ExploEducation was a forum set up in 2019 by the Foundation for Democratic Reforms to bring together individuals from various walks of life who are passionate about improving school education in India to explore, study and deliberate on the best practices prevalent in select isolated pockets. Six schools across Andhra Pradesh and Hyderabad were covered.
Akshara Vanam: A school run by Vande Mataram Foundation located in Kalwakurthy, the school emphasizes on peer learning with minimal teachers. Students take charge of their learning, discovering concepts like multiplication and division on their own. Continuous assessment is based on weekly tests, promoting fearlessness of exams and failure. The main premise of the school’s functioning is based on two simple facts – every student has a different pace of learning, and each one has a different set of pre-existing abilities. Students are divided into groups, based on their current learning levels, and are allowed to learn on their own and help each other.
Rishi Valley School, Madanapalle: The school is based on the principle of providing a free thinking space, bereft of comparisons. A similar approach is seen in community-owned schools like RiVER satellite schools and ALA government schools, where students progress through levels based on topic completion. These schools employ alumni as teachers, ensuring a deep understanding of the educational model.
HEAL Paradise School: emphasizing on democratic practices, the school ensures through campus management the involvement of students in various activities such as event planning and peer tutoring.
Living Vikasa Vidya Vanam: Built on the premise of ‘holistic development of children through a wholesome environment’, the institute is a village in itself. Students spend no more than 6 hours everyday on academics, out of which 2 hours are left as “self-time”. Farming is an important part of students’ daily routine, where they believe in the “field to platter” concept. Democratic principles are equally imbibed where they have a student cabinet and President and Vice President. Issues are discussed, deliberated and put to vote and grievances redressed.
Abhyasa Foundation: the school adopts a “learning by doing” approach, providing different environments instead of traditional classrooms for various subjects. Students actively engage in hands-on learning, such as cultivating crops to understand paddy cultivation.
ZPHS, Vijayawada: the school faced challenges in teaching English due to its unsuitable environment. We interacted with AP government officials, including the School Education Commissioner, who discussed government initiatives for enhancing learning and supporting children with special needs.
The final visit was to Aham Learning Hub, which offers a flexible learning platform with thousands of topics and customizable options in terms of content, location, and timing. It caters to learners of all ages, from 6 to 60.
The team also interacted with the Andhra Pradesh School Education Commissioner, who discussed issues related to poor learning outcomes and mass copying. Another discussion with the Special Project Director of Sarva Siksha Abhiyaan in Andhra Pradesh revealed that the department is working on learning enhancement, getting out-of-school students back to formal education and working on children with special needs (SEN).
The team’s visits revealed important insights with respect to the core elements of their study, namely pedagogy, evaluation, leadership and scalability. Their findings indicated that focus on application, skills and holistic integration of arts and sports, fosters critical thinking, better confidence and excellence. Continuous and stress-free evaluation enabled better learning outcomes. Additionally, it was found that important responsibilities beyond academics such as leadership could be inculcated by way of practice and methodology. With regard to the issue of scalability of such pedagogical practices, extending government support for private education providers, collecting child-centric learning materials and implementing school scorecards for self-evaluation and improvement were suggested.
In conclusion, the ExploEducation team’s efforts indicated that in order to improve the reach of quality education in India, it is necessary to adopt and emulate such practices, tailored according to the needs of different institutions. While everyone is rejoicing India’s success in increasing enrolments in educational spaces, we fail to acknowledge that access to education doesn’t guarantee quality education. 90% of our students are just taught without meaningful enhancement to their understanding of concepts. There are select institutions that impart quality education, however, they are not enough to shoulder the burden of the exponentially increasing number of under-qualified and under-skilled students.