Help 28,000 Indian Children Get Quality Education

During the last quarter of 2020-21, we witnessed our Fellows and Students return to classrooms safely and courageously. At the beginning of March, it was heartening to see the students, who we were able to reach, receive 18 hours of instructional time per week – almost double, compared to December. In some of our schools in Hyderabad, between February and mid-March, we witnessed a spike in the attendance of our students in physical classes from 40% to 70%. In Delhi, the increase was even more pronounced - from 12% to 95% attendance.

Given current circumstances - rising cases and increased restrictions, we are back to virtual spaces to ensure that our students bridge the learning gap. We are focusing on the safety of our community, and resuming relief operations to support the families in need.

At an organization level , we are seeing progress in the wellbeing & engagement metrics we track:

• Wellbeing: 97% of our students (who are reachable) are healthy, feel safe or have ration at home

• Instruction hours: Our students are receiving an average of 18 hours of synchronous and asynchronous learning

• Attendance and Engagement:

72% of our students are able to access learning through blended experiences

68% of our students are attending at least 1 synchronous class per week

58% of our students are engaging with at least one asynchronous packet each week

With our experience of about a year of virtual and hybrid teaching, we have observed the following best practices:

• Enrolling parents as equal partners in the learning journey

As students spend more time at home, the role of parents in mediating learning has become increasingly important. In classrooms where student attendance to online spaces engagement with learning material was high, we noticed that Fellows had spent a significant portion of time investing parents. In these classrooms, Fellows co-created goals with parents, created structures to consistently update parents on their child's performance and created multiple spaces to interact with parents both virtually and in - person (wherever it was safe enough).

• Creating a conducive schedule for learning

There are multiple factors that influence student attendance, engagement and learning in a blended environment. Some of these are

1. Availability of the device during the day

2. The Student’s schedule at home

3. Level of independence of the Student

4. Consistency of support at home

Keeping these factors in mind, creating an optimum schedule for learning for the week was one of the most important practices with blended instruction. Classrooms with high levels of attendance, engagement and learning often had weekly schedules specifically created to address the above factors. Students were called in different shifts based on the availability of devices. Fellows took intentional calls about what material needed to be done synchronously and asynchronously based on the nature of the content and the Students' ability to learn independently. Some Fellows ensured that Students had opportunities to learn in smaller groups and some leveraged the support of volunteers to ensure that students had more touchpoints through the week.

Our Fellows have truly stepped up to overcome the challenges that the pandemic brought:

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, our Fellows pivoted to the virtual realm with astonishing agility and urgency, enabling many of our students to continue learning. While anything we say will fall short of their stupendous efforts, here are some stories as testaments to their unyielding spirit.

In March, Fellows in Chennai with the appropriate and recommended safety procedures conducted in-person meetings with their students’ parents to emphasize the need for attendance in virtual classrooms. The importance of online classes, the role parents play in bridging the educational gap, mental health, and what asynchronous and synchronous classes mean were some of the topics covered.

Megha, a 2020 Delhi Fellow, has been taking classes in two distinct parks since January to ensure that all children in her classroom can access in-person classes. She regularly travelled about 2.5 hours to reach these locations.

In early March, Ahmedabad conducted the first in-person space for Fellows. They did community visits where they spoke to parents, community leaders, Headmasters, and children.

In light of schools being shut for most of this year, we shifted to blended learning almost six months ago. Since then, we have made progress in procuring hardware for students who lack access and engaging them in online and offline spaces of learning. We have continued to face significant hurdles on the way but we are witnessing accelerating change for students.

Keeping our kids learning

We are measuring our progress in classrooms across wellbeing, attendance, and engagement. As an organization, we are now focusing on getting accurate and complete data from Fellows to help us understand what is working and what is not in blended learning.

At an organization level:

-   We have 28,880 kids with us as of January 2021, out of which 24,409 are reachable (85%)

-   94% of our students (who are reachable) are healthy, feel safe and have ration at home

-   Our students are receiving 13 hours/week of synchronous and asynchronous learning time*

-   69% of reachable students have access to learning through blended experience

-   63% of reachable students are attending at least one sync space per week

-   52% of reachable students are engaging with at least one async packet per week

Implementation of Blended Learning in classrooms

-   Synchronous instructional time has gone up from an average of 5 hours to 8 hours a week

-   Professional development to onboard all Fellows on blended learning : We hosted 8 Weeks of training modules which had a mix of synchronous learning materials (SYNC - everyone learning together online) and asynchronous learning materials (ASYNC - self-paced managed materials and assignments). The Elementary Fellows learnt and taught 4 content areas: Reading Fluency, Reading Comprehension, Writing & Math while the secondary Fellows had Reading, Writing, Math & Science or SST.

-   The 8Cs of the new Leadership Development Journey (LDJ) were embedded into the training module of the 2020 cohort.

-   2020 Fellows had continued support after Institute through ‘Institute Lite’.

-   Different blended learning as well as content support workshops/ trainings were held at the city level for all Fellows.

-   We advocated with key schools and governments to make systemic changes based on our learnings.

Example in Bangalore, Teach For India worked with a symposium of NGOs to share its work on blended learning and resources in a combined offering to the Karnataka state education department. We also contributed to a paper on online learning published by partner organizations Whitefield Ready and Inventure Academy. This paper was also shared with the department. In August, the Karnataka government initiated the Vidyagama programme which incorporated many aspects of blended learning, including meeting children in small numbers to distribute asynchronous learning material supplemented by online teaching. Currently, we have the second version of the programme running that has additionally allowed children from Grades 6-10 to attend school in small numbers for a few hours and directed teachers to share asynchronous material to complement this learning.

We continue to face the following challenges in Blended Learning Implementation

1. Reality of the students we serve: 

33% lack stable internet connection

15% have migrated/not reachable

35% have required food/financial relief during lockdown

2. Current reality of access and well-being: 

40% of students have restricted access to a device for at least 3-4 hours of learning each day

11% of students do not have access to any device 

3-4% of our students require support for their physical, emotional or mental well being

3. For more than a century, schools have been the hub for learning. With schools now being shut, investment in education has dropped. We now have to battle the limitations of home infrastructure and other competing priorities to ensure that children do not drop out of school.

4. The economic impacts of the pandemic on low-income families and also the ensuing migration has forced kids to move away from their school cities and support the family by working jobs.

5. Small home spaces, limited infrastructure, multiple family members, etc. has resulted in a highly unpredictable schedule for kids.

6. The pandemic also created security concerns for parents to allow students to say, gather in small study groups or to share devices.

7. The pandemic has made it unsafe for Fellows to visit communities and effectively engage with students and parents.

Firki InspirED
In the month of October, Firki and Teach For India hosted inspirED 2020, a five-day virtual conference where students, teachers, sector leaders, parents, and others came together to reimagine education.
The 100+ inspirED sessions including keynote addresses, masterclasses, and panel discussions addressed many such questions and initiated discourse around the education landscape of India for the coming decade.

Links:

• Teach For India & Firki's - InspirED2020 Conference Compendium