Help 28,000 Indian Children Get Quality Education

A. Fellow Leaders

• Recruitment and Selection:

We successfully campaigned around the country to recruit young professionals for our Fellowship program.

In 2018-19, we received 12,367 applications and after multiple rounds of the Selection process, 815 Fellows were oered to join the Fellowship program. Teach For India maintained a selectivity rate of 6.6% (slightly higher than 6.1% from 2017-18) while screening the applicants. We welcomed 448 Fellows to Institute with an increased matriculation rate of 54.7% as compared to 53% from last year.

• Institute

We trained 448 Fellows at the Institute 2019.

Institute is the first step of the Fellowship program. It is a five-week long training process as part of the induction of Fellows onto their Leadership Development Journey and takes place at summer schools in Pune. These Fellows took their first stride towards educational equity in the rigorous 5-week residential training program. Institute 1 saw active participation from Student Interns, or as they are called, “The Fellows of the Future”! We met the reading comprehension growth goal of 0.5 at the Institute. 3% of the Fellows dropped out during the course of the training in Pune.

B. Alumni Impact

• TFI Connect

TFI Connect is our digital community platform with 3000+ Fellows, Alumni, Staff, and Partners of the Teach for India Community.

In quarter 1, the platform experienced an average of 850 visits per month and posted over 200 new jobs which had 800+ applications; around 3000 messages were exchanged on the platform. The team also conducted their first mentorship track where 6 Fellows leading projects in their regions were matched with Alumni with skills and expertise in that domain.

• InnovatED

We innovate to multiply our impact in the system through entrepreneurship.

We opened out the applications for InnovatED 2019 Cohort in May and received 31 applications from 17 women and 14 men, across 12 regions in India, representing 8 Teach For India cohorts. After a rigorous selection process In June, InnovatED selected 8 Entrepreneurs to its 2019 cohort with a selectivity of 25% this year.

C. Innovation Cell

• Firki

Firki continues to build strong content and make it accessible for all.

This quarter, Firki added 2600 new enrolments and secured partnerships with Code to Enhance Learning, and Life Lab – these partnerships will enable the creation of expert cocreated content in various formats. Audience engagement has been consistently high and attendance rates have also risen thanks to communication that focused on increasing registrations and their conversion to attendance. Another interesting update is that over 14 courses have been translated into 5 regional languages making it more accessible.

• TFIx

TFIx focussed on enabling skilling and cooperation for Alumni.

One of our strategies for supporting our Alumni was through Regional Hubs. Our aim is to launch two hubs – Bihar (recently launched) and North India. The idea is to provide an ecosystem of support for our entrepreneurs by bringing in different stakeholders, including other entrepreneurs. The team also conducted 2 Alumni webinars – while one of them focused on inspiration and passion (for the cohort of 2018), the other focused on the technical aspects of running a fellowship (for the cohort of 2017). We received positive feedback on these webinars.

• Kids Education Revolution

KER team ensured cross-functional collaboration to   focus on student leadership.

Some of the big wins for KER this quarter were investment of staff team for the track at Institute, clear communication with Students, Staff, and Fellows, designing strong learning experiences for the students and integration of this track at Institute 2020. The KER team collaborated with Firki team to finalise the 6 themes they wanted to work on for the Firki courses and a draft of their first course, ‘Safe space for voice’, is ready. Inspired by our KER, Teach For Armenia held its first Kids Education Revolution National Summit in May 31st. 20 kids from 5 regions participated in the event at Vanadzor Technology centre, North Armenia.

D. Organizational Updates:

• Project Lion

We have taken concrete steps in our pursuit towards making Teach For India stronger.

Project Lion aims to make Teach For India a stronger organization that honours and protects our people's right to safety, fairness, and support in the workplace.

We wanted to address not only the complaints, but also the blind-spots in the organizational health.

For the latter, a diagnostic was planned and executed in phases:

We collected new data from a revamped Fellow Engagement Survey, a survey intended to measure overall Fellow engagement levels.

We conducted focus groups across cities for a more profound qualitative discussion on culture. We reflected on our values by undertaking the Barrett Cultural Values Assessment Test. Besides, the Senior Leadership Team took individual leadership assessments designed by the Barrett Values Centre to understand their unique strengths and areas of development, and worked with a coach to know how their leadership tied to organizational culture.

Following this, we shared a synthesis of insights, actions and next steps with our leadership team, and then with our Board to validate it. Finally, we distilled all of this into this report so that our community could also see the journey we’d undertaken.

Post the diagnosis the following changes have been implemented:

1. We have strengthened our policies after consulting multiple stakeholders and have begun implementing them in various degrees.

2. We redesigned the ecosystem of support for Fellows and Program Staff and clarified the role vision and expectations.

3. We have refocussed our Phase 3 vision around leadership development and redesigned our planning process to enable greater clarity.

4. We have also appointed child protection officers across cities to ensure the safety of our students.

At Teach For India, our goal is to put every child that we work with on a different life path. We measure our impact as progress to this goal on three levels - academic growth, values and mindset, and exposure and access. Central to all our impact is leadership. We aim to develop student leaders who show transformational change both in themselves, in their classroom, school, and community.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the education system in India failing to create impact as it continues to suppress the voice of its most important stakeholder: the student. The education system has been focusing on disciplinarian structures and outdated curriculum that isn’t equipping kids with the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century. Students in most schools across India aren’t given the chance to explore their interests but are forced to fit into the straightjacket that’s been handed to them since their admission. With the world being divided like never before, we consider it important that schools become a place for kids to become empathetic individuals, who can lead the change towards a better world.

We’ve all heard of Malala Yousafzai, whose fight for girls’ right to education won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. Malala created a worldwide movement that increased awareness and brought about real change - all when she was just a teenager.More recently, Greta Thunberg, a 16 year old girl from Sweden, has created a worldwide movement towards demanding that concrete action be taken to tackle the issue of climate change. Greta started protesting independently in 2018 when she started skipping school to protest outside the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm, where she hoped to influence people before the general elections. Her friends soon started joining her and it slowly led to first a national, and then an international movement of students. On 15 March 2019, an estimated 1.4 million students in 112 countries around the world joined her call in the striking and protesting.Through these examples of student movements around the world, we have seen how kids know what they want and are not afraid to be leaders and create real change. We have seen many such examples closer to home as well, and through The Kids Education Revolution (KER) we hope to amplify the voices of such kids by giving them a platform to speak. Listed below are few such proof-points of student leadership :-

Almas, Grade 10

Almas, a 10th grader from Mumbai, started a project called 'Basket of Joy,' which is an online organic fruit basket company that aims to create social impact by providing work to disadvantaged communities. The fruits for the baskets are sourced from organic farmers in Pune, whereas the baskets are woven by Kashmiri women and sex workers in Mumbai. Almas was part of a one year entrepreneurship program called the Young Entrepreneurs Academy (YEA) and also won the IE Social Impact Business Plan Start Up this year

Hajeera, Grade 9

Hajeera, a 9th grade student leader from Hyderabad and a member of the KER National Committee, is currently working on two different projects along with her teachers and classmates called 'Each One Teach One' and Canteen. With Each One Teach One, she aims to create peer to peer learning circles for students and with Canteen, she aims to provide nutritious meals to the students of her school at minimum or no cost.

Sanmyukta, Grade 10

Being a champion for mental health, Sanmyukta has founded various safe spaces and support groups for adults and kids alike! Through ‘Open Book’, she celebrates the individuality of every student participant at her school. She has also constituted ‘Sanvad Katta’, a place where adults and kids join hands to solve problems in their society! Sanmyukta is also working on spreading awareness on mental health and menstrual hygiene in government schools in Nashik, where she spends her summer holidays every year.

Links:

• Kids Education Revolution website