Excellent education for 2500+ students in Chennai

The narrative from one of the Teach For India - Chennai Fellow, Meera is as follows:

"I believe that wherever I am today is because of the opportunities I got while growing up. I was blessed to have parents and teachers who believed in providing excellent education and gave me the opportunity to choose the path I wanted and supported me throughout the journey. Though I knew the fact that India is also amongst the countries which have not been able to provide even the basic elementary education to all our children despite the Right to Education.

But after seeing the reality, I realized why the numbers are all skewed. I decide to join the Teach For India fellowship to play my role in eliminating educational inequity and making sure that my students will become leaders one day. My experience during the past 20 months has been utterly gladdening. My students and I pushed each other to give our best in every task. I didn’t want the circumstances to affect the learning of my students Initially when I joined the school the average mastery of my class was 55% in Math (i.e. only 55 % of students had mastered the content of Math according to their grades) and 1.7 grade level in reading and writing (the average reading level of kids is equivalent to below grade 2 even if they study in class 6).

At the end of this year, they have achieved the mastery of 75% in Math and 3.7 in reading level. To maintain the idea of holistic learning, my school team and I started a lot of projects in the school and since we all believe not only academics are important but also the values and mindsets are very important for the students to grow as a leader. For academics, we prepare kids for Olympiads (30 students in math and 30 students in science participated and 2 students got selected for second round) conference and city level summit, Research project (How well Chennai knows about Electricity) submitted at City As Lab, is an annual, city-based research project undertaken by school children for 3-4 months, which culminates in a one-day conference event. I was a coordinator for under 12 boys and girls football team for Just For Kick's intervention to build life skills through football coaching.

We conduct the regular assessment and track their individual growth. We have organized regular Parent-Teacher meetings which impacted 120 parents across 3 classrooms, co-planned and executed lessons with 15 government teaching staff, established students committee of 8 students to solve the community-based problem. The most important thing for me is my students learning. When I see my students being curious, coming up with a great idea for projects. Students came u with the ideas like making biodegradable sanitary napkin, conducting a session for community women to make them empowered. These are some of the events will always make me feel about my students. I have faced a lot of challenges that emerged out of teaching in lower income government schools like lack of resources, exposure to various opportunities, self-motivation in children and faith of parents in education system, support from the Principal, and other school staff in holistic development, unavailability of proper mental space to study, violence in the community. To tackle all these challenges, I started setting goals for my students and slowly moved towards co-planning and now my students are motivated enough to set their own goals. Proper analysis of data and communicating each and every success of my class made my principal to trust me and the students. Taking up projects like Just For Kicks (intervention to build life skills in kids through football coaching), Dramebaaz (theatres for kids to showcase acting skills and be themselves), MaKER’s club (TFI led a space for students to share their knowledge, skills and interests), ties up with American International School, Taramani and Artmozo have given a lot opportunities to my students. Through effective team management, rigorous planning, effective execution, time management and resourcefulness I further strengthened the parents and staff investment."