vision document for yog bharti

8/12/2019 Vision Document for Yog Bharti

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VISION

DOCUMENT Yog Bharti Public School

Providing a truly holistic education through a progressive school.


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Executive Summary

Yog Bharti Public School has been making incessant efforts to improve student impact in our school.Here are some of the factors which we feel will help improve the impact:

School Tranformation

Make morning school assemblies more interactive and student oriented. Teachers should beexpected to model the behaviour they expect from the students.

Morning school assemblies to be cut down from 6 days a week to 2-3 days a week. InteractiveClass assemblies should be organized on the other 3-4 days.

Use of softboards and displays for constructive purposes like publically appreciating schoolstaff and students, for word walls, etc.

Greater freedom for teachers to explore and improvise in their delivery of curriculum. Big Goal setting with students to invest them in their own learning.

Create Parent Advisory Committees (PAC)s for investing parents in schools mission and makecommunication between parents and school much more efficient.

Class Tranformation

Shifting focus in English teaching to a functional, practical-usage based approach rather thanthe current grammar based theoretical approach.

Adopting NCERT textbooks for a conceptual and well-paced curriculum that suits the learningspeed of our students.

Make exams more conceptual , aligned to real life and focussing on usage of critical thinking

skills. Using projects and activities rather than a traditional pen and paper test for FormativeAssessments ( Following the CCE framework )

Shifting from a focus on 33% passing marks to 80% mastery in our assessments. Putting student learning outcome at the center of all teaching methods.


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Utopia lies at the Horizon. I take ten steps towards the horizon and it moves tensteps back. I take twenty swift steps forward and it swiftly moves twenty stepsback. What then is the purpose of the Horizon? What then is the purpose of theUtopia? It makes me keep walking..

-Eduardo Galeano

INTRODUCTIONWhile every organization can connect its vision and mission to this quote, the quote really comes alive ina school setting. The way a school functions, decides the course of a society over the next 60-70 years.

What the students will make of the society in the coming decades will decide if it is a utopian society ornot. With that accepted, it can be also be related that every step towards the horizon is only a step infulfilling the dreams and aspirations of our children. Not the ones who can or the ones who cannot, northe ones who are quiet and well behaved or those who are hyperactive and often labeled Trouble -makers. The common purpose should be t o raise the thinking and achievement levels of EACH ANDEVERY KID in our school IRRESPECTIVE of where they are right now.

As someone who have just been debutant teachers, we have been quite motivated and inspired by theway our school functions. Before joi ning the fellowship we really didnt expect so much professionalismand emphasis on progressive education. It has also been our fortune to have observed somethings thatperhaps become oblivious to the eyes of those who see/feel/experience them on daily basis. Here aresome of the observations that we had and some suggestions based on our limited knowledge andexperience in Education. Their purpose is not to be a prescriptive document but to have a thoughtdialogue between various stakeholders in the school.

Transformation in School Transformation in Class

It is important to clarify right at the onset that even though we divide the levels of transformation inSchool and Class but just like an organic cell, what lies at the heart of all these transformations istransformation in every kid.

Every kid is different and every kid is special is quite the rhetoric of the town in all modern schools, butwhat it does not translate into is an active belief that none of the students are the same. They are alldifferent and shall stay to be different for various reasons (societal/parental/genetical) and its we whohave to adapt to their different needs than the students adapting to us, because then they becomemere Xerox copies of our own experiences than being a product of their own unique experiences. Inexact terms, they become caged by our experiences and never get to try being a strong individual self.


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We should teach our kids to be better than us rather than being like us. They should obviously take allthe good values from us but not in a way that either forces them to do so or makes them dependent onus. There will always be multiple situations that d emand a kid to think critically on their own and its agood probability that we never had an experience like that, due to which we never told our kids howdid we deal them and the kids have no idea how to deal with them. In such trying instances are kids

would crumble before their problems without even giving a proper fight. Much like an untrained armydepending only on their leaders strength fighting a war without their leader.

School TransformationSCHOOL CULTURE

Value building

Students academic learning is only a part of what the kids will use in their quest to be successful in life.The social culture that they imbibe from the school is what will live on with the students for the rest oftheir lives.

Our school should be proud of itself in the values that we hold close to our heart. We have a focusedattempt at value building in our students. However, while our efforts are well intentioned, we think theycan be better directed. Currently our students hear us talking about our values but dont see us activelyfollowing them. A very basic example would be that we expect our kids to stand in attention positionwithout talking and paying proper homage while the national anthem/song is playing in the morningassembly, but we as staff are more often tha t not following the same rule. They dont see us standing inattention position or paying any homage or even singing the song. An approach where we are shoutingat a student for not standing straight during national anthem shows to the kid that even the teacher istaking the liberty of not observing attention during the national anthem and hence its not thatimportant, hes more important than the anthem.

Kids learn by imitation. They want to act as adults do. If we set positive examples by following an idealconduct, we will be their role models and the kids will do as we want them to do, just that we need todo what we want them to do first.


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This will also develop a feeling of community where we dont try and demarcate teachers and staffmembers as special people for whom rules can be bent but as people who are equals in every way butneed to respected because they have more experience and are elders.

In a more specific sense, we could have less frequent school assemblies and more common class

assemblies. One can observe on a random day as to how many kids are actually paying attention whileone of us is sharing really important values/wisdom with them. Only a fraction of the students are ableto pay attention. Why? Psychologists tell us of a concept called social loafing whereby people in a largegroup try and absolve themselves of their responsibility because they feel that its okay if they wont doit, because there are many more who will still do it. This is a common phenomenon across every largegroup setting. A small gathering means more engagement, more transparency and higher levels ofengagement. Otherwise the morning assembly becomes counter productive and highly negative withkids being forced to just stand straight and recite poem while constantly being shouted on or beingmade to switch off their brain. Result? They start talking because they dont feel mentally engaged inthe assembly. This agitates us as teachers since we expect them to stand straight for the entire duration

of the assembly. This expectation of ours is again unreasonable since its not the kids fault that they arenot being engaged intellectually, its ours. And when our expectations arent met, things get ugly and westart becoming frustrated and the frustration often turns violent and puts us as well as the kids into a lotof stress. It is a lose-lose situation for everyone.

To make the school assemblies more interesting, they should be restricted to twice or thrice a week.Perhaps the beginning of the week (Monday) and the end of the week (Saturday). On the other days(Tuesday-Friday) every class should discuss something for half an hour and there should be some valuebuilding discussions/debates/activities. This time between 8 and 8.30 am could also be used as a zero-period for intellectual simulation of the kids. They could use this time to play board games like Chess

and scrabble, solve mathematical problems of a higher degree, have quizzes/debates/etc. and othercritical thinking inducing activities. The start of the day in a school should really make them hungry forknowledge.

Better use of our infrastructure

As a school, we have many strengths, oneof them is our infrastructure. We have somuch we can do out of it. Take forexample the soft boards outside theclassrooms. Curr ently theyre just used as

decoration spaces to make our schoollook appealing to the eyes. But perhapswe can also make them appealing for ourminds. May be we can use them todisplay student work and shout outs(appreciative notes for motivatingsomeone who has done good work). This


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way everyone in the school gets to see a kids name and the kid would really value being positivelyrewarded for good behavior/actions.

Teachers should proactively write such shout outs on the smallest of things to give the kids something tovalue about themselves. Teachers could also use the soft boards inside the class for instructional

purposes. They could put up word walls that have those key words that they are learning this unit/year.That way kids constantly keep on seeing these words. The word wall has been found to be a veryeffective tool for revising concepts. The words can be arranged in a way where they are associated toeach other through a logical thread. A word web can also be formed that connects all the words througha cotton thread in a logical manner.

Stakeholder investment

A holistic growth in the child is not possible in school alone. For a child to grow the childs parents, theteachers and the child him/herself need to be invested in the mutual vision for excellence.

Teacher Investment

In our conversations with the school teachers, we have found that they share a common vision for ourwork. They all want to see kids have fun and feel a sense of achievement when they are teaching. Theyfeel that they need to teach their students as they would want their own kids to study. And even thoughthey express a desire to grow and improve on their teaching style, they feel they are restricted by thesyllabus and school administration in doing so.

Our personal experience dictates that the school administration is very willing to promoting change and

has been focused on improving the standards of education in the school. Their cooperation itself hasbeen the corner stone of any work that we have done in our class. It is a fact that people resist change.They may find change attractive but the very process of changing is not at all appealing for them.However, the school leaders have navigated our new system through the thick and thin and shown usthat systematic change in education is possible.

That said, if the teachers are still feeling that they can become better educators but feel restricted aboutit, then perhaps we need to have a dialogue inside the school. A meeting where everyone gets to talkand discuss new models for progress in our classrooms and the school in whole.

An educators research has shown that teachers work best when the school administration gives themenough freedom to explore and improvise. We as the new entries into the staff have felt that free dombut perhaps the staff members who have been there for a while dont realize that they have as muchfreedom to improve their classrooms. This could be made more clear to them during the meeting. Theyshould also be motivated with incentives for showing progress. The incentive could be anything as longas it makes a teacher work even harder.


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With greater freedom, also comes greater accountability. The teachers are free to improvise andinnovate inside their classrooms as long as they are accountable to the school for their growth. Butwhen we say accountability of class progress, how do we measure the progress?

Student Investment

Students and teachers should have an yearly activity at the beginning of the year where they set a bigambitious goal for themselves. What do they wish to see themselves do over the next year? These goalscould be academic, for eg. All the students will score 80% in Maths and grow by 40% in their Englishscores in comparison to the previous year. These goals are very big and ambitious and they need to bethat way to get the best out of us by constantly pushing us and making us feel that we still have notachieved enough.

The Big goal also needs to be measureable so that we can measure our progress and hence keep theaccountability alive. These big goals can they be further translated into unit goals and weekly goals usingback ward planning. When kids see these goals in everyday life, it gives them a sense of purpose andthey feel like studying. Otherwise its just our usual rhetoric of You will not get a job if you will notstudy!. The kids have not experienced what it means to get a job. They have a short attention span anddont like being told of rewards that will only be true ten to fifteen years down the line. They wouldrather just concentrate on making a paper plane than on something that everyone says will happenwhen they will grow up. Goals make the kids see things in the near future and have a more realisticsense of competition and achievement.

Parental Investment

A student on average spends only 4-5 hours in the school. The rest of the time is spent with his/herfamily. Hence the learning can be exponentially increased if the family also provides an educativeenvironment to the kids. Parents often feel left out when it comes to their kids education and only getto talk to the teachers once in a month where lack of communication for an entire month comes out asfrustration for the parents and makes the PTM a not so positive time for teachers as well as parents.

A strategy that many progressive schools use is called Parent Advisory Committees (PAC). The main aimof the PAC is to provide an opportunity for parents to share their ideas and mutual concerns on everyfacet of school life. It helps provide an on-going communication between parents and the management.PAC will keep all parents informed of school policies and issues, and provide continuous feedback. It willalso help endorse, recommend, and collaborate on school initiatives like the Bal Mela, Annual Day, etc.


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Through the PAC we will also try to involve parents with their children in academic learning at home,including homework, goal setting and other curricular related activities. PAC shall also have a fewdecision making powers such as making suggestions and in advocacy activities through independentteams on Academics, School and Bus administration, safety, sports, food & hygiene etc.

PAC should also be expected to deal with concerns and rumours, advocate for the school in thecommunity, and advise the school about issues of concern.

Parents of each Grade/Section are requested to give their acceptance to be a ParentRepresentative of the Grade, to the Class teachers of their children.

We will collate the list of interested Parents and short list a few. We will request the Parents ofthat Grade to vote for the shortlisted candidates, who will be elected as Parent representativesof that Grade/Section.

Parent representatives will then elect the Advisory Committee amongst themselves. This will

include 8 parents and 3 teacher members. The teachers will be nominated by the Principal.

Members will serve on the committee for one academic year.

SYLLABUSThe syllabus decides much of what a classroom does in a year. Its their yearly master plan. For a classhoping to have transformational impact on its kids, it cant be emphasized how important a role Syllabus

plays. In our school we are following CBSE curriculum and in our TFI classrooms we are following acurriculum that is CBSE aligned with U.S based common core curriculum.

While the CBSE curriculum is a very rigorous curriculum that has been serving us really well over the lastfew decades, the rapidly changing world has changed our needs and the needs of the economic worldfrom people who can do the work to people who can get the work done more efficiently, withoutsupervision and with more insight into their work than a regular computer. Its a knowledge d riveneconomy and everyone wants critical thinkers. In such a scenario, where we want our kids to be able tonot just remember and understand a concept, but to be able to apply it, analyze it, evaluate it andcreate something better and more efficient out of it. From a pilot, to a doctor and from a doctor to an

engineer, human jobs are being taken over by computers. In short, you got to be smarter and a bettermultitasker than a computer to keep holding your job.

To make our kids such dynamic and strong ind ividuals, we need to give them a syllabus which doesntonly raise their level of awareness and conceptual understanding but also gives them enoughopportunities to apply the concepts and critically analyze them. The removal of one entire termexamination is a very welcome step in that direction. The same time can now be used to have student


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led projects where the emphasis is on creating something new out the concepts understood over thefirst one unit.

Like we said, every child is different and their ways as well as pace of learning are very different. Hencethe syllabus shouldnt be forced to onto teachers without realizing what is the level of mastery of kids

over concepts from the previous years class. For eg. If the class average on maths is 55% in sec ondstandard, then their class goals for the third standard should be set at the beginning of the year inaccordance with their performance of 55% in the previous year. Say 50% growth, thatll mean the classshould be at 82.5% average mastery level in maths at the end of the third standard. In this case, ateacher is given an annual goal, is told that he/she can decide to skip or concentrate on whichever topicsshe considers important for kids to reach that goal and hence go about it in a more planned mannerrather than trying to get each and every kid to finish the whole syllabus and end up not justifying theefforts on any of them.

This will also help give the teacher a little room for experimentation by releasing the responsibility andmaking him/her directly accountable for her class s progress.

It is often observed that the classrooms build either on just rigor (regular practicing of a skill) or on justunderstanding, but for effective learning, we need a balance between both, which is time consumingbut more rewarding as well.

English as a Second Langage

Ours is an English medium school and hence teaching English is an important area of our syllabus. Butwhat we have noticed is that the English instruction in our school is very rote and theoretical. The kidsdont get to converse in English or read, write or understand English independently. They can only do it

with the help of their teachers. There are several factors for this problem:

1) We dont talk to our kids in English. They will never want to learn t he language if they do not getto use the language.

2) Writing has come to mean mere handwriting and no effort is made to interpret it as creativewriting. And by creative writing we dont intend to call it story/poem writing but writing fiction(stories) as well as non-fiction (letters, articles, essays, research papers) using ones owncreative mind and not by remembering and printing over a sheet of paper.

3) Grammar is over-emphasized as a means to learn English. While no one can deny that grammaris a very important component of learning and practicing a language, however English is not ourfirst language. We are learning English as a Second Language (ESL), and hence our instructionshould be based on a functional approach, where we try and make kid fluent at using English fordaily functions in personal as well as professional life rather than be able to tell the differencebetween a verbs different forms. The previous comment should not be understood to espousethe choice between not teaching grammar and teaching grammar but to simply prioritize whatis important for our kids and at what time in their life.

4) Lack of knowledge about phonics. English is a phonetical language with multiple sounds comingout of the same letters. For eg. The letter A has two sounds, the long a sound (a in plane) and


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the short a sound (a in apple). Using Phonics at the primary and secondary level can really pushthe reading levels of the kids to higher levels of fluency.

It is impractical to teach kids in primary grades all t he basic punctuation marks ( , . ? ) and keep onpracticing it till secondary school. Rather have just two basic punctuation marks like the full stop and a

question mark and teach them till at least the majority of the kids have mastered them and havebecome fluent at using them. I.e. Every sample of their written work would show the use of punctuationmarks without telling the kids to do so every time they write.

When the kids have gone through the basic grammar in primary grades, they should slowly be moved toan approach towards English as a Language Art (ELA) whereby they can decode and interpret a textcritically using their own knowledge base in English grammar as well as their literary experiences.

To sum up, English Grammar education needs to be made more practical. It should have lesser syllabusand more practice.

Selection of Books

Selection of Books gains a prominent place in syllabus delimitation. Every publisher is backed by adifferent expert but its a known truth that best amongst the exp erts are part of the NCERT team andthat their books are the best in terms of content in India. Not only are these books cheaper but alsohave a better content, at least when looked at from the kids perspective. The stories are such that theyare at par with the reading level of majority of the kids. Kids in our classrooms will definitely find readingand understanding NCERT books much more easier than reading books from the private publisherswhich have books at a much higher reading level. Books at that reading level become books that inducerote learning since kids can only read them by repeating after the teachers and not independently. It is

also our knowledge that running a private school in a low-income community is a very difficult task. Insuch scho ols, where the kids fees are too low, schools need to depend on other sources of income tokeep the school running. One major source could be selling private publisher books, which offer morediscounts to school than the government books. While this makes perfect business sense to use thebooks as one of the sources of income for the school, its a strategy that has long term consequences.The inability of the kids and the teachers to access the books and enjoy them slowly creates negativitytowards the books and by extension, towards academics. In years to come kids become dependent onteachers for marks and lose any interest or sense of value towards education but become caged bymarks alone thanks to an inaccessible and un-enjoyable syllabus. Such students and up beingdisillusioned by education and start finding other more destructive missions for their lives and the value

system of the school goes for a toss. Something that no school administration values or enjoys.

ASSESSMENTSAssessments have always been feared by kids. Not because it checks them for what they have learntbut because it checks on them. Who is a ssessing who in an assessment? Is it the school assessing


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which kid is doing the best and which kid is not? Is it the parent who is seeing how well his kid is doing incomparison to his neighbors kid? Or perhaps is it for the kid to assess how well he has been workingand learning in the classroom? I doubt say anyone considers it to be the latter.

Kids love testing themselves. Seeing if they can make a better score in their favorite game. Can they hit a

century in the next match? Can they finish two glasses of milk every day? Why is exam supposed to beany different? Because we as adults consider it as different and make a big deal about it. CBSE hasmoved towards the CCE model with a focus towards making assessments more student friendly and reallife so that all kids find avenues to prove their self but CCE does not work without us. We need toactively pursue it as part of our assessment reforms. The deletion of second term exams from the yearlycalendar is a wonderful step towards it. I dont think many schools will find the courage to take such abig leap from the traditional styles of examinations but we have taken that leap of faith and we shouldpride ourselves in doing it. Now we just need to make the best use of it now by completing the reformsprocess.

Blooms Taxonomy

The assessments need to be made more conceptual and real life. If we are teaching our kidsmeasurement of length using centimeters, feet and inches, then our questions shouldnt be merely howmany centimeters make one feet but how big do they think would be a human? 6 feet or 10 inches?Thus effectively checking whether the kids are getting to apply the logic of different units in real life and


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have an approximate idea of how big or small an object is depending on the unit it is measured in andwhich unit is appropriate for what sized object.

It is a common misconception that a conceptual assessment involves using only Multiple ChoiceQuestions (MCQs). Conceptual knowledge can be checked through various formats of questions: Draw

and show, Write and express, tick the correct option, explain using diagrams and real life examples, etc.Why then are MCQs so common? MCQs are relatively more frequent because they check only specificconceptual knowledge and not the writing skills of a kid or his command over the language in expressinghis ideas. For eg. A kid may not feel comfortable explaining why 2 2 is same as 2+2 in English language butthrough aligned options, he can choose the one which describes what he thinks. Again, its the options,which decide how difficult or easy the question is. The level of question can be increased or decreasedby changing the options and/or their language.

Nevertheless, there is nothing to stop us from giving explanation seeking questions in Maths papers anddraw and show types questions in science. Human brain and especially that of our kids has evolved in itsthinking thanks to the constant exposure to various forms of media. If our way of judging how our kidsthink is not updated along with the real world then we will only be crea ting a myth of our kids progressand not their actual progress and therefore substantiating the belief that one does not need to besuccessful in school to be successful in life.

A very basic example to prove how different our exams have become from real life is that even duringthe administration of an exam, kids find it difficult to even understand the vocabulary in the questions,thereby showing that even the vocabulary we use in our classrooms is not the same as the ones we givein our exams. If the current exams are not even representative of the way our classrooms function, thenthey are definitely not representative of the real world outside our classrooms.

The real question however is, what can we do to correct this? While it will take a collective dialogue inthe school to have real reforms in assessment, some of the things that could be tried are:

Open book test that build on Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) like analysis, evaluation andcreation. The students can open their books but it just gives them information to process, notready made answers to write down .

Student centric examinations in the second term. It has been a widely accepted research byHarvard Professor Howard Gardner that intelligence cannot be judged in terms of IQ alone.Intelligence manifests itself in various capacities like visual, kinesthetic (bodily movements),auditory (through audio), logical, naturalistic (nature related), inter-personal, intra-personal, etc.

They all are present in different people in different capacities. A kid may be high on Visual andKinesthetic intelligence but low on logical and auditory. That doesnt mean that the kid has anylow chances of being successful in life than someone who is high on logical intelligence and isgood with maths. The kid with visual and kinesthetic intelligence can perhaps prove hisunderstanding of place value system by the mans of a painting or a visual play. At least once in ayear, the kids should have system of evaluation that does justice to their individual identity anddoes not judge them against the majority in the society.


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Multiple Intelligence Theory by Howard Garnder of Harvard University has revolutionized the way we think tointelligence.

The Class teacher, subject teachers and the department should come together to discuss with

student/groups of students as to which project they could do that will really push theirunderstanding and learning.

The current emphasis in exams is on passing. This is a mere reiteration of the fact that we allneed to score a minimum in everything and just get done with it. We think its a very negativeapproach towards academics. While not completing negating the concept of pass-fail, wesuggest the shift of focus from passing percentage of 33% to mastery percentage of 80%. Weshould push all our kids to pursue mastery of a concept rather than just pass in that concept.Such an ambitious target makes the student want to learn, want to excel and makes the teachernot just concentrate on finishing the entire syllabus but concentrate on making kids master theconcepts and skills. Its a more positive approach and makes the exams a challenge rather than ahurdle.

With this approach we can have a firm reform of our assessment system. The end of the year finalscores should be used to decide the learning goals for the students in their next academic year. For eg. Ifa kid hasnt mastered Place Value in second standard, then his syllabus goal for third standard shouldnot dictate mastery of multiplication but mastery of place value first since its a more fundamental skill


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and continuing without it makes mastery of multiplication also doubtful. Note: The term used is Masteryand not pass. Passing with 40% in multiplication is still possible through rote learning despite of havingno mastery over Place Value but the emphasis on mastery with 80% in multiplication becomes verydifficult by rote alone and would need mastery over basic concepts like place value as a pre-requisite.

This does mean extra work for the teacher in terms of differentiating between kids but most of the kidscan be clubbed together into groups of similar mastery levels and their learning goals can be clubbedtogether to run the classes more efficiently. Also, the End of the Year (EOY) scores can be used everyyear to differentiate the classrooms. There are two sections in every standard and both of them can bemade with a fresh muster roll every year by dividing the kids according to their performance in theprevious year EOYs. For eg. Higher order kids, i.e. kids who have good mastery over basic concepts canbe all in a particular section and lower order kids can be merged to form the second section. This makesthe work easier for the teachers since they know what levels their kids are on and how to push them forgrowth that is comparative to their own self and kids with similar levels.

CLASSROOM TRANSFORMATION

TEACHING METHODOLOGYFor a child, his classroom is like the second breeding ground and the place where he will gain his socialidentity. The classrooms need to provide him/her with an environment where he wants to learn and notforced to learn. While all of this sounds very idealistic, it is indeed possible. On the onset, a class can betransformed by three active measures:

1) Real time Data trackingTeachers are oftensurprised by theirstudents performance inthe exams. The studentsmay perform below orabove expectations andthis happens oftenenough. Not because thestudent performedradically different in theexam but because ourexpectations fromhim/her are not based onany evidence. We teachour kids and then dontcheck their understanding


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gauge the way different kids in their classes learn and adopt a methodology which suits thembetter. For eg. Many of our kids have a musical intelligence. Hence, we sing the multiplicationtables rather than simply reciting them for a better memorization.

Hence, we need to move from the dogma of Non -Performing students to Non -performing

teachers.

3) Student driven learning

Education is about filling a cup with water but about kindling a fire and letting it grow - Socrates

We are too used to spoon feedingour kids with knowledge. Weremember somethings, we revisethem before a class (or better still,copy them in a notebook

somewhere) and start reproducing itin front of our kids. I.e. Filling theircups of knowledge with our ownlimited knowledge. This way kidsbecome dependent on us, they arenot learning or creating anythingnew but are merely becomingXeroxes of our knowledge. We feel itis almost unfair to the kids since we

have spent our young life learning new things and are just passing what we learnt to our nextgeneration without getting them in a habit to learn for themselves.

In a world that is constantly changing, imparting our kids with knowledge that is itself a fewgenerations old (assuming a teacher is at least twenty years old and a generation gap being 10 years) isas good as producing students who will go into the outside world ten years down the line, but will bethinking at least 25 years behind. For a rapidly progressive economy, our students will be non-productive assets.

Student driven learning is essential for someone to be self-sustainable in a knowledge driven economy.But what does student driven learning look like? This question has as many answers as there arestudents. There are so many things we could try to gradually release the responsibility of learning to ourkids, but Activity Based Learning is something that has been tried and proven to have successful results.

Classroom observation by the school administration and Peer observations by teachers can be aneffective means of accountability and knowledge sharing to see what is working and what is notworking.


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CONCLUSION

Every day in Africa a gazelle wakes up.

It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.

Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows that it must outrun the slowest gazelle orit will starve to death.

It doesnt matter wh ether you are a lion or a gazelle.

When the sun comes up, you better be running. - Abe Gubegna

Transforming a school should be considered as the building block of national transformation. A little

effort on our part will take us collectively a long distance. Just by prioritizing EACH kids success, we makeourselves more accountable to our kids and to our profession. There can be many ways of transformingour school but the reasons for transforming need to be mutual.

This process of transformation cannot be one way up or down. It has to start from the bottom level withteachers and has to be facilitated by those on the top to make sure whatever changes we try to bring inare not only sustainable but also things we all believe in. Together, we can make it happen. We can trulychange the future of our kids and our country, one kid, one class and one school at a time. All we need isa little courage.

vision document for yog bharti

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