Quality evaluation is a sensitive issue in the educational sector, especially in India, where often intervention for improvement is regarded as interference.

I joined Indus Training and Research Institute as a Quality Evaluation Officer in July 2010. My primary task was to design an Academic Scorecard, initially for quality evaluation of the Indus Schools (Bangalore, Pune, and Hyderabad) and later offer it as a consultancy to other schools. The academic scorecard was to be designed based on the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) model.

To understand how to use a BSC model for quality evaluation of schools, one needs to first understand what a Balanced Scorecard is and why it should be used for quality evaluation.

What is a Balanced Scorecard – An Academic Scorecard (ASC) is an application of the Balanced Scorecard, used for self evaluation of a school.

Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton (1992) in their Harvard Business Review article, “The Balanced Scorecard – Measures that Drive Performance” first introduced the concept of the balanced scorecard (BSC). BSC is a strategic planning and management system that is used extensively in business and industry, government, and nonprofit organizations worldwide

• to align business activities to the vision and strategy of the organization
• to improve internal and external communications, and
• to monitor organization performance against strategic goals

A fundamental feature of the balanced scorecard is that it allows decision-makers to view organizational effectiveness from four perspectives simultaneously:

1. Financial perspective (How do we look to shareholders?)
2. Internal business perspective (What must we excel at?)
3. Innovation and learning perspective (Can we continue to improve and create value?) and
4. Customer perspective (How do customers see us?)

As such, it provides information from multiple perspectives while minimizing information overload by limiting the number of measures included.

Why use a BSC – Since financial results alone cannot give the true picture of an organization’s performance, BSC has been widely used in the business sector as a performance evaluation tool. The concept has recently been applied in the educational sector. Though the literature documenting the Balanced Scorecard implementation in this sector is not so rich, as compared to that in the private sector (Nistor, 2009), several research works and case studies in the area can be outlined.

BSC as a tool to assess the performance of an educational institution, is a growing concept. It is adapted to education based on the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence, which provide a systems perspective for understanding performance management. They reflect validated, leading-edge management practices against which an organization can measure itself. With their acceptance nationally and internationally as the model for performance excellence, the Criteria represent a common language for sharing best practices among organizations. The Criteria are also the basis for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award process.
(Source: http://www.nist.gov/baldrige/publications/education_criteria.cfm)

School self-evaluation provides an opportunity for the whole school community, including students, parents, and all staff, to reflect on student outcomes in light of their goals, targets, and key improvement strategies from the previous planning cycle. This includes examining teaching and learning strategies, the performance and development culture and other aspects of school operations so that they can be strengthened and supported to improve student outcomes.

Effective schools consistently reflect on their performance as a matter of course. School self-evaluation merely formalizes this process and makes the process accessible to their school communities.

From BSC to ASC
Applying the BSC model to academia is a challenge. However, one cannot ignore the fact that designing an academic scorecard provides the opportunity to identify what really matters to customers and stakeholders: why the institution exists, what is important to the institution, and what the institution wants to be.

The traditional BSC model has four perspectives, as mentioned earlier. However, for an educational institute, the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) can be categorized into six perspectives, which are
a) Pupil achievement
b) Teacher effectiveness
c) Pastoral care
d) Leadership and community service
e) Staff
f) Administration/finance

The indicators have been chosen based on the following criteria:

1. they have to reflect organizational values;
2. they have to be simple;
3. they have to meaningful;
4. they have to be easy to represent visually;
5. they have to facilitate organizational learning;
6. they have to be measurable;
7. they have to support comparisons – intra and inter, both within and outside the school; and
8. they have to permit analysis over at least four years.

In short, indicators of organizational performance should be ordinary rather than exceptional, routinely applied to the rhythms of academic management. The scorecard will then reflect the true picture and will be useful only if the yardsticks used to measure the performance cover the four major areas, namely internal stakeholder, external stakeholder, growth and innovation, and financial performance of the institution.

Every Perspective (KPI) has around 6-8 measurable objectives. A target is set for each objective and reviewed at the end of every six months. For example, under the Leadership and Community Service perspective, one of the objectives is to ensure that all teachers and students put in certain hours of community service. Leadership and Community Service form an integral part at all Indus Schools. The performance of a student is not just measured by his/her classroom performance, but also by the number of hours put in community service and leadership assessment at the Indus School of Leadership. This ensures holistic development of the student. Similarly, under staff, a teacher’s appraisal is not just based on how she teaches in her class. It also considers the number of hours she puts into community service and her assessment at the Indus Leadership Camp. Hence, a 360-degree approach is adopted for measuring performance.

Under administration/facilities, various surveys can be conducted to understand the satisfaction level of parents, students, and staff regarding various facilities provided, e.g., food, transport, etc. The survey results are then interpreted to check for the traffic light attained (red, amber, or green) and an action plan is then formulated for improvization.

An Academic Scorecard serves as a road map for an academic institution and enables it to focus on its actions, resources, policies, and priorities in order to achieve its mission and strategic goals.

Indus International School will be the first in India and probably Asia to have used an Academic Scorecard for Quality Evaluation of its schools. This scorecard was designed at the Indus Training and Research Institute (ITARI), a training wing of Indus International School, managed by the Indus Trust.

The author has been an educationist for the past 9 years. Currently she is pursuing her Doctoral Program from Jain University in Human Resource Management. Her areas of interest include, Adult Learning Principles, Team Building and Leadership, Performance Management Systems, Needs Assessment and Training Matrix. She can be reached at darshikasanghani@gmail.com.

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. It can be seen as having two components: 1) a set of information and belief generating and processing skills, and 2) the habit, based on intellectual commitment, of using those skills to guide behaviour. It is thus to be contrasted with: 1) the mere acquisition and retention of information alone, because it involves a particular way in which information is sought and treated; 2) the mere possession of a set of skills, because it involves the continual use of them; and 3) the mere use of those skills (“as an exercise”) without acceptance of their results. (Michael Scriven & Richard Paul)

In the primary classroom
Children in the primary classrooms bring with them all the ingredients that a teacher requires to nurture the art of critical thinking. They are highly motivated, eager to explore the world, enthusiastic about everything around them and like a sponge, ready to absorb anything you choose to give them.

There is a misconception among many teachers that critical thinking cannot be developed in the early years. But, nothing is farther from truth. Even a simple story, like that of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, lends itself to critical thinking. It depends on what kind of questions the teacher asks at the end of the story. If she asks the name of the girl in the story, then probably no thinking would be required. But if she asks the students to give the story a different ending or if it was right on the part of Goldilocks to enter a stranger’s house and touch the things inside which did not belong to her, children will think of new and unusual ways of responding to them. The students could role play one of the characters and let other children question them on different aspects of the story. In either case, they will be compelled to think differently and critically on issues like ‘right and wrong’, ‘justice’, ‘empathy’, ‘kindness’, etc., without necessarily knowing these terms.

Stories, simple experiments, games that children play – all of these are fertile grounds for critical questioning and thinking, provided the teacher pre-empts, sees those questions coming and places them before the children.

That brings us to several critical questions with regard to our education system.

Does our system allow for such expressions?
Are we too bound to syllabus and curriculum, even in the primary years?
Are our teachers critical thinkers themselves?

The last question is perhaps, the most crucial. Because no matter what the system or syllabus, there is always room to bring in thoughts and ideas that are not stereotypical in nature. There is always scope to make a subject or a situation exciting and interesting.

But, are our teachers critical thinkers? For, it is implicit that a person, who cannot think critically, who cannot question the status quo, who does not read, who takes things for what they are, cannot arouse critical thinking in others.

Most teachers in traditional schools do not push themselves into moving up the ladder of thinking skills nor is there any compulsion from the system to do so. The ‘strait-jacket’ ideas of imparting education, inflexibility in the prescribed curriculum, scarcity of resources, poor access to technology and lack of training and time add to the difficulties in acquiring these skills.

Therefore, it boils down to the individual teacher. If the teacher is evolved in her thinking, has understood the true meaning of education, is willing to take intellectual risks and constantly pushes herself out of the comfort zone, updates herself with innovative ideas, she manages to make her classrooms vibrant, thought-provoking and ensures meaningful learning – both for herself and her students.

Yet, it is imperative that this process becomes widespread among teachers. It is important that schools create a platform for teachers to get together, have discussions on subjects and topics that matter, offer resources like books and access to internet where a wealth of ideas can be found. Above all, the teacher must have an inclination to do more than just the job of teaching; she must critically think about the purpose of education and explore ideas that make the world more interesting and consequently, present ideas interestingly in her classrooms.

Correspondingly, the teacher has to design creative lesson plans with tasks and situations that lead the children to think analytically and creatively. Also, thinking of a discipline in isolation limits thought. Teachers have to find ways to connect different subjects with each other. Like, geography with math, science with English. Critical thinking empowers a teacher to make such connections.

Classroom ideas
Here is one project in which I got groups of children to think critically and give us some unusual and heartening outcomes of learning.

Water theme
I worked for an organization where we supported the government school children with meaningful education in collaboration with the schools they were in. One such group of children wanted to work around the theme of water. The process started with a problem question – why were the girls more frequently absent from school than boys? Exploration began with the group going out and making a survey of the amount of water used in the family for different purposes beginning with their own homes and then in the village. They studied the various sources they got water from. The girls were given the job of fetching water from these sources on certain days and these took hours. Forcing them to skip school. The group discussed solutions, brainstormed ways of saving water in their own homes, visited a popular Rain Harvesting Agency, saw how people could save rainwater and use it for domestic purposes. The group designed and set up a mini rainwater harvesting model at their learning centre. They studied water as part of their subject and built a 3-D model of the water cycle, the design of which was lauded by many teachers, educators, and visitors.

A documentary on my village
A group of 10 to 12-year olds were discussing maps with me. These children had not used a map in class ever. The process of understanding maps began. I asked them to draw a route map from the learning center to their home. We checked for accuracy of the maps, direction, distance, and everything was subjected to discussion and questioning. One child then asked if the village had a map. The map hunt ended with finding a map stuck on the wall of the village panchayat office. Since it could not be brought down, the outline was laboriously traced over three days. Children tried to identify the lake, the fields, and other physical landmarks and decided to create a 3-D map made of water, fiber and clay. One group went about the village taking pictures of important spaces in the village including lifestyles and occupations of people to create a powerpoint presentation. The cream of an idea came when one of the children suggested making a movie on the village. They filmed different areas in the village, talking to people, capturing moments and situations. The 30 hours of footage was then down loaded on the computer, edited, given music and narration, subtitled and crunched into a 12 minute documentary! All this by children, with me and other volunteers merely facilitating the process. One of the children, after the project, said, ‘Earlier, to me, my village meant my school and my home. Now I know that the lake, the market, the roads and the fields, the people, they are all very important part of my village and I care for it all.’

These children did not just learn the subjects but felt it, critically questioned ideas and learnt in a manner that gave them lifelong learning skills. Art, theater, music, film making, all became a part of their learning; and critical thinking and questioning was integral in their learning process.

In conclusion
Teachers need to get out of the existing mould and create new thinking for themselves first, and children next. Our obsession with getting only the right answers has led to the death of thinking in our schools. Eleanor Duckworth has said, “Virtues involved in not knowing are the ones that count in the long run. What students do about what they do not know, will in the final analysis determine what they will ultimately know’.

Critical thinking, with its consistent attempt to help us live rationally, reasonably, empathically, embodies the Socratic principle: The unexamined life is not worth living, because we realize that many unexamined lives together result in an uncritical, unjust, dangerous world.

I am often amazed by the questions children ask and the thought process they carry out to answer some of ours. Their responses are innocent, humorous, yet often profound and thought-provoking. Though spontaneous, these answers make you wonder how the child arrived at an answer which sounds so right. What the child displays is what we call ‘critical thinking’ – a quality that every human is born with, but somehow doesn’t flower to its full potential in spite of the years of education we put the child through.

Let me give a gist of a few of my countless such tête-à-têtes.

World is colourless
My two sons (then, 10 and 7) and I were toying around with a prism in the balcony of our house one night. It gave us a massive thrill to look at the streetlights through the prism and see light split into different hues. As a consequence, questions followed – why do we see so many colours through the prism? Why are we unable to see the split colours with our eyes without the prism? Are the colours really there? There were a lot of questions and a lot of explanations and the conversation veered to the subject of light. Without my giving them the ‘right’ answers there was a discussion on the role of light in our ability to ‘see’ the world around us and all the colours in it. Just then the lights went out, thanks to the power cut, and everything was plunged into darkness. And in the dark, after a minute of silence, I heard my son’s amazed voice saying, ‘the world is colourless!’

Death is like sleep
Children’s questions on life and death sometimes unnerve you, especially when you are the parent and you wonder why your children talk of such ‘dark’ subjects. So when the dreaded question came to me – what is it like to die – and I pondered on how best to answer the question without expressing fear, my younger son, then 8, who heard the query, said, “Death is like sleep at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. If a bomb were dropped you wouldn’t know. That’s how it is. It’s like sleep!” I wondered at the wisdom in that idea of death. So simple. So true!

A glass of water
As a teacher, I have come across different kinds of students and just as many ways of thinking. In one of my geography classes, we were discussing tides. They were 11-year olds and I had popped a question that made them think. The question was – Why did the water rise equally on the opposite side of the earth when the pull was on one side, when ideally, water should rise only on the side of the pull? I had drawn the tide diagram on the board. I asked the children to think of any wild reason for this. There were absurd and funny explanations that gave rise to bursts of laughter. One response was that all the fish in the waters at the side it was being pulled fell to the other side and made the waters rise on the other side! At last, one boy (who had never fared too well in any of the subjects) said that it was like having a glass of water that is full. If I jerked the glass down, the water would get thrown up. That is probably what is happening to the water on the other side of earth. As a teacher, I could never have thought of such a simple, beautiful, and relevant explanation to that query myself!

Defining respect
It is not unusual for adults, who have great expectations from children, to be unable to understand the meaning of their own ideas. For instance, we expect students to respect us. But can we define respect in our own words? More often than not, we have borrowed ideas and principles which we have not examined and analyzed ourselves. At best, we preach them – without thought. Here is one definition of respect I received from an 8th grade girl, “Respect means understanding the concept behind someone else’s beliefs; not necessarily agreeing or following, but understanding and feeling compatibility”.

These instances show that children have an innate ability to ‘reason’, to examine varied and complicated ideas and situations and express them in simple terms and language. The explanations may not always be logical or scientifically accurate, but they ‘make sense’ and are not entirely ‘wrong’ either.

Surprisingly, we find that these responses come out only in informal conversations. The response given in the classroom was under non-threatening circumstances, where even the most absurd responses were accepted as outcomes of a good imagination. However, in normal, daily classrooms, children barely express such ideas. The reason being they barely encounter critical, thought provoking questions that fire their imagination and force them to reason or arrive at a logical response.

The author is currently a faculty member at Indus International Training and Research Institute, Bangalore. She has taught Social Sciences and English at primary and high school and has been involved in designing and conducting teacher training modules. She can be reached at sandhyagatti@gmail.com.

Of late, the outsourcing of work to professionals and organisations to deal with day to day issues in schools has become a fad. As a result of the cut-throat competition amongst solution providers each agency wants to surpass the others by providing more solutions to the school system to ease the teaching-learning process. While these agencies certainly help facilitate change in the way a school functions, sustaining this change is entirely left to the school and how many schools manage it is a question.

The problem
The problem, essentially, is to sustain change in schools and to optimise learning in classrooms. Is it possible to sustain change, acknowledging the fact that outsourced professional assistance is an expensive solution and is accessible for a limited period only?

Some thoughts
A system that recognises the need for some external help is a system that learns and will grow. In Peter Senge’s (An American scientist and author of the book ‘The Fifth Discipline’) terms this system has analysed its current reality, its present situation, the problem it faces and is ready to seek help. In other words this system has self-knowledge and shows readiness for change.

Once a school has acknowledged its problems and is ready for help the second step is to look for help. Should the school outsource professionals or is there a scope of resolving the crisis from within? What shall affect a long lasting change? How should one move forward?

The visible trend
Increasingly, many schools are seeking professionals for the following needs:

• Day to day lesson planning
  Most schools are now seeking professional help for day to day lesson plans to effectively transact their course books. When a school management requests external help for lesson planning it sends a message across that it does not repose faith in its own teachers but trusts professionals who lie outside the school system to prescribe the methodology for teaching. And more often than not these professionals providing solutions to teaching are not practicing teachers.

  If a school does need external help then why not organize regular workshops on how to plan lessons, have discussions on the school and class setting, the effective use of available resources in optimising learning in classrooms? What I am articulating for is a common platform; time for teachers to discuss key issues that are peculiar to each of their classes and finding solutions as a group. Rather than looking at class 2A, 2B, 2C and 2D as separate groups led by different section educators, it is possible to treat class 2 as one cohort group and then identify different kinds of learning preferences of children. Collective lesson planning will surely help in minimising problems, finding solutions, collating resources and upgrading one’s knowledge.

• Making teaching-learning innovative
  Many schools are seeking professional assistance in acquainting teachers with ideas to make the teaching process engaging. Ideas are shared based on some philosophical or pedagogical theory; however such a system does not encourage teachers to develop activities on their own. It is important that teachers develop the capacity to create and design activities on their own. This can only happen when there is a culture of sustained reading and sharing. Expectations from teachers will only materialise when there are systemic changes as well.

  Time needs to be set aside on an ongoing basis for reading research, interpreting new syllabi document and engaging in a dialogue. Only this can push thought processes further and develop confidence to ideate and innovate. There needs to be an ethos where teachers can make errors and learn from their new experiments. It is imperative to move from being safe following the tried and tested chalk and talk method to becoming a risk-taker, plan based on one’s gut feelings, one’s interpretation of theories. There is risk in innovating, but yes there is also a sense of accomplishment.

  Isn’t this something we also expect of our students? Further as a practice, reflective journal writing can be introduced where teachers can pen down their daily reflections of their classes. This is important as these journals can be a source of assessing one’s new methodologies, and also can offer useful insights about learning and our learners. It is however important that these journals are not regulated and checked by the management as this would alter the entire dynamics and richness of writing, as somehow our schools are yet to function as a whole.

• Drafting assessments
  Some schools demand professional help in setting question papers – unit and term papers included. Such a demand leaves teachers with no autonomy to draft need -based assessments. Further, all pedagogical deliberations on assessments to be formative, beyond paper and pencil tests seem to be only deliberations with no practical grounding in face of such demand and solutions. If we do seek professional help, instead of asking them to set question papers, let’s ask for how to assess, what goes behind setting a good and valid assessment, how can children be assessed in a formative manner, how to design rubrics that are valid and reliable? Such demand from schools will also push solution providers to move beyond the spoonfeeding mode to more thinking and challenging levels. This will set a premise for a thinking school, where all stakeholders are engaged in thinking – leaders, teachers and children. This is what I call HOTS applied to a school. Higher Order Thinking Skills – is a framework not only for students but also true for a thinking school – a learning organisation.

The basic idea is to push the needs of the school management and solutions provided by organisations to a level where the fundamental paradigm breaks away from giving solutions to thinking together and empowerment at all levels. From questions that move from ‘what’ to ‘hows’ and ‘whys’at all levels. Such an empowerment shall definitely be a breeding ground for a thinking classroom.

The author works with the Oxford University Press, New Delhi. She can be reached at meetaprabir@gmail.com.

Exam time is a period of anxiety for most parents. Once the exams are over, the students and their parents heave a sigh of relief. But their worry does not end with the exams. Fear of the results also causes anxiety. If the child is intelligent and studious, the parents have no reason to worry. But if the child has performed poorly, the parent hopes that the child will just be able to pass the exam. If the child has failed, it is as if a calamity has befallen the family. The parents lament, and try to find out what has gone wrong and the blame game begins. They blame the child for not working hard. The parents blame each other for not taking enough interest in the child’s studies. And many a time the parents find fault with the teaching system and the teachers for not taking adequate care of the child.

Praises and complaints
Take the case of a highly educated couple who have two children, one of whom is brilliant, while the other has no interest in studies. When in school the young girl is unable to concentrate on what is being taught. Everyday her mother rings up her classmate’s parents to find out what was done in the class. Parent- teacher meetings are a nightmare for the couple. While the son’s teachers heap praises on the boy, the girl’s teachers have a long list of complaints and say that they will have to withhold the child in the same class if she does not improve. Some teachers even point an accusing finger at the parents for not guiding the child enough. Being responsible for 30 or 40 students the teachers say they cannot attend to each child in the class.

Prestige issue
Parents often feel they have failed somewhere when the child is a poor performer. Or they feel the child has not studied enough. Comparison also sets in which makes the situation worse. Parents are unable to accept that their child is different from their friend’s or relative’s child who is academically inclined and performs well. The academic failure of the child becomes a prestige issue for the parents. They do not try to find out what has gone wrong. They take out their frustration on the child and abuse the child physically and mentally.

The school policy
Most schools have a policy of promoting the child up to the primary section. Once the child leaves the primary classes and enters middle school, his or her performance is under observation. The school management realises that if the child continues in the same school, he may bring down the pass percentage of the school in the board exams. So they call up the parents and politely give them the option of pulling the child out of the school or the child repeating a class. Many parents not wanting the child to lose a year admit him or her in a lesser known school. The new school is in need of funds and admits the child. And finally when the child writes his or her exams he or she fails miserably.

Analysis of the child’s performance
The sad part is that neither the school nor the parents think of taking help from a counsellor, psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist depending on the need, to analyse the child’s performance. So many factors can come into play when a child performs poorly. A psychologist tries to find out what is hindering the learning process. First, the child undergoes a psychometric test to determine the Intelligence Quotient. If the child’s IQ is average and yet he or she performs poorly, then other tests are undertaken to identify the cause. The specific learning disability which the child is facing is identified. The disabilities can be in areas such as hearing, reading, comprehension, writing, reasoning, memory retention, etc. Once the learning disability is identified the psychologist suggests remedial measures to overcome the problem. Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities. When the child has an average IQ with no learning difficulties and still gets below average marks, then factors related to environment and behaviour are looked into. A death in the family, adjustment, domestic violence, etc., can cause mental disturbance in the child and manifest itself in the studies.

The problem parent
Sometimes it is the parent who is the problem. The expectation of the parents from a child exceeds the child’s performance. Every parent knows the intelligence level of his or her child and how much they can expect from him or her if they are monitoring the child’s performance closely. After consulting a psychologist or child psychiatrist, the parents should adopt different methods of teaching to benefit the child. They should be happy if the child’s performance is average. The child should not develop inferiority complex due to parents’ scolding and teachers’ sarcastic remarks. Instead the parents and teachers should encourage the child to develop certain hobbies and excel in extra-curricular activities which will raise his self-esteem. These can be sports, dance, drama, music, art and craft, etc. When self-esteem rises, the child will perform better in academics as well and win appreciation from his parents, teachers and peers.

Emotional block
One of my nieces failed in her fourth standard. I advised the parents to consult a child psychologist. Through a few tests the psychologist analysed that the child had an average IQ but her fear and anxiety levels were high and were interfering with her learning. Plus her motivation level was low which was due to low self-esteem. On counselling the parents it was found that the father did not have time to explain the lessons. So he made the girl memorise the answers. The mother was unable to teach the girl as she studied in the vernacular medium. There was no motivation since the child did not have a role model to emulate. The child was never provided with story books and other reading material which prevented her from mastering language. Further, the parents used to yell at the child if she showed unwillingness to study which contributed to her anxiety. They made her sit for hours at a time to study. The parents were counselled to teach the child by new and innovative methods of learning.

Remedial measures
Parents whose children have learning disability can join together and form a self-help group. They can employ special educators as tutors for their children. If the kids are unable to cope with the regular curriculum of the schools, they can opt for the open school examination system. Select schools where remedial measures for children with learning disabilities exist and can be considered by the parents. Some organisations are doing pioneering work in the field of learning disabilities. Find out from the internet and contact the nearest organisation which will help in identifying the disability and give remedial measures to overcome the disability. Also keep in touch with a pediatrician who has specialised in learning disabilities. NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) tests the child and certifies the learning disability. This child can avail special provisions when appearing for the board exams. For instance, they are given one hour extra to write the exam and are also provided help to read or write depending on the disability. Instead of getting depressed on the day of the results, parents can gently motivate their child with learning disability to study well and come up in life.

The author is a freelance writer and conducts soft skill programmes for schools students in Hyderabad. She can be reached at radhika_writer@yahoo.co.in.

Should a child be failed?

Harekrushna Behera

If the recently introduced Right to Education Bill becomes a law, both the private and government schools will not be allowed to force a child to repeat a year or expel students until class VIII for any reason. But for now we still have the pass and fail system that separates the best from the worst. Though we all know that every child is unique, somehow due to circumstances surrounding the child, he/she may be unable to produce good results in an exam. But, instead of discovering the qualities or uniqueness within the child, if the school and teachers fail the child or expel him/her from the school are we doing the right thing? Should a child be failed or expelled from school?

What generally happens in a school is that importance is given to the child who is good at studies. The best student or scholar award is given to children on the basis of academic achievement. We neglect the extracurricular achievement of children. A child who doesn’t really understand Science maybe good at something else like sports, music or art. Schools have to start recognising these talents as well and stop showering attention only on those who study well. When a child is failed or expelled from school do we even stop for a minute to understand the emotional turmoil that he or she will go through? It is often this tag of a failure that causes children to take the extreme step of committing suicide.

The question we need to ask ourselves as authorities is do we still rate children as successes or failures on the basis of their marks in exams alone or do we allow the children to show us how they can all be successes? After all we cannot expect one size to fit all. It is time that we as teachers and educationists let the children tell us how best we can teach them. If music is someone’s forte then let us develop methods to teach that child Science, Maths or English through music. Let us formulate systems that allow children to showcase their capabilities and potential in the best way they can and not insist that they write exams and pass in them.

The government is trying to introduce a ‘no fail system’ in every school up to class VIII. This is a step that has to be appreciated. But, the government is yet to decide whether it will simply promote the ‘academically poor’ children from class to class until they reach class VIII or provide alternative methods to test them. When every child is helped to realise how worthy and bright he is, as their teachers and guardians we would have done a good job.

The author is a teacher in Social Science at Chinmaya Vidyalaya, Raebareli, Uttar Pradesh. He can be reached at hare_321ku@rediffmail.com.

We hear often enough about the high expectations we have of teachers and the difficulties they face in terms of working conditions, compensation and resources available to do their job. We also hear about teachers’ strikes and the associated demands made by unionised teacher groups. While government teachers do have some form of recourse to speak up for their rights, teachers in the private sector are usually not adequately informed nor have access to means of demanding redressal of grievances. This article outlines some of the rights and legal provisions available to teachers. While the wide variation across teaching contexts and situations makes it difficult for any uniform application of legal or professional policies, teachers can take the first step to change by staying informed.

In October 2008, a teacher with work experience of nine years was offered a salary of Rs. 3,000/- per month by a city school, an amount that is probably less than what she would have spent on conveyance had she accepted the job.

This salary for the job of teaching a class of 40 students, correcting their notebooks regularly, conducting tests and correcting test papers, maintaining discipline, being a role model, inculcating in them good values, performing administrative and other duties that a teacher is called upon to fulfill. This salary of Rs. 3,000/- for imparting knowledge and building the nation.

In another instance, a school teacher was subjected to disciplinary action by the school management, for raising her voice at a student who was misbehaving in the class.Interestingly, there are about 38 Supreme Court judgments reported in Judis (Judgment Information Centre) on issues relating to teachers from January to August 2008. In All India Reporter, another database for court judgments, in 2007, about 21 Supreme Court judgments on teachers’ issues have been reported. Similarly, in the year 2006 it was 16, in 2005, 21, in 2004, 20 and so on. A miniscule number, one may say, compared to the total number of cases decided and reported every year. However, these cases only reinforce the growing discontent among the declining number of professionals taking to teaching.

No wonder, then, as noted by Mohammad Akhtar Siddiqui, Chairperson, National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), in a recent media report, “There’s a shortage of three lakh teachers at the elementary level in India”. The situation at the higher education level is no better. The reasons, he believes are that “we give our teachers authority and responsibility but not autonomy to experiment and innovate”.

Under these circumstances, with the ever increasing demands/expectations from students/parents/management and the society on the one hand and an unequal rather mismatched reward mechanism in terms of status and economic compensation on the other, is it not apt for teachers to, at the least, be cognizant of their rights that go hand in hand with their responsibilities, if not fight for them?

In fact, the government at various levels, some NGOs and many organisations such as the Jan Shiksha Adhiniyam are working jointly and/or independently towards ensuring the enjoyment of rights by teachers. Yet, unless the efforts at individual institution level are strengthened, a perceivable change cannot be brought about.

It is imperative that teachers are made aware of their basic rights even as a host of responsibilities are thrust on them. Some of these rights are listed below:

• Teachers cannot be deputed for non-teaching tasks except with explicit orders of Government so as to provide them with more time to focus on improving the quality of education.
• Teachers have the right for their professional development.
• Teachers, though governed by the rules of the organisation they work for, have full freedom to enjoy their fundamental rights of freedom of speech and expression bestowed on them by the Constitution of India.
• Dress codes such as sari cannot be forced upon women teachers. As long as they are decently dressed, it should suffice.
• Minimum salary, as prescribed by the board to which the educational institute is affiliated to, has to be paid to the teacher.
• Teachers cannot be subjected to racial/gender discrimination at the work place.
• Teachers cannot be forced to practice, advocate a certain religion.
• Teachers have a right to form unions/associations and put forth their requirements before the authorities concerned.
• Teachers have a right to security of tenure (subject to contractual conditions).
• Teachers have a right against sexual harassment at their work place.
• Teachers have a right to human rights education.
• Teachers have right to privacy, or to keep one’s image and likeness from being exploited without permission or contractual compensation.
• Teachers have a right to publicity/use of one’s identity.
• Teachers have a right to attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously and the right to the integrity of the work (i.e. it cannot be distorted or otherwise mutilated).

It is pertinent to note that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and International Labour Organisation (ILO) framed recommendations, back in 1966, on improving the status of teachers in India by equipping them with adequate knowledge of their rights and responsibilities.

While it may be not be justified to say that the spirit and letter of the ILO recommendations have not been incorporated by the National Policy of Education, 1986, yet there is indisputably a lot more left to be done in terms of actual practice and implementation. This is evident from the fact that even today, according to a recent study, at least 50 per cent of the Indian teachers do not have access to information pertaining to their rights, leave alone demanding/putting forth their ideas.

Amidst this, at another, very theoretical level, some purists profess that responsibilities of a teacher alone need constant scrutiny and more stress, citing Abraham Lincoln’s (the sixteenth President of the United States) famous letter to the headmaster of his son’s school extracted below, which is certainly as relevant today as it was then:

“…teach him if you can, that a dollar earned is of far more value than five found… In school, teach him it is far more honourable to fall than to cheat… Teach him to listen to all men; but teach him also to filter all he hears on a screen of truth, and take only the good that comes through… Teach him to sell his brawn and brain to the highest bidders; but never to put a price tag on his heart and soul. This is a big order, but see what you can do…”

However, are these responsibilities, by being a tall order in themselves, not an adequate reason for a teacher to be provided with proportionate rights? In the contemporary context, it is perhaps superfluous to emphasise that the responsibilities of a teacher without parallel and proportionate rights are akin to a coin with just one side, an unthinkable proposition, to say the least, in common parlance and definitely a perceptible wrong liable to penal action in legal parlance.

The author works with Deloitte Haskins and Sells. She can be reached at .

The views expressed are the author’s personal opinions and not that of the organisation she works for.

These days there is much talk of teachers as ‘facilitators’ and the need to move from being the ‘sage on the stage’ to the ‘guide on the side’ in the classroom setting. Unfortunately, most of the time it remains just talk. While in some cases, the teaching methodologies may shift, the underlying power dynamics often remain the same. The teacher-facilitator (and the examination system) still holds the power over the students. Truly re-inventing oneself as ‘facilitator’ calls for a different kind of vulnerability, openness and mutuality.

As opposed to Vinoba Bhave’s famous story on “Only Teaching”, in which the teacher refuses to open himself to learning anything new, facilitators must be in a continuous learning and unlearning process. To support and deepen this, they need feedback – not just from principals or peer evaluation mechanisms or self-reflection tools but also from the students.

Most of us have only seen teachers evaluating the students. Students never get the opportunity to assess their teachers. In the Guru-Shishya parampara, there was a relationship of mutuality. Rather than a facilitator, I would describe the guru as a co-learner. Both the guru and the shishya used to play the role of nurturing the other’s curiosity and self-learning process so as to evolve in its own unique way. The shishyas also had the privilege/responsibility to choose their own guru and the guru would accept each shishya individually. There was no compulsion on either side. If the shishya was not satisfied with the guru, he could leave and search for another guru.

I remember from my college days that we used to assess our professors at the end of every course and the results were printed in a booklet and made available to all students for the following year. This proved very useful not only for providing feedback to the professors but also for helping our fellow students to decide whether they wanted to take the course given that particular professor’s teaching style. Today there are many democratic schools¹ around the world that allow students to evaluate their teacher-facilitators. There are some schools which give students the radical power to influence whether a teacher’s contract is renewed and she or he is retained in the school. I am not suggesting that this extreme example of ‘the customer is always right’ is a good idea – it probably does not help build healthy and trusting learning communities – but it is important to note that the student’s opinion should carry some weight.

I feel that if we really are concerned about creating healthy learning environments with teachers as facilitators, we must encourage students to assess their teachers (and ultimately choose them). Students are always doing this in their own way behind the teachers’ backs. We can all remember talking about our teachers as being ‘nice’ or being ‘very strict’ or ‘very boring’. (Strangely, I have found that most people across the world had harsh comments about PT sirs.) It is now time to encourage this feedback process to happen more consciously and openly and as an essential part of the teacher-student relationship.

We have created a reflective questionaire with the help of some children who frequently visit the Shikshantar² learning center in Udaipur. By no means is this meant to insult or demean teachers. Rather, it is intended as an invitation to strengthen the dialogue and relationship between students and teachers. We hope to generate a more conscious vision and visible set of reference points as to what constitutes a good teacher-facilitator for the 21^st century. Are our children and parents clear on what we should expect from our teachers? Are the teachers clear on what is expected from them – by their students, their colleagues, parents, society, the planet? It is high time we raise the benchmark in order to bring quality learning and real shiksha in our communities.

We think that this questionnaire is an important process tool for empowering students by encouraging them to reclaim control over their own learning processes and learning ecologies. It also can help reinvigorate relationships between students and their teachers, and teachers and the local communities. We shared the questionnaire with selected students from government and private schools and found that they provoke the students to start reflecting on their educational journey from new perspectives.

Needless to say, these few questions are only a starting point for much-needed deeper conversations between teachers, students and parents. You should feel free to add to them based on your context, particularly with more open-ended questions such as: What is the most interesting or inspiring things you have learned with this teacher? What concrete suggestions do you have for improving the performance of this teacher? I should clarify that the questionnaire should not be used as a tool to punish or reward the teacher. Nor should the student be punished for giving his or her honest feedback. This would severely undermine the integrity of the exercise. I would suggest that the results be shared with the students and community within a larger context of talking about how to improve the situation and how to give the teacher more support. Students also must be invited to take responsibility for positively shifting the learning environment. A healthy feedback process will help increase motivation of both teachers and students. Ultimately, the teachers and students will start to internalise a larger set of the criteria for creating healthy learning ecologies.

An interesting way to begin is for teachers to first fill out the questionnaire as a form of self reflection and then compare their own perceptions about their roles and performance with the students’ perceptions. One does not have to wait until the end of the course to do this. Sometimes it is helpful to get feedback in the middle of the course. I have found that the start and the end of the assessment process is most critical. The teachers should be invited to start by asking themselves questions such as: “What can I learn by finding out how students experience me?” or “In what areas do I feel my teaching needs improvement?” There needs to be a baseline agreement from teachers on why this kind of reflective process is important.

The end of the process is equally critical. The students should feel that their feedback matters. Only then will they take this responsibility seriously. Teachers should listen to the feedback and not reject it immediately or become overly defensive. Acknowledge the student feedback that you are planning and not planning to incorporate into your teaching, and explain why. Your response to the feedback can also create exciting opportunities to clarify your expectations for the learning environment, and open doors for further dialogue with students, parents and the local community.

As we seek to create quality education for the 21^st century, it is critical that students be given more power and responsibility to self-design and shape their learning environments. This may initially sound like a scary proposition for teachers, but it is one that we need to explore if we want to get to the heart of real shiksha.

The author is learning activist with Shikshantar Andolan, an organic learning community in Udaipur, Rajasthan. He can be reached at manish@swaraj.org.

Guru index

You should assess your teachers on the scale of 0-4:
0 means not at all or never
1 means very little
2 means sometimes
3 means oftentimes
4 means really fantastic

1. How much real knowledge and practical experience do they have about the subject that they are teaching? For example, if they are teachers of science, have they conducted any experiments in their homes or communities?
2. How much positive energy (happiness and enthusiasm) do they bring into the classroom with them?
3. How curious are they to learn new things and to upgrade their knowledge?
4. How much do they listen to the opinions of students and respect what you are saying?
5. How often do they acknowledge their own mistakes?
6. How much do they know about you personally – your actual dreams, interests, talents, problems?
7. How much do they respect your parents and your community?
8. How much do they help or support you in you personal life? For example, can you discuss personal problems with them?
9. How many ideas do they try to share with you that are relevant to your everyday real life and to your local community?
10. How much do they participate and involve students in community service projects?
11. How much do they try to connect you with other learning resources and opportunities outside of the formal syllabus?
12. How much do they encourage you to collaborate and work together with other students?
13. How honest are they in their daily life and work?

Total Possible Score: 52
Score given:

1. For more information on democratic schools, see: http://www.idenetwork.org/index.htm and http://www.educationrevolution.org/demschool.html.
2. For more information about Shikshantar, see www.swaraj.org/shikshantar

A classroom of their own like an alternate home, with a computer or laptop, printer, microwave oven, refrigerator, music system and sometimes, a couch and sofa, where they could set things the way they like: Indian teachers in the United States on a Fulbright exchange programme found they were in a completely new system where teachers as well as students had the freedom to choose, from how to teach the course to the clothes students wear to school. The experience was matched by the unique narratives of American teachers who took on Indian classrooms – equipped with the ubiquitous chalkboard and holding double the number of pupils they were used to.

Eight Indian and eight American teachers of math, science and English participated in the Fulbright Teachers Exchange Programme from August-December 2007. Administered by the United States Educational Foundation in India (USEFI), the programme has completed its third year, providing opportunities to secondary school teachers to learn from each other’s daily experiences and culture. “It is truly a case of stepping into someone else’s shoes. Each pair of teachers actually exchanges classrooms and teaching assignments for one semester,” says Jane E. Schukoske, USEFI’S executive director in New Delhi.

The Indian teachers were impressed with the facilities provided to teachers in American schools and found benefits in different techniques. In America, for instance, it is the students who move from class to class, to keep them from growing sleepy, and also to allow the teacher to keep materials and equipment in the classroom. “School teachers in the United States do not have to change their classroom after every period and the classrooms are provided with modern education gadgets like overhead projectors and multimedia technology. This ensures that the teacher does not get exhausted. They can also set the classroom in a way they feel comfortable with,” says Ranjini Gopalakrishnan, a math teacher from the Padma Sheshadri Bala Bhavan senior Secondary School in Chennai. He spent a semester at the San Lorenzo High School in the northern Californian town of San Lorenzo.

Sasi Raj, from Kendriya Vidyalaya at the Air Force Station in Pune, was also amazed at the use of modern technology he found at Gateway Regional High School in Huntington, Massachusetts. “In my U.S. school, each classroom had 10 laptops for students, who used them for writing essays and doing projects,” says Raj.

On their part, U.S. exchange teachers found that while most Indian students had a desire to learn, the huge classes made teaching more difficult. “An average class in an Indian school has about 50 students and the teacher is not able to give individual attention to the students, which they need and deserve,” says Timothy Daponte, a physics teacher from Bellaire High School in Houston, Texas, who taught at Kendriya Vidyalaya No. 3 in New Delhi.

Another American teacher, Eddie P. Grannis, describes the Indian chalk and board approach as slow. “In U.S. schools, we do not follow the lecture method. We have more projects. Teaching is more application oriented, whereas in India there is more focus on the syllabus and examinations. But both systems are now gravitating toward each other,” says Grannis, who is a teacher at the John O’Connell High School in San Francisco, California. He taught biology and environmental science at the Eklavya School in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

Rodney Kleber of Gateway Regional High school in Huntington, Massachusetts, echoes his sentiments. Assigned duties at the Kendriya Vidyalaya in Pune as an English exchange teacher, Kleber checked several hundred answer sheets during a short period. Back home, he would have an assistant, a volunteer, more time, or fewer tests to grade. “I checked these papers while listening to presentations during a conference,” he says.

Incidents like these left the American teachers with a sense of awe for their Indian colleagues as they neared the end of the semester. “I feel like I have not stopped [working] since I arrived. I admire how they are able to teach, do all the grading, conduct labs, write report cards, address the disturbance of students and on top of that cook and clean and raise their families,” says Ashanti Branch, a math teacher from San Lorenzo High School in San Lorenzo, California, who was an exchange teacher at the Padma Sheshadri Bala Bhavan Senior Secondary School in Chennai.

Erin Beth McGraw, who taught at a Kendriya Vidyalaya in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, says, “Indian teachers are often given extra responsibilitiesike administrative work and organising of cultural shows apart from their teaching duties”. She feels this interferes with their professional work. Also unlike in the United States, where there are strict regulations on what work teachers can be given. “Indian teachers are not even paid for these extra jobs,” says McGraw, an English teacher at Rutland High School in Rutland, Vermont.

Overall, what did the teachers learn from the experience? “Teaching in the United States does not depend on emphasis on examinations and developing skills for retention of facts as much as on developing creativity, encouraging divergent thinking and analytical skills. These are some areas I would like to focus on in my classroom,” says Sheela Gabriel from Hindu Senior Secondary School in Chennai, who taught English at Portland High School in Portland, Maine. Gabriel enjoyed the candid views of the students. “Their independence, frankness and confidence was something that is missing in Indian students,” she says.

Branch, temporarily working in a Chennai school, says he liked the Indian system of the students being in one class together for the whole year. “Although they meet fewer other students, it helps to build trust and a community – like feeling within the classroom. I also like how students have a desire to learn. I like it when I ask for volunteers. I have to fight the students off because I have too many volunteers,” Branch says.

The teachers also got to experience life outside the classroom. Indian teacher Sheela Gabriel did a power-point presentation titled “India: Unity in Diversity” for the students and teachers of her school. “We had Indian music in the background and pakoras, papads and a variety of chutneys from an Indian restaurant were served on the occasion to give the whole event an Indian flavour.” She also demonstrated Indian cooking for an international cooking class at her exchange school.

Some Indian teachers experienced seeing their first snowfall. When Sasi Raj saw white particles falling from the sky, he thought they were from the nearby trees. Then some of his students told him, “Mr. Raj, they are snowflakes.” “I watched the beautiful snowflakes falling, painting the bare trees and the evergreen pine trees white, giving a spotless white look to nature,” he recalls.

The Indian teachers were also struck by the fund-raising activities of their American students. “Some students were spraying water on cars, while others washed them. They also sold cookies and food items to raise funds. It impressed me a lot,” says Raj. His American liaison teacher used to drive him to school and back home every day. During the half-hour drive, they exchanged ideas about the education system, their cultures, language and people.

The American teachers had some amusing experiences. Daponte could not believe his eyes when he saw an elephant strolling down an arterial road in New Delhi. Despite the sultry August weather, he travelled by local bus to taste the “real” India. Diwali, though noisy and polluting, was a memorable experience for him; he and his son Matthew celebrated it with his host family.

“The Fulbright programme is so intensive an experience that I do not feel as if I am the same person who left India six months ago. I know I have to step into my Indian shoes once I am back on familiar ground but I wonder if those shoes will feel the same again,” says Gabriel. Meraj Fatima Parveen, from Kendriya Vidyalaya in Kanchan Bagh, Hyderabad, has fond memories of Vermont and its Green Mountains in the northeastern United States. “They are embedded in my memories. I have never seen such marvels of nature. I miss the ‘good morning, hello, how are you today, have a nice day,’ and so on which I got from almost every one every day,” she says.

“The exchange provides an important opportunity for secondary school teachers to learn about the host country and to share that learning with their students, schools and communities at home,” says Schukoske. So far, 38 teachers have participated in the programme. “USEFI is very pleased with the positive impact of the teacher exchange and plans to continue the programme with about eight exhanges per year for the near future,” she says.

This article has been reprinted with permission from Span January/February 2008, Volume XLIX Number 1.

For more information on the Fulbright Teacher Exchange Programme, see
http://www.fulbright-india.org/scripts/ForU.SNationalsTeachersTeachersExchange.aspx
Teacher’s Guide to International Collaboration on the Internet
http://www.ed.gov/teachers/how/tech/international/index/html

A baby’s first words are mama, dada, tata. As the baby grows older and develops her (his) communication skills you will notice these simple words replaced with the more complex why, what, who and where. It’s not that he wants to know the mystery behind the sky or why he cannot fly. The baby only wants to communicate with his parents. Asking repeated and pointed questions about something and having a parent answer them makes the child happy. He feels that the adults around him are paying attention to him.

Questions at home
As parents, when our children ask us questions we answer as truthfully as we can. But there are times when their questions stump us. I was once visiting a temple situated at the top of a mountain with a friend. My friend’s young daughter wondered why the temple was on a mountain top. My friend asked her daughter to come up with an answer herself. And the daughter said, “The higher the temple, the nearer we are to god since god stays in the sky!” In another instance, a child once asked me, “If a fly does not fly, what should we call it?” How does one answer such questions? Parents have to practice patience and learn the knack of giving smart and quick answers. Any delay arouses suspicion in a child. Are you making up an answer or telling them the truth? And beware, children are smart enough to catch you lying. Kanmani Buddhi, a professor and mother of two, says, Grandparents or other elders in the family can play an important role to satisfy the curiosity of the child. This helps the child connect with people other than his own parents.

Questions at school
Unfortunately this enthusiasm for questions dies when the child starts school. At school he/she is expected to answer all questions from the teacher. He is hardly given the opportunity to question when he has doubts. He is afraid of the reaction his questions may evoke in the class. And he is unsure of the teacher’s response. Often the teacher has limited time to complete the syllabus and she does not want to waste it by answering questions. Some students are shy and though they may have doubts, they prefer to ask their classmates or their parents instead of the teacher. Though the Internet can satisfy curiosity, this should be an option only in higher classes.

The teaching-learning process
Teachers are trained to frame questions for the lessons they teach. These questions test comprehension skills, analytical thinking and reasoning. A teacher judges the child’s intelligence by his capacity to answer these questions. And when she doesn’t get appropriate responses, she understands that the lesson has not been properly understood. If students are given the freedom to ask question as the lesson proceeds, the teacher can clear the doubts. With students participating more eagerly, the class will become more interesting. First, curiosity should be evoked by the teacher. And when the lesson is over, students should be encouraged to ask questions to know more about the topic.

Intellectual growth
According to Nandini Nayar, children’s writer and parent, “Asking a question not only requires the intelligence to recognise a lacuna in knowledge and seek to fill it, it also requires the courage to stand up in front of the entire class and voice it.” When there is a positive reaction to the question, the child feels happy. Not only is his curiosity satisfied, he is encouraged to ask more questions. When a child is brusquely told to sit down and his question is ignored, it can make him feel small. This also conveys the message that his questions are unimportant and unless he is a very determined child, it is more than likely that he will not voice any more questions in the future.

The teacher’s role
The teacher has a big role to play in ensuring a child’s intellectual growth. He or she has to encourage the child to question. When a child asks a thought-provoking question, the teacher should acknowledge it. Sharada Ramachandran, a primary school teacher, says, “When a student asks a question, I challenge the student and also the class to come up with an answer. I always appreciate a good question. There are some students who tend to ask irrelevant questions. For them I emphasise good listening skills.” Let us not label any student who constantly questions as a trouble-maker. Instead, help him understand that he cannot interrupt the class. Only when a paragraph is over and the teacher pauses can the student seek permission to clear his doubts. Cheryl Rao, a writer and a former teacher, says that a question hour should be set aside every week for the students; a question box to drop in questions will also help the very shy students clear their doubts.

Spirit of enquiry
In today’s scenario, skills such as communication, self-confidence, leadership, etc., are the need of the hour. A quiet student who doesn’t open his mouth may be in the good books of the teacher, but that quality may not lead him anywhere. Constant questioning will open and widen his horizons. Gone are the days when children who questioned were looked upon as rude. Today’s children are intelligent and cannot take things for granted. Teaching should be an interactive session of give and take. Some of the world’s greatest discoveries started with an innocent question, “Why does an apple fall on to the ground and not go up?” Who knows, a budding Newton may be sitting right there in front of you with questions popping up in his mind. Don’t discourage him. Let him question.

The author is a freelance writer and conducts soft skill programmes for school students in Hyderabad. She can be reached at radhika_writer@yahoo.co.in.

As a language teacher, initially of French and later of Hindi, I was struck by the agony that Hindi seemed to generate among students who were not native speakers of that language. A number of times, students who had struggled with Hindi for five years or more would come to me and beg me to allow them to switch over to French as their second language!

Their sense of complete helplessness expressed itself in declarations such as, “Hindi is too difficult to learn.” And when I ask them how they were so confident about learning French, they would reply,  “French is easier!” and give me names of older students who fared better in French, after switching over from Hindi, in their 10^th standard exams as proof. I too had to admit that children could not only handle the exams but also speak in French with some fluency after being exposed to the language for two or three years alone. So, why was it so difficult to gain a measure of proficiency in Hindi?

My own experience with language learning told me that no language is more easy or difficult to learn than the other. Learning is the outcome of a student’s own motivation, aptitude, degree of engagement with the process of learning, and last but not the least the process of teaching and learning itself. In this article, I would like to concentrate on the last factor.

As I interacted with a wide variety of non-native speakers who had studied Hindi as their second language in school, I began to notice a basic pattern in the difficulties which led to a sense of helplessness among such students. These were clustered broadly around the following issues:

Having become aware of these issues, I decided to address them in the classroom by taking up Hindi language teaching to young children. Scholastic India Ltd has now published some of the material and classroom practices that emerged from this shift. It is called ‘Hindi Ki Duniya, pehle kadam’.

In this article I will discuss briefly the reasons for the problems outlined in the box. I will then describe some of the common current practices that don’t address the problems, and  then give some broad principles of language learning and teaching and share some ideas that I have found useful in the classroom.

Students make many mistakes in writing because their pronunciation is faulty. When a child cannot pronounce Hindi words correctly it is natural that he will make mistakes when writing them – Saat (Seven) saath, khana (food) kana, mujhe-muje. I realised that the child could not pronounce these words properly because he simply did not hear the distinctions clearly. And typical errors such as the ones mentioned above were legion in students’ notebooks.

Teachers try remedying these by giving frequent dictations. When lists of words are dictated to students, they sometimes do manage to write them correctly. However, when they attempt any kind of free writing, the errors come right back. No amount of practice with dictation can really remedy this issue.

The key, I realised, lies in more oral work which stresses upon getting a more accurate pronunciation. Audio-based materials seem to help. Recording stories onto cassettes and giving them to children to listen to at home are useful in training the students’ ear to hear the sounds of the language. Recording students’ own speech and playing it back to them will also sensitise them to issues of pronunciation. Cassettes where blank space is left, for students to repeat after a recorded sentence or verse of a rhyme, also give an opportunity to students to hear and pronounce the sounds of the new language. Use of cassettes becomes all the more pertinent when a non-native teacher herself may have a less than accurate pronunciation.

Substituting auditory discrimination tests for dictations is another effective practice: Distribute papers that have similar sounding words written in pairs. For instance – Saat-saath, khana-kana, mujhe-muje, tali-thali, jharna-jarna. The teacher then reads out a sentence – Mere saath Bunty bhi aaya hai. The child has to tick the right word on his sheet.

Students make errors in syntax. Most can be traced to a lack of awareness of the gender of nouns. It is interesting to note that no primer introduces students to the gender of nouns, and therefore, they are often not aware of the gender of nouns appearing in their textbooks. Since much of Hindi syntax is dependent on the gender of nouns, it is not surprising that students make mistakes when forming sentences; they have no reference material to guide them.

In my classroom, I adopt the following approach: First, I make it a practice to introduce every new word with a small drawing of a boy-face or a girl-face1 and teach the children the concept of boy-word, girl-word. I encourage the children to ask me for the gender of every new word they came across, and help them note it with symbols in their books. Then I create a set of flash cards using the nouns that the children come across in poems or texts they learn: Naav, nadi, kauwa, kuda, kovi, lattu, magarmach, machli, makdi, machchar, aam, eekh, eenth.

With the flash cards ready, we play simple games. We sit in small groups of five in a circle. We spread the cards in the centre, upside down. One child in the group has the list of words with the gender symbol – he is the umpire. Others pick up cards in turn and make sentences with the noun they have on their card. For instance – Yeh mera naav hai or yeh meri naav hai. The umpire checks whether this is correct. If it is correct, the child gets to keep his card. If it is not, he has to place it back in the centre. The child with the maximum number of cards is the winner. Children love to play these games.

By systematically playing such games, children can internalise the gender of nouns encountered in lessons with a fair amount of ease. In the first two years of language exposure, I play such games regularly with my students. Though these students continue to make errors in their later years of learning, the frequency comes down visibly. And what is most satisfying is that they do not experience a sense of helplessness while using Hindi.

Students could read aloud fairly complex texts even with some degree of confidence, however many did not comprehend even ten per cent of the text. This is because our schools have for far too long stressed more on literacy, i.e., decoding of script to sound, rather than on the act of reading which is a more complete act of making sense of what one decodes.

Unfortunately, even well-designed textbooks fall into the trap of reducing the complex act of real reading (understanding what you read) to such exercises as: Padho-ghar, kar, kab, kam, man, nal, bus, ras, kalam, namak, kamal (taken from Bal Bharathi Bhag 1 pg 19).

In doing such an exercise, the message that the child gets is that if he decodes the words in the book, his task is done. He thinks this is reading. And will continue to ’read‘in this fashion for years to come, never mind if it is all gibberish and brings to him no new information. If we are to inculcate a sense of reading for meaning, we need to shun reading aloud lists of words.

But what is to take its place? Simple, meaningful, socially anchored, and if possible humorous texts. These texts should also have sufficient pictorial clues to help children understand the meaning in the first few years of language learning. Such an attempt has been made in the reader which is part of the Hindi Ki Duniya kit.

Teachers need to look out for simple yet meaningful texts with high pictorial content. Some Children’s Book Trust CBT and Scholastic publications are very suitable for the early stages of reading.

Students ‘know’ many words and phrases, but they cannot use them correctly in basic sentences. This often happens because children are taught a lot of disconnected words in a single class. The idea of semantic fields, i.e., words belonging to one semantic domain needs to be kept in mind while introducing vocabulary in a new language. Nouns need to be associated with verbs and other elements of syntax. I have found that it is a lot of fun to do activities such as the following: Think of simple everyday activities like drinking water from a jug. Together with the children pretend that you are actually drinking water from a jug, while vocalising each action. Here’s an example. Paani ka gilaas uthao. Use seedhi kar ke mez par rakho. Jug ka dhakkan kholo. Dhakkan ko neeche rakho. Ab jug dhyan se uthao. Paani bina giraye gilaas mein bharo. Jug mez par rakho. Us par dhakkan wapis dhako. Ab gilaas uthao. Bina mooh lagaye gilaas se paani piyo. Saara paani pee jaao. Gilaas wapis ulta kar ke jug ke dhakkan par rakh do. Students can in turn be asked to do something as simple. This encourages them to comprehend and speak.

Students frequently used literary words in everyday conversations and writing. Main darpan mein mera chehra dekhi. This is the kind of sentence that Hindi teachers will recognise as one of their students’. The word ‘Darpan‘ may not be wrong, but it certainly is not a word you use when you speak. A simpler ‘Sheesha’ is more appropriate. But the non-native speaker of Hindi has probably never come across this more simple word! Yet, knowing a language is knowing its subtleties. We introduce literary elements far too early in our process of language teaching and then fail to forge the necessary bridges needed to understand that each language functions at various registers. Teachers need to emphasise this aspect explicitly. In fact, it is good to bring a range of language registers into the classroom and help students distinguish between language of everyday use and language used for literary or other cultural purposes. Far from making things too complex for the student, such a rich exposure will actually help students learn a language more effectively and make them independent users of the language.

• Students made many mistakes in writing; this was largely because their pronunciation was faulty. For example – Main kana kata hoon (rather than main khana khata hoon).
• Students made errors in syntax, which could be traced to their lack of awareness of the gender of nouns. For example – Bus aa gaya.
• Students could read aloud fairly complex texts even with some degree of confidence, however many did not comprehend even ten per cent of the text.
• Students ‘knew’ many words and phrases, but they could not use them correctly in basic sentences.
• Students frequently used literary words in everyday conversations and writing. For instance, Main darpan mein mera chehra dekhi.

1. Please see Hindi Ki Duniya, Pehle Kadam, Scholastic India Limited, 2004

Sometimes we make incorrect judgments about people because of wrong assumptions and expectations. When we expect something and don’t get it, we find it difficult to accept and as a result, direct our anger at people who don’t have anything to do with these expectations. This happens to many of us in our homes, workplaces or elsewhere and causes psychological and sociological problems affecting individuals and communities. We can help our children in averting such problems later on in their lives, if we teach science more carefully than we are currently doing.

One of the most important aims of teaching Science is to inculcate a scientific attitude in children so that children can approach real-life problems with ease and try to work out solutions. Any research on good practices in the field of education will show that children who develop a scientific attitude during their student years approach any situation or process objectively and make decisions carefully by considering all possibilities and develop into good members of the community. An important ingredient of scientific attitude is the willingness to accept the `unexpected’. It is important that we train our children to have an open mind. How can we achieve this? This article gives one solution.

It was the year 1990. Although I was a Physics teacher, I had to teach middle school biology (as part of the integrated science course), due to a shortage of qualified science teachers in Botswana, at that time. (I remember Zabine Feezer, a colleague, needing my assistance when she had to teach Ohm’s law or my requiring her help when teaching the Nitrogen Cycle. In fact, that was the first time that I realized what `team teaching’ was all about, although I had studied it during my B.Ed course years before). Although I found it a bit difficult to teach biology for the first time in a classroom, I could easily overcome the pressure, by going back to the high school textbooks I had used in my school days, trying out the textbook activities myself and referring to contemporary material. Besides, thanks to the British Council Library, I could borrow very good curricular videos and sci-fi films such as `Fantastic Voyage’ for use in my classroom.

I developed almost all science activities in such a manner that they included the skill of `predicting’. My students identified this as an important skill that would help them become scientists who make hypotheses or effective people who can approach problems in real life situations in a pragmatic manner.

Once I had to teach “Transportation of Water in Plants” to my middle school science students. I developed my lesson material to include a hands-on activity written like a worksheet as follows:

1. Take a transparent plastic cup or container (plastic is better than glass as the latter can cause injury if it breaks).
2. Pour some water and mix some food coloring to it.
3. Dip a leafy stalk of spinach into the water.
4. Leave it for about 4 hours.
5. Soon after dipping the stalk into the water, study the following statements and put a √ mark to show your choice:
• At the end of 4 hours, there will not be any change in the color of the stalk or the leaves.
• At the end of 4 hours, there will be a change in the color of the stalk or the leaves.
6. At the end of 4 hours, observe the stalk and leaves of the plant.
7. What do you observe?
8. Take the stalk out and cut it across. Observe the cross-section of the stalk.
9. What do you observe?
10. Explain the reason.

Emotional problems in children can be prevented if schools use textbooks that enable teachers to develop pedagogically sound classroom processes that will train children to think in the right direction. This means that textbooks should be written accordingly. I place emphasis on textbooks here, because in countries like India, almost all classroom processes are based on what textbooks say. Teachers very seldom have the time to make children think beyond the textbooks (for reasons such as substitution work and administrative responsibilities). Besides, they are under pressure to `cover’ the `portions’ by the most influential stakeholders in the system: parents, school managements and examinations boards. In India, textbook contents are written in accordance with syllabus frameworks prescribed by government agencies and by private agencies such as The Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations. Well-defined syllabi and carefully developed textbooks can prevent a cascade of problems.

But, as our syllabi do not adequately emphasize precise skills, the lessons in our textbooks reflect this deficiency clearly. (For example see box, pg.15).

As a professional who has worked in textbook publishing in the private sector, I have found the same situation there as well. There are exceptions in both cases, but they are very marginal.

Science activities that include the `prediction’ component encourage children to be pragmatic in problem solving approaches and train them to be creative individuals who can accept the unexpected, and are flexible enough to adapt themselves as good members of the community. Textbook publishers have an important role to play in this direction. Well-developed textbooks can do well in the global playing field.

“Research on student learning indicates that a cycle of prediction, observation and then explanation promotes student learning” – Tobin K, Tippins T J and Gallard A J: Handbook of Research in School Teaching and Learning: Macmillan, New York: 1994.

What does the stem do?

In India, the central government and state governments run their own schools. It is mandatory for government schools to use textbooks developed by their respective government agencies. National Council of Educational Research and Training develops textbooks for use in central schools all over the country (and abroad) and The Tamilnadu Textbook Corporation, a Unit of the state government of Tamilnadu, develops textbooks for use in government schools in Tamilnadu. Similarly there are agencies associated with each state government to bring out textbooks for use in their schools.

Transportation of water in plants is taught in grade 6 in central schools. What follows is an excerpt from the grade 6 NCERT textbook (http://www.ncert.nic.in/textbooks/testing/Index.htm).

“We would require a glass, water, red ink, a herb, and a blade for this activity. Pour water to fill one-third of the glass. Add a few drops of red ink to the water. Cut the base of the stem of the herb and put it in the glass as shown in the figure.

Observe it the next day. Do any of the parts of the herb appear to have red colour? If yes, how do you think the colour reached there? You can cut the stem across and look for the red colour inside the stem.

From this activity we see that water moves up the stem. In other words, stem conducts water. Just like the red ink, minerals dissolved in water also move up in the stem, along with the water”.

The same concept is taught in grade 4 in the Tamilnadu government schools. As the textbook contents are available only in Tamil and other regional languages, they could not be excerpted for this article. However, you may view the contents at
http://www.textbooksonline.tn.nic.in/Books/04/Std04-ESSc-TM.pdf. In neither lesson is there an option for children to `predict’.

The author is currently a freelance writer and has formerly been the Technical Advisor to the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, Government of Cambodia. He can be reached at panamalairguruprasad@gmail.com.