Learning Companions
What are we working for?
Annual Status Of Education Report(ASER), 2018 says that more and more parents, even from rural areas want their children to go to private schools and paid tuitions.
Do you wonder why?
It is a strong indicator that most of the parents no more believe that the existing schools are capable of giving quality education to their children.
Very well then! Let the people go to private institutes and get a better education!
The problem? The same report says that private schools are not in any better state either.
Let alone getting the children skilled and ready for good jobs, schools are incapable to get the children to pass even in their own exams.
The solution as we see
The following picture is sufficient to tell us the story of what is going wrong. It is a comparison of some well-equipped classrooms with the ones that are not.
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What it takes to make a good ‘learning environment’ is a well-equipped space, sufficient ideas to engage children and enough freedom to explore.
What do we do?
So we are working on 4 fronts:
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Collecting, creating, testing and documenting a database of good learning activities, which will be available as an ‘open to use’ online resource, in the native language
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Running training workshops for teachers/facilitators to increase their understanding of how to use these resources, ideas, how to create teaching aids and how to make their classrooms more engaging and effective
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Developing tools and structures for the effective follow-up of the training process, and to create long-term support systems to help the schools/other organizations to upgrade on the other aspects of creating better learning spaces
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Working on different research and development themes necessary to create a strong knowledge base for the above programs.
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Our approach?
We believe in the power of :
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Information
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Understanding the problem well before taking on it
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Considering humans as the most important resource and equipping them well
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Efficient tools for presentation and pursuing stakeholders on new ideas
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Efficient tools for follow-up and monitoring
We identified that we want to work with the English articulation skills of some class 8 students in a school. First, we tried to understand what kind of errors exactly are they making when we say we want to improve on their grammatical errors.
As these are std 8 students, not everyone needs help with everything. Using this data, the team of the school can give customized exercises to help each student or a particular group of students.
We not only try different approaches but rigorously test to see if they are working. Further, we use this information to make necessary improvisations in our approach. The following graph shows how children from another learning center improved on sight words test after 3 months.
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The third key approach is to train the teachers, fellows, organizations themselves to use these tools. This is done through theme-based workshops and supervised ‘learning by doing’.
No matter how exciting and bright the ideas maybe. It takes continuous motivation and a ‘sense of comfort’ for these ideas to be actually implemented by the schools or organizations. We are continuously experimenting on how to present new ideas and how to make sure that they are implemented, and we have developed some tools and approaches in the process. What are these tools? This space is not sufficient and exciting enough to share them.
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Contact us. Get in touch. Come over for some conversation to understand our work and engage in this exciting vision of changing the canvas of education for better!