Someone once told me that magic is what you
make out of your potential and it shines through your hard work. Today
I saw a real life example of that. I was lucky to accompany one of my
colleagues to her school today, where she was gearing up for her quarterly
update on STEP* to the school leadership team. School leaders are instrumental
to the success of any intervention in schools and hence, engaging them in the
process helps build sustainability of change efforts. The update presentation
is a way to formally apprise the leadership team about our work, successes and
challenges in school and to brainstorm with them on further possibilities.
To set the context, my colleague is a School
Transformation Lead for a low-fee, private school located in the (semi-urban) Hebbagodi
area in Bangalore. As her profile says, she drives efforts towards the
transformation of her school by influencing a change among all the stakeholders
responsible for a child’s education. This includes school teachers, principal,
parents and of course, the children themselves.
So today was the day of the quarterly update
presentation. I, as a new joinee, had accompanied her to just see her school
and to understand the dynamics of the school. Little did I know, what I was about
to witness was indeed magic..!
It was a tiny room where the Head master and few
senior teachers were present. She started off her presentation by thanking them
for the support and then headed onto describing the areas of her work. Next
came the videos of teachers using child-centric teaching methods in the class and
interesting Behaviour management techniques (which replaces corporal
punishments and develops ownership among children), innovative teaching methods
and use of trackers in a class room. Normally, these aspects are rarely seen in
under-resourced schools. All these videos exhibited the confidence with which
the teachers were applying all these techniques. It was an eye opener for me
because I could imagine the extent of efforts that would have been put in. Change
is a slow process and not everybody is receptive of new ideas. If she was able
to convince them to do so, that means many barriers and battles against fixed mind
set were won. She talked about how teachers are taking responsibility of
helping their fellow teachers and how they asked her to organize more training
sessions that’d equip them with more techniques and ideas. Guess what, all this
was achieved in a short span of six months.
What followed was even better, the school head
master and the senior teachers asked her to present this video in the staff
meeting, where they could inspire other teachers as well and could acknowledge
the teachers’ hard work on a public platform. This is where my colleague picked
up a discussion about the structures for appreciating their staff. It was
interesting to see how opportunities for setting up better structures &
processes can be created during such one-on-one conversations. It was a
brilliant opportunity to point out to the school leadership that their appreciation
and feedback matter a lot to teachers; and hence, they can inspire the teachers
to bring innovation to classrooms on a regular basis.
At the end of the meeting, the HM and the
teacher walked out with an extremely positive frame of mind and feeling great
about themselves; and I went out with a learning that inspiration lies all
around us. All we need to do is be open to it.
*STEP:
School Transformation and Empowerment Project is a key initiative by
MANTRA4Change.
- The blog piece has been written by Ms. Poonam Shukla, who works as the School Transformation lead at Mantra4Change.