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SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT PROGRAMME

Footprints of Change

 

 

     This is the story

            of an organisation that chose .....

            to question its assumptions, the relevance of its existence.

The story that unfolds reveals .....

            anxieties about change .....

            questions about the future .....

            a willingness to try, a willingness to change.

The setting for the story

            is in two modest schools

            with inadequate facilities,

            antiquated teaching methodology.

The characters in this story

            are teachers, students, management

            and a team of professionals

            all working towards a common goal.....

How far were they successful ?

How much ground did they cover ?

What was their struggle ?

Where are they now and where do they want to be ?

                        ..... perhaps there's some

            learning in this sharing .....

 


Prologue

 

The year is 1986. Located in the heart of Mumbai are two schools set up in the late 1940’s housed in buildings inadequate for the purposes of education. These Diamond Jubilee Schools (D.J. Schools) have limited facilities, no playgrounds, large class sizes, small classrooms, poor sanitation, low water supply. There is little space for children or for that matter adults. Within these four walls children between the ages of two and a half to sixteen daily attempt coming to grips with the reality of acquiring an education.

 

The story that unfolds over these pages has its beginning when the Aga Khan Education Service India, (AKES,I), a young professional group, undertook the management of these schools which had been in existence for 35 years prior to that.  It is a story about learning about schooling, about management of schools, about methodology, about teachers and their training and about children and their needs. It is also a story of a human movement where people with individual differences, varied experiences and complementary skills came together to share a growing, common belief that learning is about “freeing”.  It is about creating a child supportive attitude as well as a child supportive environment. With this sharing came an understanding that any change process starts from within and not outside.  For the people involved it became a process  of understanding themselves.

 

What were these schools like ten years ago? An external evaluation undertaken then reports several lacunae.  Management was perceived as “a distant entity”, occasionally present with a “lack of interest/involvement”.  The teachers it is reported were “in a rut”. Within the four walls of the classrooms studies were an issue of “remembering”, “concentrating”, “chorusing”, “recitation”, and “testing”.  “Sit straight, stop talking” was what was heard rather than the voices of any children discussing the lesson with the teacher. “There seems to be a good deal of criticism of the children but little or no awareness or admission that anything might be wrong in the instruction given to them. In one classroom after another. The teachers were  reading the text books to the children, dictating answers to questions or doing literally nothing that could be called teaching. All this was clearly observed during unannounced visits to the classrooms,” reports the evaluation. Education was a case of putting the matter across. Few actually thought of drawing it out.

 

The quality of education being offered, it was felt, left much to be desired. The parents when interviewed felt the need for training of teachers in newer techniques that would make learning an easier and more pleasurable task for their children. The evaluation also revealed the interpersonal issues that prevented members of the institution from working as a team. This review provided an in-depth perspective on the state of teaching/learning, facilities, resources, attitudes and relationships within the schools.

 

Both schools had different entities, a different ethos, a distinct interplay of personalities and yet their struggles were similar.  The system was crying out for change.  If a School Improvement Programme (SIP) was to be undertaken, how would one go about it?  Where could we begin? More important, who were we?  What were our genuine needs?  In what direction would we need to move?

 

The crucial awareness that came about with the review was the need for an adaptation of the system to contemporary requirements, using the learnings          from the evaluation as a blueprint for planning. How were the schools to go about the hard business of gathering information, negotiating differences, building a consensus and bringing about change ? In order to appreciate this process perhaps a brief description of the schools, their clientele and the programme that was introduced would be in order.

 

D.J. schools in the context of the larger system :

 

Children enter these schools at the age of two and a half. At five and a half , after 3 years of pre-school, they enter the primary section where they remain until Standard (Std.) IV.  For the next six years until Std. X they are in the secondary section, taught on the basis of the Government designed syllabus.  At the end of  Std. X the children take the Secondary School Certificate exam, a School leaving exam that is uniform throughout the state. This section is the “grant-maintained” section of the school, the salaries of the teachers are paid by the government. It also implies that the section has to abide by centrally “defined” rules, regulations and syllabus.  This fact is often raised by the secondary teachers as being a barrier to experimentation.

 

The reality of this relationship with the State Government’s Education Department gets expressed in various ways. It  could imply making concessions for children who cannot gain admissions elsewhere even if they don’t appear to be able to cope with the school’s academic expectation, even when there is no space for an additional child.  The degree of experimentation a school can attempt would depend a lot on the parameters set by the departmental rules. It could imply employing teachers sent by the department whose calibre or training may not suit the requirements and demands of the school.

 

These schools have over time acquired the nickname “Diamond Dubba” (box). Its a name that the inmates are still struggling to cast off. Society’s perception of a “Convent School” as being the hallmark of good education is a reality the schools, the staff and the students have to come to terms with. An interesting comment on this dubba image of the schools was made by a parent who said she overheard her daughters inform other children from other schools that they are from ‘St. D.J. School’! When asked where this school is located they mentioned a posh locality, “Marine Lines”.

 

Talking to ex-students who have a continued involvement with their school yielded visual images of an era that SIP has been at pains to erase. One PTA member reminisced : “In our times everyone had to be quiet, put our heads into a book and not even look at our partners. We used to sit in the back benches  to do our own work away from the eyes of the teacher. Our own batch in 1984 was a notorious one. But complaints about us never went to the parents. Also, parents never used to come to complain about the school”.

 

Laila, a pre-school teacher and an ex-D. J. Student, also remembers her own school days as being a period when there was “no growth and no dynamism”, as a system where parents “hardly took any interest in what their children did.”

 

Ms. Pushpa Pillay, Principal of D.J. Boys school with some 20 summers of teaching behind her at this school recalls the children in the seventies as coming from homes where cleanliness was not always given priority. “Some of our children arrived in the morning, having been woken up from sleep, not even having washed their faces, buttons missing from their shirts, their hair full of lice”. When we would tell the parents to send them to school dressed neatly, they would snap back, “Why should my child brush his teeth? Who are you to tell me what to do with my child?”. “Our girls came to school having had no breakfast,” recalls Jhoola Fernandes, a teacher at the girls school.

 


The Parents

 

The parent clientele is from the vicinity, a primarily lower middle income group which is largely self employed in occupations that may be broadly classified as small businesses. Their own education has been mainly in the vernacular medium. Having experienced the disadvantage of being ignorant of English in a cosmopolitan metropolis like Mumbai, their ambition for their children would be to offer them the advantage of an English medium education. They recognised that their children were low in self confidence.

 

However, the vernacular educated parents are not personally able to give the needed support to these firstgeneration children of English medium schools. During this period of School Improvement these families whether from the middle or lower middle class in the urban setting of Mumbai, have been socially and culturally in a period of transition.

 

The Schools 

 

One school in a five storied building caters to boys only.  It has 31 classrooms, an Assembly Hall that serves many varied purposes such as a lunch room, and as an area for physical education. After school, classes for other activities like karate and boxing are conducted there if it happens to be vacant. Teachers eager to work with smaller groups claim it for their use.

 

The fourth floor houses the library and laboratories. Due to their relative inaccessibility much of the 35 minute library and science period is spent in climbing up or down stairs.

 

This school with its 1700 boys has virtually no playground. The residential complex in which this building is located has a small quadrangle into which the boys pour out during the lunch recess. Needless to say that for the four months of the year when the monsoon is in full swing, the school hall, stairway  and corridors overflow with boys with pent up energy and no space to expend it. The pre-school is situated on the ground floor. The four classrooms have students coming in two shifts of three-hour duration.

 

The Principal of the school is assisted in her work by two supervisors, one in the primary and one in the secondary, who themselves take a part time teaching load. The pre-school has been an entity in itself, being completely private, with its own head mistress.

 

The other school caters only to girls.  Till 1989 this school admitted boys up to Kindergarten, who were then sent to the boys school. Here again the 1,400 children are located in a four storeyed building, part of the ground floor being leased out to shopkeepers. This school has a meagre 11 classrooms with wooden flooring. With  two divisions of students in every grade the school has to work in two shifts. The students from grade V to X arrive at 7 a.m. for their classes. The secondary section finishes school at 12.30 and the Primary children commence their classes at 1 p.m. The ensuing melee at the single wooden stairway of older girls racing down with heavy bags and younger children climbing up with their own load is a daily sight that has, as yet, no solution.  Here again the library and laboratories are on the top floor.  The small enclosure on the ground floor, open at one end to the vicissitudes of nature is all the space available for the students to assemble for any kind of activity.

 

Teaching in this environment involves competing with the noises in the market place, the clatter of footsteps on the wooden stairs, apart from the steady beat of the monsoon for four months each year. The building is old and leaks. At times the toilets get flooded. Communication within the school from the Principal’s office is through the public address system.  Important messages to teachers often interrupt the teaching/learning  while a class is in  progress.

 

Reminiscing about the physical environment a decade ago teachers remember strange details. “Way back in 1983 we had a slide within one pre-school classroom. Can you imagine anyone putting it inside a class ?”, it is difficult to visualise these classrooms of the past. The only photographs taken were at functions -- the annual prize distribution, sports day or at an exhibition put up by the school. There was no notion of capturing what was happening within a class -- perhaps this itself is an indicator of what was deemed “important and worth recording for posterity”.

 


The Programme

 

This was the scenario in 1989 at the start of the programme for School Improvement. AKES,I decided to take an active interest in improving the quality of education being offered in these schools. Given the clientele, teacher quality and physical facilities, it had to plan for a comprehensive programme that attempted to upgrade all these aspects. It was a herculean task. To attempt to bring to its fold the entire school would have been too ambitious. It was recognised that it would be more meaningful to start with the pre-school and gradually move up with the children.

 

The focus was on moving away from rote learning and testing to understanding the needs of young learners, allowing them to explore, experience and assimilate their own learnings in a supportive, encouraging environment. It was recognised that what was required was a redesign of the curriculum, a change in teaching methodology, and provision of resources for meaningful learning to occur. The programme also recognised the need to develop teacher attitudes towards this change process. A three year proposal with these above objectives was written. It was placed before the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) for approval and obtained a sanction for funding after many modifications. SIP Phase I came into existence into June 1989.

 

Prior to the School Improvement Programme an Aims and Objectives Exercise was conducted which enunciated the deficits in learning. An examination of the statistics of “failures” in the secondary section led to the belief that basic learning had not occurred through the pre-primary and primary schools. The learning process, it was felt, was not merely a process of transaction, it included “a stimulus, a reaction to the stimulus and a meaningful organisation of clues”. Such a curriculum would demand that the student works alone, there is a set of common expectations and there is a mastery of objectives by all students. At the primary and secondary levels the need to follow the prescribed departmental syllabus and textbooks allowed for limited flexibility in bringing about change. Also the expectations of both parents and teachers were high at these levels.

 

While there was a concern about the older children and their needs, it was realised that a beginning had to be made somewhere and where else but at the place where it all begins -- the pre-school. This section had the advantage of being totally private, thereby affording total flexibility in curriculum and methods used in teaching. It was also the section where, it was felt, parents would experience least anxiety with any experimentation.

 

Year 1 looked at the pre-school as a whole and introduced a new curriculum. Simultaneously, teacher workshops were held to introduce new teaching strategies. Year 2 saw the programme focus on standards I and II in the primary school. Here again the curriculum and methodology components were examined and in the light of the changes necessary, it was agreed to do away with text books. The emphasis on homework and examinations was reduced as also the need for school bags. Year 3 moved further up with the children into grades III and IV.

 

The School Improvement Programme in the second and third year involved the teachers in the very redesign of their change process. Overall the attempt was to broaden the range of competencies that children could have an opportunity to develop in the classroom.

 

Central to all this change was the notion of institution building in terms of the way in which members of the school community related to each other. The Project attempted creating  fora for various members to meet. The management style changed over time to accommodate more participation. At the end of Phase I (1989 - 1992) much had been attempted, and much remained to be consolidated.

 

Phase II of School Improvement had thus a two-pronged thrust. On the one hand consolidating the Phase I experiences and on the other pursuing the process of renewal into the middle school. In these three years of School Improvement (1993 -- 1996) the Project moved year wise into grade V, grade VI and then grade VII. Matters were more complex in this section as it received aid from the government and as such had to follow the State Education Department’s rules and regulations. The focus shifted from curriculum redesign to curriculum delivery. The state prescribed syllabus had to be followed. The flexibility lay, it was realised, in its delivery. Teachers needed time and space to reflect upon their own classroom experiences. This gave birth to the ‘co-ordination system’ whereby subject teachers were allotted free periods simultaneously to be able to gather together to discuss both curriculum content and effective practice.

 

This system, with co-ordinators appointed from amongst staff, provided the teachers with career ladders and an opportunity to hone a new set of skills. At the end of the Second Phase both schools had institutionalised this system within their time tables and it became one of the key ideas of the Project that could be disseminated. Towards the end of this Phase, networking with a  number of schools had commenced for needbased dissemination. While some schools sought indepth intervention, others sought help in specific areas. The dissemination strategy has been to suit the needs of individual schools. Details of organizational structure, programme objectives and a chronology of processes is in the appendix for the readers’ reference.

 

The Programme thus involved a number of hard decisions to be taken, not all of which turned out as envisaged. Implementers had to sometimes break existing structures, create new ones, only to find sometimes the need to retreat to the older pattern. 

 

This then has been a brief description of the programme since its inception. This document attempts to focus upon the individual members and their own experiences of the change process. A concluding chapter on where the programme is vis-à-vis other schools highlights some of the areas that School Improvement could examine for the future.

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