Unto the classroom

A major quality improvement programme is under way in Gujarat to promote all-round excellence in schools.

"A DEVELOPED India, by 2020 or even earlier, is not a dream. It is a mission we can all take up and accomplish. Ignited young minds, we feel, are a powerful resource. This resource is mightier than any resource on the earth, in the sky and under the sea," wrote President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and Y.S. Rajan in the preface to India 2020 - A vision for the new millennium.

We could not agree with this more.

It is this human resource that constitutes the `social fabric' and defines every element of society. The importance of cultivating, nurturing, directing - actually setting the `young minds' off in the right direction - cannot be exaggerated. These `young minds' spend their formative years in schools, which offer an awesome opportunity to reach into their minds, intervene, and impart the right qualities leading to societal transformation and a developed nation. Working backwards, who are the people who can help us accomplish this? It is the people who are part of the education system, from school inspectors and teachers to principals, who play a pivotal role in this process.

A few years ago, I visited a school in Khedbrahma taluka of Gujarat's Sabarkantha district, a tribal region. It was an unannounced visit and I am sure I `surprised' the teacher. For, when I walked into the classroom, I found barely a handful of children and the teacher oblivious of his surroundings, reading the newspaper with his feet propped up on the table! Not just that, the attendance register showed 40 students present in the class not only for that day, but right from the beginning of the term. And, hold your breath, the entire class was marked present for the week to come! Later, while talking to the tribal parents, trying to convince them to send their children to school, I was shocked to find that one of the students who was marked present all along, had actually died six months before. I took the teacher to task and initiated action against him.

Ruminating over this incident and several such visits to different schools made me realise that while strict action against the erring staff and officials was necessary, there was an acute and immediate need to sensitise, train and motivate these stakeholders on a regular basis. Perhaps what is required is to provide academic inputs, leadership skills and focussed training to draw up and implement action plans and take regular follow-up actions with a clear emphasis on all-around excellence.

IN my current role as Commissioner of Schools, we initiated a State-wide Quality Improvement Programme, with the objective of creating all-round excellence in the 6,500 secondary and higher secondary schools across Gujarat. This operation, christened Karma Yogi, commenced six months ago. As a starting point, each school went through the process of clearly defining its vision. Each school coined a motto and composed a school song as its signature, bringing out its `personality'. Based on this vision, each school team, headed by the principal, prepared an action plan to achieve all-round excellence, which is now being implemented.

Project work undertaken by students often teaches them a lot more than the classes that they have to plough through. Each school has identified projects of its choice to be implemented by the entire team. In order to make the process of learning interesting and facilitate the regular sharing of the locally improvised teaching/learning materials, schools have been pooled together in small quality circles.

Consequently, the level of participation in district-level science exhibitions has gone up remarkably, with many creative exhibits of high quality, this year.

We undertook an interesting exercise of having each school principal pen down an experience that posed challenges and drew out his or her coping skills. A 56-year-old principal from a school in Kheda district said: "Thinking and writing this out has, for the first time, helped me understand myself and define my role and mission as a principal". Each principal, inspector and officer was also asked to write about an incident, a person or a situation which has acted as a trigger, tapping their inner strength, drawing out their passion and commitment for life. The experience of keeping aside some time to think and write these out has been an eye-opener for many. The sharing of these experiences has been well received, reinforcing winning attitudes. Since the basket of schools, is a potpourri of sorts, ranging from the really motivated, excellent ones to the terribly run ones, bringing them together in a structured manner, periodically, in groups of 50 with yoga, group work, presentations, case studies and motivational inputs, has produced encouraging results. Experience shows that such a forum with a predominance of `losing attitudes' would mostly discuss various pending demands of teachers and principals. This negativity would, in turn, vitiate the classroom. Learning from experiences, resource persons have been carefully selected to play the role of mentors, trouble-shooters and counsellors for each group. They sort out issues when difficult and tricky situations arise and have lent a lot of energy, initiative, drive and positivity, in this march towards all-round excellence in schools.

The objective is to make this percolate down to the classrooms and provide the kind of ambience that would enable each student to excel, cope with challenges, think creatively and work with commitment and diligence. Going through this massive capacity-building exercise, one realises that we do have a rich pool of resource people in the education sector. It may not be inappropriate to say that we have diamonds - some of them in the dust and a lot of them waiting to be shaped properly to enhance their value manifold. Once we have and keep this in place, we have the means to `ignite the young minds' and turn India into a developed nation.