Sheela Mallya
WHAT MAKES ME A PROGRESSIVE PRINCIPAL
Being the head of the Academic Board at the Children’s Academy group of schools, I have espoused educational progressivism and attempted to spearhead many reforms in the sphere of education at our school. Right from the rejection of a teacher centred instruction, promotion of learning through “hands-on” activities that inculcate critical thinking and problem solving, technology aided learning, social outreach programs, emphasis on physical fitness,ethical and holistic development to providing a progressive learning environment, I have done it all and shall continue to endeavour on the same lines.
LEARNING BY DOING
At Children’s Academy, we have been constantly changing and evolving the school system to remain contemporary. The school applies its technological resources in a targeted manner to meet the learning needs of all students. Our curriculum designing, planning and execution exhibit optimal use of technology. Strong procedures are in place to encourage a school-wide, shared responsibility for student learning and success, and to encourage the development of a culture of continuous professional improvement (ICT training sessions included) that includes classroom-based learning, mentoring and coaching arrangements.
A high priority is given to the school-wide analysis and discussion of systematically collected data on student outcomes, including academic, attendance and behavioural outcomes. Data analyses consider overall school performance as well as the performances of students from identified priority groups; evidence of improvement/regression over time; performances in comparison with other schools and measures of growth across the years of school. But for technology, the task would have been impossible! Our young , vibrant, technology savvy staff, teeming with fresh ideas is navigating the school towards the digital age.
The basis of innovation is creativity. Creativity can be born from Samvedna (sensitivity). Our endeavour is to convert Samvedna into creativity, we emphasize that it doesn’t matter whether it is criticism or appreciation for new ideas, but at least there should be talk about ideas and design. We provide scientific kits to students , these kits aid conceptual understanding and enable them to explore, manipulate and experiment. We push them to design or modify something for solving a problem, and then scale it higher. The projects across subjects are designed to bring out the ‘creative” abilities of the students.
INTEGRATED CURRICULUM
For us, teaching is not an individual but a joint effort. Every teacher of a subject collaborates with other teachers of the same subject and also with the teachers of other subjects. In line with the visions of their Head of Department(HOD), they come up with improvised methods that can help teachers bring out the best in their students. In their day-to-day teaching, classroom teachers place a high priority on identifying and addressing the learning needs of individual students. Teachers closely monitor the progress of individuals, identify learning difficulties and tailor classroom activities to levels of readiness and need.
At Children’s Academy, we ensure that every student is engaged, challenged and learning successfully. We feel that learning may be improved, by viewing it as a process of conceptual change. Students often enter an instructional setting with tenacious misconceptions —probably resulting from previous reading (easy accessibility of information) and other experiences. Students may then distort new information to fit their existing incorrect knowledge frameworks. We therefore focus on explicit, reflective instruction (which provides students with opportunities to assess their previous conceptions). The school has a coherent, sequential plan for curriculum delivery that ensures consistent teaching and learning expectations and a clear reference for monitoring learning across the year .
INTEGRATION OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP INTO EDUCATION THROUGH FACULTY
Entrepreneurship education is the need of the hour, it provides students with skills related to making jobs, rather than training to take existing jobs; and a related need for economic growth through job creation. We have identified faculty who are equipped with culinary skills, baking skills, tattooing, mehandi, bag making, and a whole lot of other special skills they train students in these special skills in our “entrepreneurship education“ classes. At the end of the year, we have a carnival of sorts where we have an exhibition cum sale of the articles made, the students set up stalls for sale of various delicacies made by them, sell their paintings, apply mehendi, make tattoos, all for a price. The proceeds are then donated to an NGO for children after deducting the expenses incurred by the students.
To provide students with entrepreneurial skills, our efforts focus on the following three elements: an “initiator” (usually a faculty member) able to identify market opportunities and lead others; a development team (students) recruited by the initiator to assist with human resources, finance, marketing, selling, development, and quality management; and a constituent group of community members (parents) with a stake in the growth of the venture.
PROBLEM SOLVING & CRITICAL THINKING AMIDST THE FACULTY
Developing the disposition towards critical thinking and problem solving in students remains the most important part of the objective of education. Here, the students’ learning context is a major contributing factor. For example, teaching and learning process in the classroom which emphasize on rote learning and too focused on the content cause students to memorize the knowledge learned, rather than to analyze and synthesize the exact meaning of the knowledge. Since they do not have deep understanding regarding the knowledge learned, it leads to reduced ability to think critically as well as to solve complicated problems.
With the advancements in technology, students can get access to all the information through internet, which then causes negative effect as they simply adopt the information without analyzing, interpreting and thinking critically. Our faculty is hence trained to develop these skills in the children, our lesson plans are designed in such a way as to trigger the children to think, the projects assigned to the students are also meant to reflect their critical thinking skills, for instance recently we assigned the task of designing a school bag that is most convenient to carry to our grade 9 students.
GROUP WORK AND DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL SKILLS AMIDST THE FACULTY
Over thirty years of experience in this profession has given me enough insight about my faculty, I have noticed that they can be broadly classified as collaborating, competing, avoiding, compromising, and accommodating. I try and organize teams with a fair composition of each of the above, these teams are assigned various tasks which range from lesson planning to designing projects and assessments and also group action research projects. In order to teach students to work effectively in groups, teachers should first themselves be able to work in groups and resolve conflicts. This alone will help them become more critical thinkers with deeper understanding about the content. It will also foster positive interpersonal relationships, help them feel more fulfilled and achieve more. Performance reviews often indicate the key areas that need to be addressed and such faculty are provided with the desired training – on conflict resolution, interpersonal relations, anger management and the like.
UNDERSTANDING & ACTION BASED LEARNING
I have been seriously looking at getting rid of grades and marks, and devising an assessment system that would test genuine abilities and learning capabilities in a child. I am encouraging student learning through portfolios and creative performance tasks. Again, the objective is to use real-life approaches to assessment. An authentic performance assessment requires students to apply what they know, not merely to recall or recognize information.
A portfolio is more than a folder stuffed with student papers, video tapes, progress reports, or related materials. It is a purposeful collection of student work that tells the story of a student’s efforts, progress, or achievement in a given area over a period of time. Designing a performance task requires the students to demonstrate certain skills and knowledge. These performance tasks have been great hits and are motivating students. They find the tasks challenging, yet achievable and are able to complete them successfully. They are taking up the tasks with gusto as opposed to the mundane questions and answers in a typical test and their achievement levels have shot up! Some samples are on http://madhavnsolanki.wixsite.com/childrensacademy/ a website created and managed by my student of 9th grade.
COLLABORATIVE & COOPERATIVE LEARNING PROJECTS FOR FACULTY DEVELOPMENT
Apart from working collaboratively on lesson plans , projects, assessments , co-curricular activities, our faculty has enrolled for the UGC funded Major research project titled ‘Promoting Action Research for Continuing Professional Development among In-service Teachers through the Mentorship Model’ undertaken by Smt. Kapila Khandvala College of Education, Mumbai. Herein they collaborate to work on action research projects. For instance a group of teachers conducted a study to check if brain gym exercises are the conduit that students needed to acquire new knowledge, develop new concepts, and express strong understanding. Through the integration of these exercises in their day to day lectures they hoped to tap the enthusiasm of the students towards learning science and make them active participants in their own instruction.
EDUCATION ACCENTUATING SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND SAFEGUARDING DEMOCRACY
At Children’s Academy, we value relationships and sincerely opine that shared leadership binds people in a purposeful learning environment. Our model of shared leadership is based on the identification of a shared purpose, clear mutual goals, a 360 degree influence and time to engage in dialogue and relationship building. Our leadership framework involves a shift of responsibility from a single leader to a distributed leadership, it evokes a higher degree of collaboration—one of the necessary components for dealing with complexity.
We have been able to solve challenging problems, improve decision-making, enable adaptability and nimbleness, and improve performance, simply because we do not hesitate to express dissent and firmly state our opinions. Our common currency is dialogue. We function under the aegis of the Academic Board (AB) and the Non Academic Board (NAB). The AB is chaired by the Chief Academic Coordinator and includes the Principal, the primary Head, the subject Heads (HODs). The NAB is chaired by the Chief Coordinator and includes the Chief Operating Officer, the Chief Financing Officer, the Branding and Communication manager, Employee Engagement Manager, Manager External Events. Every single process in the school is managed by a process owner who works as per the guidelines of the standard operating procedures (SOP)and the performance management system (PMS) tracks the effectiveness of the process owners and their team members. There is micro planning of the roles and responsibilities of the Heads .
DESIGN & DELIVERY OF A LEARNING ECOSYSTEM WHEREBY HIGHLY PERSONALIZED LEARNING ACCOUNTING IS DONE FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL’S PERSONAL GOALS
As a school, when we think about achieving SUCCESS, we have to think about setting and achieving GOALS. Goals allow us to gauge success. Also, we cannot achieve success without working towards something that is measurable, memorable and attainable. At the end of every academic year, during performance appraisals, we begin setting goals for the next year. These are based on our roles and responsibilities, strengths and weaknesses and are aligned with the vision and mission of the school and help us to focus on the final destination.
The staff is oriented in goal setting sessions and together we set goals that are PRESENT, POSITIVE, and PERSONAL, all the required skills become the needed actions to support the goal that we have initially set for our self. There are measurement indicators in place for each goal and a group of ten to twelve staff members have one mentor assigned. Goal setting and goal achieving are the keys to all our accomplishments.
INTEGRATION OF COMMUNITY SERVICE AND SERVICE LEARNING PROJECTS INTO THE DAILY CURRICULUM
Value education and SUPW in our school focuses on the five main virtues that we have identified – Humility, Patience, Loyalty, Empathy and the most important Benevolence. It is the desire to help others, do charitable deeds or an act of kindness. This should be inculcated in all kids as the nicest feeling in this world is to do a good deed anonymously and have somebody find out. We have evolved the persistence model in our school where the kids are involved year on year with making packets from waste newspapers for local vegetable vendors, quilts from waste cloth to be donated during winters to the roadside beggars, providing life skills to students of less privileged schools, spending time with the aged in old age homes etc. This is a grade specific activity and teaching kids to help the less fortunate, automatically inculcates the virtue of benevolence over a period of time. They realize that helping others is not just charity or a good deed but it also provides immense satisfaction.
FUTURISTIC SELECTION OF SUBJECT CONTENT
The Children’s Academy Group of Schools has always welcomed new developments in the field of education with great enthusiasm. Through the decades, we have endeavoured to provide a progressive learning environment coupled with holistic development of our students. Our efforts aren’t to just guide the students through their academic curriculum, but to make them future-ready, capable of facing all challenges that life can throw at them.
Today’s education needs to be comprehensive. Times are changing rapidly, and it is quite possible that the knowledge the children gain in their schooling years might be outdated by the time they step into their professional lives. At Children’s Academy, we understand this problem. Hence, we are committed to create lifelong learners who would not just excel in their years of schooling lives, but also for the rest of their lives. We work towards the creation of champions who will be able to welcome and adapt to whatever advancement the future brings in. That is why we do not focus on just the knowledge. Knowledge gets obsolete with time. New forms of knowledge gain hold over society. We do not want our students to be caught unawares when this happens.
That is the reason our focus has always been on creating skills in our students rather than just what’s in their textbooks. When we talk of skills, we talk of a broad spectrum of abilities that can equip our children to be lifelong pursuers of learning. There are various forms in which these fundamental forms of training are imparted in our schools. The skills we have identified for future-preparedness are leadership, digital literacy, communication, emotional intelligence, entrepreneurship, global citizenship, problem-solving, and team-working. Our activities are geared to create these skills in our students at an early age itself.
LIFELONG LEARNING AND SOCIAL SKILLS OF FACULTY MEMBERS
Technology is the order of the day , our endeavour has always been to keep our staff abreast with the latest in this field. Most of them are ‘immigrants” to technology but they have been constantly learning . We have made conscious efforts to reduce the burden of manual work on our facilitators so that they can focus on the core teaching aspects. Our faculty no longer has to make hard copies of lesson plans, they have e-plans that can be accessed on their laptops or androids from anywhere, these plans enable word Processor-like editing, teachers can attach files to their plans, share the plans with their colleagues and also fill in their daily log of work online. We are putting systems in place so that some of the student tests can be assessed through software as well.
This year we have joined hands with a company that has developed a digital learning platform that integrates and simplifies the complete assessment lifecycle – from question paper design (Q), evaluation (E), analysis & reporting(R) and remediation(R). The Software is designed to engage each stakeholder namely, School Management, Teachers, Parents, Children, over actionable performance improvement in children.
Teachers are now working on Flipped Classrooms, a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions, thus assessing students on their grasp of the subject. Teachers are trained to provide the right resources and motivation for students to adequately prepare for the topic under consideration.
Our school has introduced websites such as Quizalize and EDPuzzle to both teachers and students. Quizalize is a unique quiz website and EDPuzzle takes this one step further by introducing video quizzes. Teachers can customize these quizzes and assess their students in an improved digitally-equipped manner. While we are training our teachers to give their best shot in the classroom, there is a development mode for the teachers as well. One of these features is the self-assessment programme. Teachers of our various schools are provided access to a form where they can assess their own strengths and weaknesses at the end of the year, and receive feedback on it. This way, they get a better idea of their individual areas of development, and can enhance themselves. All of these activities undertaken by the school help our teachers to rise above the ordinary aspects of imparting education and provide something new. Not only are they doing a better job in the classrooms, but they are improving themselves as facilitators as well, and therein lies a vast measure of our success.
FACULTY ASSESSMENT & EVALUATION OF THEIR INNOVATIVE PROJECTS & PRODUCTIONS
We have a strategic planning process, we set required results, balance these results through the KPI (key performance indicators) scorecards and deploy action plans to ensure that the results are met. At the weekly meetings the HODs monitor their respective subject teacher’s performance and their progress on the strategic objectives using information from the teacher’s log book, hand book and the KPIs. These reviews with recommended changes are submitted to the Principal to identify potential barriers and provide necessary guidance. Needed changes are recommended to the HOD/teachers for consideration. In its meetings the Academic Board uses data from staff meetings, HOD meetings, parent teacher meetings, non-teaching faculty meetings along with their recommendations to initiate action and take decisions. This kind of feedback helps the teachers to improve their skills and gives them an edge over other teachers. It is no wonder then that our teachers are highly respected by our students and their parents, most of them fondly remembered even years after the students have left the school.
PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY TO FACULTY EMPOWERMENT
The Children’s Academy Group of Schools has had a long tradition of stellar teachers who have been instrumental in providing quality education to our students. Over the years, our faculty has shaped up to be one of the finest in the city. This is of great importance to us, because we do not want our teachers to be merely imparters of education; we want them to encourage our students to become lifelong learners in keeping with the views of our institution. That is one of the reasons why we have moved from referring to our staff as ‘teachers’ to calling them as ‘facilitators’. A facilitator does not just teach but shows the right direction to students through practice and precept, and creates in them a fortitude to assimilate an upwardly mobile learning pattern as well. Through their various methods, our facilitators influence our students not just in school but in their later lives as well. All of this requires a lot of groundwork. Our schools provide a considerable amount of training through workshops and interactive sessions to our facilitators throughout the year. Trainers from agencies within India as well as abroad visit the school to give hands-on experience to our facilitators and help them to build their teaching skills as well as personal attributes, which help them to give their best in their classrooms. While we are training our teachers to give their best shot in the classroom, there is a development mode for the teachers as well. One of these features is the self-assessment programme. Teachers of our various schools are provided access to a form where they can assess their own strengths and weaknesses at the end of the year, and receive feedback on it. This way, they get a better idea of their individual areas of development, and can enhance themselves. All of these activities undertaken by the school help our teachers to rise above the ordinary aspects of imparting education and provide something new. Not only are they doing a better job in the classrooms, but they are improving themselves as facilitators as well, and therein lies a vast measure of our success.
SHEELA MALLYA
WHAT MAKES ME A PROGRESSIVE PRINCIPAL
Being the head of the Academic Board at the Children’s Academy group of schools, I have espoused educational progressivism and attempted to spearhead many reforms in the sphere of education at our school. Right from the rejection of a teacher centred instruction, promotion of learning through “hands-on” activities that inculcate critical thinking and problem solving, technology aided learning, social outreach programs, emphasis on physical fitness,ethical and holistic development to providing a progressive learning environment, I have done it all and shall continue to endeavour on the same lines.
LEARNING BY DOING
At Children’s Academy, we have been constantly changing and evolving the school system to remain contemporary. The school applies its technological resources in a targeted manner to meet the learning needs of all students. Our curriculum designing, planning and execution exhibit optimal use of technology. Strong procedures are in place to encourage a school-wide, shared responsibility for student learning and success, and to encourage the development of a culture of continuous professional improvement (ICT training sessions included) that includes classroom-based learning, mentoring and coaching arrangements.
A high priority is given to the school-wide analysis and discussion of systematically collected data on student outcomes, including academic, attendance and behavioural outcomes. Data analyses consider overall school performance as well as the performances of students from identified priority groups; evidence of improvement/regression over time; performances in comparison with other schools and measures of growth across the years of school. But for technology, the task would have been impossible! Our young , vibrant, technology savvy staff, teeming with fresh ideas is navigating the school towards the digital age.
The basis of innovation is creativity. Creativity can be born from Samvedna (sensitivity). Our endeavour is to convert Samvedna into creativity, we emphasize that it doesn’t matter whether it is criticism or appreciation for new ideas, but at least there should be talk about ideas and design. We provide scientific kits to students , these kits aid conceptual understanding and enable them to explore, manipulate and experiment. We push them to design or modify something for solving a problem, and then scale it higher. The projects across subjects are designed to bring out the ‘creative” abilities of the students.
INTEGRATED CURRICULUM
For us, teaching is not an individual but a joint effort. Every teacher of a subject collaborates with other teachers of the same subject and also with the teachers of other subjects. In line with the visions of their Head of Department(HOD), they come up with improvised methods that can help teachers bring out the best in their students. In their day-to-day teaching, classroom teachers place a high priority on identifying and addressing the learning needs of individual students. Teachers closely monitor the progress of individuals, identify learning difficulties and tailor classroom activities to levels of readiness and need.
At Children’s Academy, we ensure that every student is engaged, challenged and learning successfully. We feel that learning may be improved, by viewing it as a process of conceptual change. Students often enter an instructional setting with tenacious misconceptions —probably resulting from previous reading (easy accessibility of information) and other experiences. Students may then distort new information to fit their existing incorrect knowledge frameworks. We therefore focus on explicit, reflective instruction (which provides students with opportunities to assess their previous conceptions). The school has a coherent, sequential plan for curriculum delivery that ensures consistent teaching and learning expectations and a clear reference for monitoring learning across the year .
INTEGRATION OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP INTO EDUCATION THROUGH FACULTY
Entrepreneurship education is the need of the hour, it provides students with skills related to making jobs, rather than training to take existing jobs; and a related need for economic growth through job creation. We have identified faculty who are equipped with culinary skills, baking skills, tattooing, mehandi, bag making, and a whole lot of other special skills they train students in these special skills in our “entrepreneurship education“ classes. At the end of the year, we have a carnival of sorts where we have an exhibition cum sale of the articles made, the students set up stalls for sale of various delicacies made by them, sell their paintings, apply mehendi, make tattoos, all for a price. The proceeds are then donated to an NGO for children after deducting the expenses incurred by the students.
To provide students with entrepreneurial skills, our efforts focus on the following three elements: an “initiator” (usually a faculty member) able to identify market opportunities and lead others; a development team (students) recruited by the initiator to assist with human resources, finance, marketing, selling, development, and quality management; and a constituent group of community members (parents) with a stake in the growth of the venture.
PROBLEM SOLVING & CRITICAL THINKING AMIDST THE FACULTY
Developing the disposition towards critical thinking and problem solving in students remains the most important part of the objective of education. Here, the students’ learning context is a major contributing factor. For example, teaching and learning process in the classroom which emphasize on rote learning and too focused on the content cause students to memorize the knowledge learned, rather than to analyze and synthesize the exact meaning of the knowledge. Since they do not have deep understanding regarding the knowledge learned, it leads to reduced ability to think critically as well as to solve complicated problems.
With the advancements in technology, students can get access to all the information through internet, which then causes negative effect as they simply adopt the information without analyzing, interpreting and thinking critically. Our faculty is hence trained to develop these skills in the children, our lesson plans are designed in such a way as to trigger the children to think, the projects assigned to the students are also meant to reflect their critical thinking skills, for instance recently we assigned the task of designing a school bag that is most convenient to carry to our grade 9 students.
GROUP WORK AND DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL SKILLS AMIDST THE FACULTY
Over thirty years of experience in this profession has given me enough insight about my faculty, I have noticed that they can be broadly classified as collaborating, competing, avoiding, compromising, and accommodating. I try and organize teams with a fair composition of each of the above, these teams are assigned various tasks which range from lesson planning to designing projects and assessments and also group action research projects. In order to teach students to work effectively in groups, teachers should first themselves be able to work in groups and resolve conflicts. This alone will help them become more critical thinkers with deeper understanding about the content. It will also foster positive interpersonal relationships, help them feel more fulfilled and achieve more. Performance reviews often indicate the key areas that need to be addressed and such faculty are provided with the desired training – on conflict resolution, interpersonal relations, anger management and the like.
UNDERSTANDING & ACTION BASED LEARNING
I have been seriously looking at getting rid of grades and marks, and devising an assessment system that would test genuine abilities and learning capabilities in a child. I am encouraging student learning through portfolios and creative performance tasks. Again, the objective is to use real-life approaches to assessment. An authentic performance assessment requires students to apply what they know, not merely to recall or recognize information.
A portfolio is more than a folder stuffed with student papers, video tapes, progress reports, or related materials. It is a purposeful collection of student work that tells the story of a student’s efforts, progress, or achievement in a given area over a period of time. Designing a performance task requires the students to demonstrate certain skills and knowledge. These performance tasks have been great hits and are motivating students. They find the tasks challenging, yet achievable and are able to complete them successfully. They are taking up the tasks with gusto as opposed to the mundane questions and answers in a typical test and their achievement levels have shot up! Some samples are on http://madhavnsolanki.wixsite.com/childrensacademy/ a website created and managed by my student of 9th grade.
COLLABORATIVE & COOPERATIVE LEARNING PROJECTS FOR FACULTY DEVELOPMENT
Apart from working collaboratively on lesson plans , projects, assessments , co-curricular activities, our faculty has enrolled for the UGC funded Major research project titled ‘Promoting Action Research for Continuing Professional Development among In-service Teachers through the Mentorship Model’ undertaken by Smt. Kapila Khandvala College of Education, Mumbai. Herein they collaborate to work on action research projects. For instance a group of teachers conducted a study to check if brain gym exercises are the conduit that students needed to acquire new knowledge, develop new concepts, and express strong understanding. Through the integration of these exercises in their day to day lectures they hoped to tap the enthusiasm of the students towards learning science and make them active participants in their own instruction.
EDUCATION ACCENTUATING SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND SAFEGUARDING DEMOCRACY
At Children’s Academy, we value relationships and sincerely opine that shared leadership binds people in a purposeful learning environment. Our model of shared leadership is based on the identification of a shared purpose, clear mutual goals, a 360 degree influence and time to engage in dialogue and relationship building. Our leadership framework involves a shift of responsibility from a single leader to a distributed leadership, it evokes a higher degree of collaboration—one of the necessary components for dealing with complexity.
We have been able to solve challenging problems, improve decision-making, enable adaptability and nimbleness, and improve performance, simply because we do not hesitate to express dissent and firmly state our opinions. Our common currency is dialogue. We function under the aegis of the Academic Board (AB) and the Non Academic Board (NAB). The AB is chaired by the Chief Academic Coordinator and includes the Principal, the primary Head, the subject Heads (HODs). The NAB is chaired by the Chief Coordinator and includes the Chief Operating Officer, the Chief Financing Officer, the Branding and Communication manager, Employee Engagement Manager, Manager External Events. Every single process in the school is managed by a process owner who works as per the guidelines of the standard operating procedures (SOP)and the performance management system (PMS) tracks the effectiveness of the process owners and their team members. There is micro planning of the roles and responsibilities of the Heads .
DESIGN & DELIVERY OF A LEARNING ECOSYSTEM WHEREBY HIGHLY PERSONALIZED LEARNING ACCOUNTING IS DONE FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL’S PERSONAL GOALS
As a school, when we think about achieving SUCCESS, we have to think about setting and achieving GOALS. Goals allow us to gauge success. Also, we cannot achieve success without working towards something that is measurable, memorable and attainable. At the end of every academic year, during performance appraisals, we begin setting goals for the next year. These are based on our roles and responsibilities, strengths and weaknesses and are aligned with the vision and mission of the school and help us to focus on the final destination.
The staff is oriented in goal setting sessions and together we set goals that are PRESENT, POSITIVE, and PERSONAL, all the required skills become the needed actions to support the goal that we have initially set for our self. There are measurement indicators in place for each goal and a group of ten to twelve staff members have one mentor assigned. Goal setting and goal achieving are the keys to all our accomplishments.
INTEGRATION OF COMMUNITY SERVICE AND SERVICE LEARNING PROJECTS INTO THE DAILY CURRICULUM
Value education and SUPW in our school focuses on the five main virtues that we have identified – Humility, Patience, Loyalty, Empathy and the most important Benevolence. It is the desire to help others, do charitable deeds or an act of kindness. This should be inculcated in all kids as the nicest feeling in this world is to do a good deed anonymously and have somebody find out. We have evolved the persistence model in our school where the kids are involved year on year with making packets from waste newspapers for local vegetable vendors, quilts from waste cloth to be donated during winters to the roadside beggars, providing life skills to students of less privileged schools, spending time with the aged in old age homes etc. This is a grade specific activity and teaching kids to help the less fortunate, automatically inculcates the virtue of benevolence over a period of time. They realize that helping others is not just charity or a good deed but it also provides immense satisfaction.
FUTURISTIC SELECTION OF SUBJECT CONTENT
The Children’s Academy Group of Schools has always welcomed new developments in the field of education with great enthusiasm. Through the decades, we have endeavoured to provide a progressive learning environment coupled with holistic development of our students. Our efforts aren’t to just guide the students through their academic curriculum, but to make them future-ready, capable of facing all challenges that life can throw at them.
Today’s education needs to be comprehensive. Times are changing rapidly, and it is quite possible that the knowledge the children gain in their schooling years might be outdated by the time they step into their professional lives. At Children’s Academy, we understand this problem. Hence, we are committed to create lifelong learners who would not just excel in their years of schooling lives, but also for the rest of their lives. We work towards the creation of champions who will be able to welcome and adapt to whatever advancement the future brings in. That is why we do not focus on just the knowledge. Knowledge gets obsolete with time. New forms of knowledge gain hold over society. We do not want our students to be caught unawares when this happens.
That is the reason our focus has always been on creating skills in our students rather than just what’s in their textbooks. When we talk of skills, we talk of a broad spectrum of abilities that can equip our children to be lifelong pursuers of learning. There are various forms in which these fundamental forms of training are imparted in our schools. The skills we have identified for future-preparedness are leadership, digital literacy, communication, emotional intelligence, entrepreneurship, global citizenship, problem-solving, and team-working. Our activities are geared to create these skills in our students at an early age itself.
LIFELONG LEARNING AND SOCIAL SKILLS OF FACULTY MEMBERS
Technology is the order of the day , our endeavour has always been to keep our staff abreast with the latest in this field. Most of them are ‘immigrants” to technology but they have been constantly learning . We have made conscious efforts to reduce the burden of manual work on our facilitators so that they can focus on the core teaching aspects. Our faculty no longer has to make hard copies of lesson plans, they have e-plans that can be accessed on their laptops or androids from anywhere, these plans enable word Processor-like editing, teachers can attach files to their plans, share the plans with their colleagues and also fill in their daily log of work online. We are putting systems in place so that some of the student tests can be assessed through software as well.
This year we have joined hands with a company that has developed a digital learning platform that integrates and simplifies the complete assessment lifecycle – from question paper design (Q), evaluation (E), analysis & reporting(R) and remediation(R). The Software is designed to engage each stakeholder namely, School Management, Teachers, Parents, Children, over actionable performance improvement in children.
Teachers are now working on Flipped Classrooms, a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions, thus assessing students on their grasp of the subject. Teachers are trained to provide the right resources and motivation for students to adequately prepare for the topic under consideration.
Our school has introduced websites such as Quizalize and EDPuzzle to both teachers and students. Quizalize is a unique quiz website and EDPuzzle takes this one step further by introducing video quizzes. Teachers can customize these quizzes and assess their students in an improved digitally-equipped manner. While we are training our teachers to give their best shot in the classroom, there is a development mode for the teachers as well. One of these features is the self-assessment programme. Teachers of our various schools are provided access to a form where they can assess their own strengths and weaknesses at the end of the year, and receive feedback on it. This way, they get a better idea of their individual areas of development, and can enhance themselves. All of these activities undertaken by the school help our teachers to rise above the ordinary aspects of imparting education and provide something new. Not only are they doing a better job in the classrooms, but they are improving themselves as facilitators as well, and therein lies a vast measure of our success.
FACULTY ASSESSMENT & EVALUATION OF THEIR INNOVATIVE PROJECTS & PRODUCTIONS
We have a strategic planning process, we set required results, balance these results through the KPI (key performance indicators) scorecards and deploy action plans to ensure that the results are met. At the weekly meetings the HODs monitor their respective subject teacher’s performance and their progress on the strategic objectives using information from the teacher’s log book, hand book and the KPIs. These reviews with recommended changes are submitted to the Principal to identify potential barriers and provide necessary guidance. Needed changes are recommended to the HOD/teachers for consideration. In its meetings the Academic Board uses data from staff meetings, HOD meetings, parent teacher meetings, non-teaching faculty meetings along with their recommendations to initiate action and take decisions. This kind of feedback helps the teachers to improve their skills and gives them an edge over other teachers. It is no wonder then that our teachers are highly respected by our students and their parents, most of them fondly remembered even years after the students have left the school.
PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY TO FACULTY EMPOWERMENT
The Children’s Academy Group of Schools has had a long tradition of stellar teachers who have been instrumental in providing quality education to our students. Over the years, our faculty has shaped up to be one of the finest in the city. This is of great importance to us, because we do not want our teachers to be merely imparters of education; we want them to encourage our students to become lifelong learners in keeping with the views of our institution. That is one of the reasons why we have moved from referring to our staff as ‘teachers’ to calling them as ‘facilitators’. A facilitator does not just teach but shows the right direction to students through practice and precept, and creates in them a fortitude to assimilate an upwardly mobile learning pattern as well. Through their various methods, our facilitators influence our students not just in school but in their later lives as well. All of this requires a lot of groundwork. Our schools provide a considerable amount of training through workshops and interactive sessions to our facilitators throughout the year. Trainers from agencies within India as well as abroad visit the school to give hands-on experience to our facilitators and help them to build their teaching skills as well as personal attributes, which help them to give their best in their classrooms. While we are training our teachers to give their best shot in the classroom, there is a development mode for the teachers as well. One of these features is the self-assessment programme. Teachers of our various schools are provided access to a form where they can assess their own strengths and weaknesses at the end of the year, and receive feedback on it. This way, they get a better idea of their individual areas of development, and can enhance themselves. All of these activities undertaken by the school help our teachers to rise above the ordinary aspects of imparting education and provide something new. Not only are they doing a better job in the classrooms, but they are improving themselves as facilitators as well, and therein lies a vast measure of our success.