Very often we find the ASER tool is extremely useful [in explaining that]. Parents when told for the first time say: “Acchā, mere bacche ko yeh ānā chāhiye? Mujhe patā hi nahi thā. Mujhe lagā thā ki us kitāb mein jo-jo cheezein hai vo sāri usko āni chāhiye (So this is what my child needs to know? I didn’t know. I assumed he must know all that there is in the textbook).” Then you tell them: “Kitāb mein yahi hai (This is exactly what is in the textbook).” This process of explaining to and taking along parents is important.
Schools, governments, parents are all thinking in terms of grade. What is a grade? It is a way to organise our schools into age groups. But if children in the same grade are distributed across age groups, then you have to do something to help them to get to the same learning level quickly. The method that we use in Pratham--even in a state like UP, where the baseline is very low--is to teach [children who are behind what their grade expects of them] separately about a couple of hours a day for 40-50 days. It’s a very doable task. Teaching algebra to Grade VIII may be difficult but teaching everybody to get up to a basic level is not tough. Just because you have been left behind does not mean you can’t catch up. But you cannot make kids catch up in the way it’s routinely done. You have to do something slightly different.
In ‘teaching at the right level’, we take, let’s say, [children in the] third, fourth, fifth [grades]. And instead of organising them by grades, we organise them by learning levels [that is, whether they are proficient at reading alphabets, words or sentences in ASER tests]. Those who are at the word level are put together and so on. The results--which J-PAL has evaluated--show that substantial and significant change happens in a very short period of time.
But it means that you have to: one, accept that there’s a problem, and two, be willing to move away from your usual age-grade organisation of schools to, at least for a part of the school day, grouping children by learning level. Which the children take to very naturally because that’s how they play.
To me the best ideas are always commonsense ideas. When your older brother teaches you, he doesn’t care about your grade-level curriculum. He starts from wherever you are stuck.
India has spent billions on teachers and their training, yet learning outcomes are worsening, we reported on May 19, 2015. Is India investing in the right kind of teacher training? Is the rising contractualisation of teachers the right way to go?
We’ve worked with teachers in many states. Let me say [in their defence] that our teachers are like us. Are we a highly skilled country? We are not. Are we terrible? No.
What I just described as ‘teaching at the right level’ is to start with a student at whatever level s/he is at, and use a combination of activities to get her/him to the next level. I find that teachers across the board--whether para teachers [those hired on contract] or permanent teachers--are able to do that if they are freed up to do that. Freed up from the pressures of the grade-level curriculum. If teachers are [only] expected to finish a textbook by the end of the year, then that is what they will do. But wherever we are working with the government, such as in Karnataka and Himachal, and the goal is to bring third, fourth, fifth standard kids up to the basic level and the school allocates two hours a day for that, we find teachers do it quite well.
To Be Continue - part-5
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