Transforming a Government Primary School in Delhi

 PROGRESS REPORT – LEARNING LINKS FOUNDATION SDMC SCHOOL Krishi Vihar

  . Executive Summary

1. Key Developments

a)   Enrolment:

Learning Links Foundation (LLF) has been   working at SDMC School, Krishi Vihar, since April 2016. We have completed 16 months at the school and due to our efforts there has been an increase in the enrollment from 70 (April 2016) to 192 (August 2017).

Attendance: Regular attendance of students was ensured by subsidizing the cost of transport for the parents. Intensive community drives and daily monitoring of irregular students followed by investing parents, to ensure student regularity.

b)     Classrooms:

The initial intervention started with a single classroom but now, we are working with all students in the school – Grade Pre-Nursery to Grade 5. One of our key focus areas is creating   print rich classrooms, which have teaching learning aids displayed so as to create a positive environment of learning. The classroom walls are divided into sections for displaying material for different subjects. Apart from different subject areas we have also given a significant place to rules zone, kid’s zone and reading corners in the classroom. Students are aware of all of these sections in the classroom. The teaching material, charts and mobiles are being changed and updated regularly. In classrooms, the changes were done according to the current themes of the unit and chapters.

a)      Teachers:

In the beginning of intervention, we had only one teacher and one Principal. In the second academic year government has appointed 2 more teachers and LLF has also included 4 teachers in order to ensure that all students get good quality education. We are striving to create a co teaching model in the entire school where the government teachers worked in collaboration with the teachers from Learning Links Foundation.  We have also provided detailed lesson plans for every subject in bi-lingual language to ensure that we support teachers and provide them resources.

Teacher Development: Teacher development is a continuous process and therefore,daily mentoring of teachers is being done by the LLF Academic Coordinator. The challenges faced during the implementation of Lesson plans are discussed regularly.  Alongside regular mentoring, skill building workshops were also be conducted for the SDMC teachers.

 Infrastructure: Focusing towards a clean and green school, a lot of repairing, cleaning and maintenance of classrooms was done during the summer break. Extensive efforts were undertaken to maintain the look and feel of theschool. The addition of the much needed water cooler, colourful display boards, teaching learning material in the classrooms, made the entire look vibrant and colourful.

a)      Special Events:

Parent Teacher Meeting (PTM)

We have organised 2- 3 Parent Teachers Meeting (PTMs) in each quarter of the academic year. This time we focused on a specific need based PTM module. We created an agenda based on the requirement of the students and school. To share an example, in the month of July when monsoon begin, there is a high possibility of dengue, malaria and other deadly diseases, we decided to sensitize our parents and spoke to them about hygiene and health. During the PTMs parents also shared with the teachers, their feedback about the teaching process in the school. Teachers also gave specific feedback to each parent about their child’s development and academic growth.

School Events-

Summer Camp

During the summer break, we organized a summer camp for 20 days. In this camp, students from all the classes participated and learnt about various co-scholastic forms like quelling, painting, dance, storytelling, yoga, meditation, art and craft, sports and music. The summer camp was an environment of energetic teachers and students where we tried making learning more fun than the mythological forms of teaching.

We also plan to celebrate Teacher’s day, Diwali, Children’s day, Christmas Day and Holi. All these celebrations and a part of our diverse culture and they bring great joy to the students as they enjoy as well as learn a little bit more about their culture.