Teacher Readiness for Holistic Education - Co-scholastic learning

TEACHER READINESS FOR HOLISTIC EDUCATION

Saumil Majmudar
CEO and Co-Founder, EduSports B.Tech-IIT Bombay (1993) PGDM- IIM Bangalore (1995)
saumil@edusports.in

CHANGING ROLE OF TEACHERS IN SCHOOLS
With education boards and parents stressing the need to educate children holistically and integrate the co-scholastic areas into the curriculum and make them inclusive, schools have started partnering with service providers (e.g. EduSports for sports/PE, School Cinema for life skills etc.) to tap into their expertise in the different co-scholastic areas. In addition to facilitating learning inside the classroom, teachers have been drafted into new roles that require managing these programmes and ensuring their successful implementation. Schools now expect teachers to work as strong individuals, who make decisions and cope with the stress of doing multiple-tasks. At the same time teachers are expected to be able to be experts in these areas, work in teams, guide colleagues and parents, liaison with different service providers to ensure the programme objectives are met and the school gets maximum value from these partnerships.
CHALLENGES FACED BY TEACHERS WITH THEIR CHANGING ROLES
The changing roles inside and outside of classrooms bring with them newer challenges for the teachers. The key challenges faced by teachers across different learning areas (scholastic & co-scholastic areas) can be broadly summarized as:
a. Staying ahead of the curve (use of new media, curriculum and assessment tools)
b. Making learning truly inclusive (catering to every child’s needs)
c. Enabling participative learning
d. Managing relationships (parents, other teachers, service providers)
e. Project management & multi-tasking
f. Programme monitoring & tracking


ENSURING TEACHER READINESS FOR HOLISTIC EDUCATION- FRAMEWORK
Finding answers to a few key questions before implementing any programme takes the help of teachers is the best way to ensure the programme objectives are met. The key questions are:
1. What will motivate the teachers to implement the programme in your school?
2. How usable are the tools provided to the teachers? What exactly is expected of the teachers over the course of the engagement?
3. How will the system of execution/feedback sustain itself over the long run?
4. How will the interventions be effective, yet at the same time, cause minimal disruption to the existing systems in the school? How frequent are the interventions?
5. How will different stakeholders be connected effectively?
The framework below could serve as guidance for school leaders to enable teachers with the right programme/tools/processes to go beyond their role as instructors and successfully run different programmes in the school in partnership with other teachers or external service providers.




ENSURING TEACHER READINESS FOR SPORTS/PE- THE EDUSPORTS WAY
The framework presented in the previous section is based on EduSports’ learnings of enabling over 4000 teachers across 160+ schools to run/support/monitor an inclusive and structured PE programme. The programme with the vision of ‘Developing a Healthier School’ has been fairly successful in improving the health of all the stakeholders and creating champions out of children.

The learnings from the tools/processes used to enable the teachers in these EduSports partner schools are replicable across other co-scholastic areas of learning and perfect fit into school contexts that require teachers to play the role of facilitators/internal champions for a programme provided by an external service provider.

ENSURING TEACHER READINESS FOR SPORTS/PE- KEY LEARNINGS
In this journey of enabling over 4000 teachers across 160+ schools to run/support/manage a structured sports/PE programme in their schools, EduSports has had the opportunity of learning with the schools on ways to continuously improve the programme effectiveness and in this context, ways to enable teachers better. In this section, we share some of the key learnings.
1. Mapping on to systems/processes that the teachers are comfortable with is critical to ensure seamless adoption of the programme
2. Inclusion- The key to ensure the programme gets the right importance/support
3. It is important to get the configuration right for each & every school
4. The tools used have to be intuitive and must directly link to programme objectives to work
5. Well begun in not half done
6. One time interventions are not sufficient

FEEDBACK AND RESULTS
Over the last 2 years, EduSports has been successful in enabling over 4000 teachers across 160+ schools with the tools and processes needed to ensure an inclusive and structured PE programme is executed. The fact that schools have seen a significant improvement in skill & fitness levels as well as enthusiasm levels of children towards sports & physical activity over the last 2 years is a testimony of the fact that the programme and more specifically the tools used to run the programme have been effective. The reactions from a teacher at the Zee School, South Bangalore perfectly sums up the story- “The teacher associated with Edu Sports makes us own lesson plans and he teaches us how to execute them and even tries to integrate values such as applauding when a core participant wins, saying a thank you, apologizing, all these concepts which are very difficult to be brought into a small child as young as a child in first standard in the classroom is very easily taught to them in the form of an hour of EduSports”.