to school every day.

One of the highlights of my senior school years were the Math classes conducted by Amrut Dhumal, who also happened to be one of the founders of the school. Amrut started the school 15 years ago with a vision to redesign the way learning took place in schools. Now, after a decade and a half, his vision has taken the form of 40 preschools and 3 high schools, spread across Maharashtra. Serving as the Chief Learning Officer, Amrut has successfully implemented a discovery based, personalized model of education across the schools.

Fast forward many years, I’ve graduated from college now and I’ve come back- to work in my school and work with Amrut. I’ve always had the zeal to find out more about what it meant to educate someone, for education means empowerment. So I sat down with Amrut and deconstructed his journey of being a teacher, conceptualizing and perfecting what a personalized classroom should look like.

So I remember you taking over our Math class when we were in 9th grade. We were really excited to have a new Math teacher who had a very different approach to teaching than what we were used to. The first few classes were a series of fun lectures, but you quickly changed this style can you tell me why?

Yeah, I remember that. I mean, that’s what teachers are supposed to do aren’t they? Explain the topic in an engaging way, so that’s what I started out doing, and it was great. I remember the classroom was fun, we had a lot of laughs and I thought I was doing a great job. But then I started looking more closely at your work and that of your friends and I was shocked. It was like you guys didn’t learn anything, well that might be an exaggeration, but there were so many mistakes, it really knocked the wind out of me.

I couldn’t understand why, though it seemed like I was running an ideal class the kids in my class weren’t learning. After wallowing in it for a while, I picked myself up and tried to figure out what was going wrong. The first thing I discovered was that a lot of the errors you guys made were because some past Math concepts were not well understood. But I didn’t know which concepts to work on for 30 kids.

That’s when you got us all to practice on Khan Academy, right? I remember you wanted us to do everything starting from addition!

Haha, yes. I admit starting from addition might have been overkill for a grade 9 class, but using technology was great. I was getting data on what conceptual gaps existed. If I recall a whole bunch of you didn’t really get LCM and maybe fractions, and a lot of you had other holes. So just by getting you to practice I was getting data which focused my efforts, so before ploughing forward with quadratics or whatever we were supposed to be studying I first went back and filled in the gaps.

You had then split our class into teams and had sort of set up Math class as a giant game where teams were competing against each other to get the highest scores. Can you talk me through this approach to learning?

So, now I had tried to fill in your learning gaps so it was time to move forward. But I had already seen the futility of the lecturing approach. Me teaching does not equal you learning.

Also when you guys were practicing everything from addition upwards, I got to go around the class and see what you are doing, solve problems that one child in particular was having, because the others were fruitfully engaged.

So, I thought I would try a new approach, where I would not really teach a new topic, but only solve problems that you guys faced. But that was a lot of hard work for you, I mean without a lecture to listen to you guys were solving on average 3 times the number of problems you would have done in a normal class. Now this was great for me but understandably tiring for you and I was worried that as the novelty wore off you would stop putting in the work, so to solve that I came up with the idea of making it into a game. My bet was, initially you would put in the hard work in order to win the game, but that over time you would come to like the math too.

I think it did that but even more, so for example because you guys were in teams you had reasons to help your team mates out and I saw a lot of teaching was happening, without me, just among your peers.

But finally it was the results that mattered; you guys put in a lot more practice and were much more proficient in math using this approach, so I was quite pleased with the outcome.

So how did you go from running one Math class to running 40 personalized schools? Could you try to distill your teaching experience into the specific insights that guided you all these years?

These experiments have helped me build out principles that make up the DNA of schools we run. Let’s talk about the few I got from teaching math to your class.

1) Presumption of competence: Most schools have this lie at the basis of their conception. How will he know if I haven’t taught it to him yet? This explains why a teacher lectures most of the time or parents want the teacher to complete the syllabus. My greatest lesson from teaching your class though, was that this isn’t true — and that the best teachers don’t actually teach. You showed me that you could learn, without me teaching you. You would read stuff, try it, ask your friends. Yes, you would struggle, but then that learning was yours. It also didn’t mean that I as a teacher was useless, my job became to figure out where the struggle was going to result in giving up and helping just at that point. So, it meant me and every other teacher in my school should presume the kids can do it on their own and wait to be asked for help before solving the problem

2) Child led vs. Teacher led: Child led is a buzzword that people use but through this experiment I was able to really define what a child led class was. One where children were spending most (75%) of their time doing vs. listening. So the teacher’s job in this class, is to set up the class culture and design activities that will engage the children while helping them learn and in addition to scaffold the learning, by which I mean to understand where a child is struggling and help him across that one conceptual gap.

3) Motivation: The game part helped me understand how important it is to keep up the motivation in the classroom. Instead of using fear and threats to get a class to do work, motivation meant they would actually do more and happily.

That’s super cool, I am sure you have many more but let us stop there. Thanks, Amrut.

My pleasure.