Transform the lives of 3200 children in Hyderabad

The Fellowship has been a tough but also very enriching experience. Teaching English, Biology, and Physics to ninety-five students in Grade Ten and taking up additional responsibilities for the non-Teach For India class has been a great learning opportunity regarding the grassroots and the underbelly of the Hyderabad Old City. The students have had two years of continuous loss in learning and now facing a major challenge to write the Board Exams this academic year. Despite being a Teach For India intervention class the learning loss was real, with serious behavioral management issues, crippling financial position, and other social ills. Though there have been shifts In terms of Behavior Management, the progress has been slow and hard. 

Conducting bi-weekly investment sessions with the parents, having career counseling sessions with the students, conducting open spaces for students to share their views, taking in feedback and incorporating the same in my teaching strategies, investing students in weekly plans. This ensured that the students were much more invested in their academics and the purpose of academics and attending school. Empathy Mapping and one-on-one conversations helped us and the students to express themselves clearly in terms of what they feel and what they would like to be doing in the future. I have been conducting many Career Counselling sessions as well as talks with external people to build interest and hope in the students. 

For all of these to be conducted effectively, I have been conducting analysis to better understand the root causes in the community that may be hindering the student's growth by taking into account the cluster analysis and basing on the problems faced by the students and the parents, the hypothesis that we created for the problem statement for various community-level issues and academic performance issues in the school were effectively conducted. For all of this to happen, I leveraged free courses from the Acumen Academy as well as engaged with Alumni who have been active in the field to help better in analysis.

Post the first year of the Fellowship, along with my school team, we identified that there has been a growing lacuna in terms of compliance, governance, structure and strategy, and effective impact evaluation in the community. We also identified plenty of gaps in providing support for Girl children beyond Higher Secondary grades, and additionally, there are a lot of gaps in Low-Income Private Schools and the infrastructure, capacity building of the schools. 

Hence we realized the need for providing such support to these schools beyond the Fellowship. My school team and I have created a fund to support the education of the girl children in the community and to aid capacity building and resources for the school to ensure excellent education, such as salaries for skilled and qualified permanent teachers, infrastructure, creating community Leaders. 

The progress we have made is two-fold. One, We have reached out to the Teach For India community in Hyderabad to support us in this project and help us build our skills and further our efforts. We have also reached out to Alumni to help us conduct surveys and establish strong monitoring and evaluation systems to ensure the sustainability of the project post our support.

Penamakuri Krishna Kumar Vasishta

Cohort 2020

Hyderabad

"I teach grade 9 and 10 students at the St. Albert's High School in Hyderabad. I have seen my students grow from going completely silent in mathematics class to solving questions on the whiteboard while explaining them to their peers. We have gone from just copying answers in science class to asking about everything under the sun.

It has been a challenging period to deal with multiple classrooms and community visits. Still, my school team was always there by my side and helped me successfully fulfil my responsibilities. While teaching higher grades added an extra amount of pressure to complete the syllabus and make students exam-ready, blended learning came as a rescue; I had the opportunity to ensure my students' holistic development and well-being without compromising academic excellence. With schools reopening, I am engaging an average of 24 instructional hours of synchronous learning spaces every week and a commensurate amount of asynchronous learning material in the virtual medium.

The last few months were filled with hardships, uncertainties, and adversities. Still, they have left me with a hope that we will one day see all children attaining excellent education, just because we have a lot of people like us working towards supporting directly in this movement."

These past three months have been a rollercoaster ride with uncertainties surrounding schools opening and the safety precautions that had to be maintained when the schools eventually opened. Creating a safe space for Students to return to school needs meticulous planning. We had multiple conversations with the school staff and the parents to ensure the safety of the students within the school, such as physical distancing in the classroom and staggered entry plans for different grades. With physical distancing norms, having group activities was limited, so we had to devise means of hybrid learning with the help of school staff.

Measuring impact

• We’ve had 90% attendance of the students in school and 82% engagement in classroom participation and asynchronous work submission.
• 70% of the students are completely aware of the available career options for them, 55% have shortlisted the feasible options considering various personal and academic factors, and 20% of the students have chalked down their next steps for the short term and long-term goals
• Our continuous efforts with English learning labs and specialized blended learning curriculum has increased the class average literacy mastery by 10% over last year’s average mastery. Alongside the literacy mastery, students have shown 24-30% progress on listening, writing, and speaking skills over last year’s levels. Besides, with digital learning, debates and discussion spaces, practical classes and real-life problem-solving techniques over the previous eight months, grade 10 students’ average mastery for all the subjects grew by 18%.

Students’ overall well-being

Community visits and parental conversations to examine their well-being and convince them to bring their children back into the learning loop have become fruitful. Engaging with parents has led to them becoming more involved in their child’s education and holistic development.

The pandemic put a lot of pressure on my Students. While some of them have learned and grown from these experiences, few are still struggling to cope with the pandemic's added burden. To address this, we have declared Fridays as “No Bag Days” at school, where the students engage in Socio-Emotional Learning and also get an opportunity to showcase their talents/projects to the whole class. Grade 9 students also participate in various co-curricular and extracurricular events and competitions like inter-school debates, quizzes and regional and district level sports competitions to improve their social skills.

Blended learning has also led to an opportunity for the students to acquire digital literacy skills and take responsibility for their own learning. It is a big goal that we aspire to achieve through our classrooms, where the students take responsibility for their own learning. We organized personal SWOT analysis and career counselling spaces (external partners) with our students to create self-awareness and realize their goals and aspirations for the future. We have also collaborated with other Fellows from different schools to provide career counselling to our students.

Student achievers

One of the success stories was that of a student who cultivated reading books during the lockdown. She slowly picked up with reviewing the books on her blog. Today, she is almost on the verge of finishing her own novel and planning to publish it as well. The virtual learning also helped a few introverts and lower order students in my classroom to open up and use different learning methods to master the concepts at their own pace without any peer pressure. It brought a completely different aspect of their personality and learning prowess which increased their self-confidence and self-belief.