Notes from the field of Education

The Villgro fellows spent time out on the field two weeks ago looking at various private sector interventions in the field of education, healthcare, water and sanitation. Their visit to Hyderabad took them to the Naandi Foundation, where they learned more about their Ensuring Children Learn Program. Villgro Fellow Mayank Jaiswal tells us more about the program.

The Naandi Foundation’s Ensuring Children Learn Program is based on the approach that every child can learn. The approach is called Cooperative and Reflective Learning approach. The classrooms used are learning-oriented and child focused; the teachers act as facilitators and not lecturers. The ECL program works with government schools to ensure that students enrolled receive a minimum level of competency in language, mathematics and social sciences.

To ensure that children don’t drop out of school because of poor grades, Naandi invested in developing a curriculum that suits ‘B’ level students. Typically this target group consists of 3rd, 4th and 5th graders who are on par with a 2nd grader in terms of their skill set. Recognizing that students would not have all day to be brought up to speed, Naandi developed an integrated remedial curriculum incorporating Language, Social sciences and Science. It is annoted to the school curriculum books, and is spread across 3 levels.

At Level 1, the assumption is a 3rd, 4th and 5th graders who enter the system have skills of a 2nd grader. Level 1 A and B are courses that act as a bridge. The course brings the students on to a level of basic mathematics and language.

At Level 2, the curriculum is integrated for a specific grade’s curriculum. Each chapter has 6 modules, which use different teaching techniques – a picture card, a vocabulary card, reading card, and so on. Each module is referenced with chapters from the state curriculum.

Level 3 focuses on the state curriculum tests.

ECL employs the Cooperative and Reflective Learning Approach which maximizes the scarcest of resources – the teacher. In this approach a teacher selects a leader in a group of 5 children. The leader usually understand the subjects well and he then makes sure that the group is doing the tasks that it is supposed to as assigned by the teacher. This decreases the load of the teacher and at the same time the students learn leadership.

Instruction at all 3 levels uses the physical infrastructure of the school for 2 hours after regular schooling hours.

The ECL is headed by 6 Project officers who in turn supervise the work of 500 community activists. These activists, with a graduate degree in Arts or Education are trained by the ARCs, who are in turn trained by the Naandi Material Development Team.

Each Community Activist maintains a register of what they did each day, the performance of each student in state tests, attendance and so on. This acts as a handy indicator of the student’s progress.

The approach followed by Naandi will have a wide ranging impact. It will be pivotal in bridging the gap between ‘documented’ literacy levels and ‘actual’ literacy levels, thus leading to a betterment in the quality of life of India’s young population.