Prasanna

On way to making Karnataka a DigiState!

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 18:47:00 +0000

I have never been more excited about the potential impact of a program than our latest one called Grama Digi Vikasana. It is based on a simple idea that access to Digital Devices and the Internet can be made available to everyone in the country quickly if we deploy them as a community shared resource.

A few months ago, during the 2nd wave of the pandemic we all saw how lack of access to digital devices and internet was cutting off millions of students from learning, especially in rural areas. Organizations and Individuals started efforts to buy devices to individual students. At the same time we were working with Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Department (RDPR) on enhancing rural libraries and at that point it occurred to us that why not setup digital devices along with internet access inside these gram panchayat libraries so that everyone in the community can get access to digital information.

On August 15^th, we launched a small pilot in 8 grama panchayat libraries and set up internet connections and also provided various digital devices like android mobiles, tablets, android tv, etc. to understand the best use case for these devices. We were pleasantly surprised at how quickly these devices were embraced by the students and youth in these villages. We also realized that in addition to providing access to the devices these rural youth needed basic digital literacy training to ensure they have a safe and productive digital experience.

As we were looking at scaling this up, Dell Technologies who have been our partner for over a decade in school programs, saw this as a program which aligns with their Global Digital Inclusion project. With their help we were able to quickly digitize over 400 libraries across Karnataka fully equipped with 4 android mobiles, an android TV and one-year prepaid broadband connection. Just a few months after the launch we are already seeing a significant impact through our monitoring system and our field staff have been reporting some amazing stories.

A couple of weeks back a few of us in Sikshana decided to visit a few GPs at random as we started driving from Bangalore to Sirsi. We got to see the extremes where some GPs were below average and some beyond our expectation. The video attached to this write-up captures the feedback from the librarian at Heggere GP in Tumkur district. The team felt that this is how a model library should be and the challenge for us now will be to set up systems in place to ensure that every library we work with operates like Heggere or even better.

We are pretty excited to start the 2022-23 year with support from Dell Technologies which will help us cover a total of 1000 GP libraries. This program is not just about setting up devices, we will be running a digital life skill certification course with stipend for 1000 volunteers (GP Hitaishis) on our digital literacy modules. During the 10month training they will spend their weekends at GP libraries helping people with devices, running digital literacy sessions, etc. All devices will be set up with content access control and will be monitored using custom apps developed by us.

Our target is to create a Management Process which the government can easily adopt and scale the Grama Digi Vikasana program to all the 6000 Grama Panchayats in Karnataka. As a society, our past iterations with Educational Literacy ended up creating a big divide in the society and we hope that when it comes to Digital Literacy we will do a much better job. Grama Digi Vikasana has the potential to create millions of digitally literate folks in rural Karnataka and when this happens, we can truly call Karnataka a DigiState!!

The Fine Line!

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 18:27:00 +0000

The question that is keeping me up tonight - Am I working “with” or “for” the Government?

Today I had an interesting conversation with a well-wisher of Sikshana who wondered if we have started to work for the government! Now this is a question I asked myself first back in 2007 just a couple of months into running Sikshana when a small event of Sikshana appeared to me like a political rally of the local MLA!. Since then over the years this question has come to my mind several times triggered normally by an external event and sometimes in discussions within the Sikshana team. And most of the time the clarity of our role has been clear. But today it just felt different. Ever since the pandemic started I have been, in addition to running Sikshana, spending my personal time mainly in software development, to help the Govt. in its effort to manage the pandemic. I know that many in the system have assumed that I am a paid consultant working for the Govt. But I continue to put in the effort along with a few other like minded folks, knowing fully well that the system and the people in it will get the credit, only because of the larger benefit to the community.

But when it comes to running Sikshana programs, I feel that we have stayed true to our mission statement of “working with the Government”. Initially we used to prototype ideas in a small pilots with funding from donors and then after a few years have taken the program to scale, with the Government taking over both the funding and execution of the programs. But this approach takes years and of late I have started to pilot ideas with the government itself!. The obvious benefit here is that the Govt. will quickly see that their own system is able to create an impact and this will help in scaling much faster. The downside is that we risk appearing as being part of the Govt.

And now as we have started creating cross departmental programs, we are seeing the challenges in bringing together various Govt. departments to work towards a common goal. The Govt. policies itself don't make it easy even if it is a social program, to help the under served. One way I see to resolve this, is for us to piggyback on an existing Govt. program which is already pulling in multiple departments into the project with a common objective. But in doing so, here we will be actually carrying out the objective of the Govt. program with our resources with potentially the credits going to the Govt. and more so to the people in power at the moment. Now for me the question is no longer easy to answer. I think we will have to spend more time evaluating the engagement on a case by case basis but try not to cross the fine line!

But I am clear about one thing, there are far too many people who need help and only the system can help them, and we need to find a way to make the system deliver!

What next when the planet starts again?

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 18:01:00 +0000

This morning as I brought the veggies from hopcoms into the house with the last night news of a pizza delivery guy testing +ve in Delhi fresh in my mind, I just could not dump the veggies in the refrigerator. I made sure I washed all the veggies with hot water, then dried and finally stacked in the refrigerator. I started to wonder will this be the new normal now? Like this there are so many other things like wearing a mask, washing hands frequently throughout the day, etc which I feel we will be following for the next several months and some maybe forever.

Having seen the power of the little children in taking back good hygiene practices from school to homes (see YoungChangeMakers ) , I am sensing a great opportunity to not just control the covid-19 spread in the coming months but also control diseases like Malaria, Tuberculosis (which kills over 0.4 million people in India annually) etc,. I can’t help but wonder, what if we spend a year in schools with a program which extends our WASH program which is under our Project Based Learning module and cover things like sources of water, the importance of forests, effect of global warming and link them to how each one of us on the planet have a role to play? We could link this to positive behaviors which leads to healthy living in an environmentally sustainable way. We plan to introduce small activities for children which results in a behavioral change in the children first and then through them reach their families and communities. We have started talking with WWF (World Wildlife Fund) and Mudskipper Labs (the team behind the highly successful Wild Karnataka) to collaborate with us and help us create specific modules as we shape up this program. If you feel like contributing to this project please feel free to email us at info at sikshana dot org.

The young Changemakers

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 15:44:00 +0000

A few times in the last 13 years of working in Sikshana, I have had moments of exhilaration, but nothing can match what I am experiencing now due to the sheer magnitude and kind of impact our program is creating. Under our Project Based Learning program, students in class 4 thru 7 work on a project in groups of five. WASH (Water, Sanitation, Hygiene) is one such project, under which the students research importance of hygiene, proper technique of hand washing etc. At the end of the project, they create a chart or a slide presentation and share the same with their families and communities. Just the possibility of 90,000 little change makers influencing their families and communities as the entire planet is trying the tame the pandemic is why I am so excited!. If you are curious please watch the 93 sec video below !

When the Planet stops!

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 17:42:00 +0000

In these unusual times, we in Sikshana are doing our best to keep up the momentum which has gotten us this far. Our first focus is of course that we act as responsible citizens and do our part in fighting the spread of the virus. We have ensured that all employees across the six states are in their home / hometown by declaring work from home as early as March 15^th. Thanks to our donors who made it possible for us to acquire laptops and internet dongle as part of the grant thereby allowing most of our staff to work from home.

Next, thanks to our accounts team, by planning early we have ensured all our staff have received their salaries on 27th itself and we have also ensured that all our vendors have also been paid and we closed the books for financial year on the dot today the 31^st.

Now coming to how we are getting affected by the lockdown, first even though we managed to do end line assessment / survey in most of our project areas, we got hit in a couple of areas where we are collecting child level data, like in Chitradurga / Davanagere where the CLAP data for end of year from the 1430 schools could not be captured and nearly half of the 1800 schools the tribal areas of Paderu, AP will miss our end line assessment. Based on when the schools reopen, we will try to cover the gaps as much as possible.

85% of our team, work as mentors staying in small towns and visiting the schools in the villages daily and interacting with children, teachers and the community. With the schools closing almost a month prior to the normal academic year, there is an impact and the uncertainties during summer break means that the normal summer camp they used to run in selected schools may not happen. In addition to the school visits they are expected to do data entry, identify success stories among their schools, write monthly/annual reports, etc. So currently they are all engaged in those activities and in addition, the field managers have identified specific talent of some of the mentors and have given them product development related work like translation, verification etc. Our training team is running online training to all our mentors for each of our products and on general soft skills development. The operations management team is working on the next year operations calendar and creating process for the dry runs for the upcoming new products. And as always we use our in-house android app MySchool, through which we continue to use to manage the tasks daily.

A training session for the field staff on Data Management

The back office in Bangalore where the rest of the team works out of, have always had the flexibility of working from home but under the current situation where each one of us are dealing with additional responsibilities at home than normal times, we are realistically looking at 60-70% productivity. Since most are developing various products used in Sikshana they are mostly working on estimated timelines for the deliverables. As of now we are on track to have all the products required for the upcoming academic year on time. The only downer is that the possibility of not having summer camps will hit us as we will not be able to test out the prototypes before the schools reopen.

In addition, we are offering the services of some of our team members for helping other NGO’s or Government agencies in managing the crisis. We hope you and yours are all staying healthy and hoping for normalcy soon so that we can all start working with our kids again.

What will children do when they run out of learning inputs?

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 18:26:00 +0000

During my last 13 years in Sikshana, across hundreds of school visits one thing that has been a constant is that Children always surprise me by going beyond what is expected of them. Today I had a chance to visit Veerasandra government school in Anekal taluk where children were sharing their project reports which they had prepared as part of Sikshana's Project Based Learning intervention (PBL).

As part of PBL children receive a catalog with list of curriculum aligned projects with a social context that they may choose to work on, along with Project planner for each group which we provide with space for 2 projects every semester. It also houses two charts on the inside of the front and back covers for them to use for their final presentation. A few pictures of the planners are shown below.

Project planner provided by Sikshana Foundation

Now in this school the kids had finished projects and had used up the all the pages in the provided project planner. But with still 3 months to go before the academic year ends, they were keen on taking on more projects, so what did they do? Well they decided to create their own planners which are more colorful, same template to ensure that they followed all the recommended steps to complete a project, group details, task delegation table etc.

When 2 projects are expected these kids in 7th class had gone up to 6 projects already and are planning to do more in the next few weeks!

Sample pages from planners which the kids have created

And once they finish all the projects in the project catalog what next? Well this time we are ready for them :) we have suggested that they define their own project preferably something that relates to their school and then go about implementing the same. We will be conducting a survey end of year to see how many of such projects have been executed across the nearly 2000 schools where PBL program is running!!.

The source of Motivation

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Wed, 25 Dec 2019 18:27:00 +0000

In Sikshana, every product that we develop has one common element that we overly obsess about and that is "Motivation". Our first program itself being called "Prerana" is designed to motivate the entire school ecosystem. All the four main components of Prerana has motivation at it core. Our next version called Prerana 2.0 has two components Project Based Learning and Customized Learning Achievement Path (CLAP) both of which are again created with motivation as a starter. Our technology intervention called STEP (Sikshana Technology in Education Programs) is more focused on motivating children and teachers than being about technology or content. And then finally we have the SGEP (Sikshana Girl Empowerment Program) which is also designed to motivate and support girls to go and achieve their dreams.

Now if you have noticed, motivation angle start with the program name itself like in Prerana, Step, Clap etc. The next commonality one can find in each of these is that at a minimum it will ensure that every child who experiences the product will feel motivated. In each of these programs it is not always about finishing or scoring the highest etc, but the effort the child puts in is the only thing that gets highlighted. Even our monitoring software reflect the good work happening in each and every school on a single dashboard rather than reflecting what is not done.

Starting next academic year we are planning to enter the field of ITIs and Polytechnics and our first need analysis points to many gaps formed due to lack of motivation!. So our products to improve the quality of these vocational training institutes will again likely center around motivation!.

So if you are wondering if there is a reason why the org looks everything through the eye of motivation... yes there is a source and it is our founder Shri E.S. Ramamurthy popularly known as ESR. Very early in the formation of Sikshana he realized the lack of motivation in the government school ecosystem as one of the key reasons behind the less than desirable quality. He started a few interventions which even though had an expectation of improving the learning outcomes, on the input side focused more on motivation and empowerment. I was fortunate to see this up-close as a donor since 2005 and by 2007 I got motivated enough to move back from US and start scaling the program. He moved out of the organization in 2014 for personal reasons, but those of us who got an opportunity to work with him until then were lucky to understand the power of motivation and some of us who are still in the org, continue to carry the message forward. Since 2014 the org has quadrupled and has more programs and more than 90% of the current staff have joined after 2014 but still each one of the team member understands the importance of motivation.

And if you ask me the motivation for this blog today... well it is ESR's Birthday today and on behalf of over 3million children, thousands of teachers, education departments of multiple states and the entire staff of Sikshana I wish ESR a Happy Birthday and a wonderful year ahead !!

CLAP

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Sun, 22 Dec 2019 18:28:00 +0000

Today Dec 22nd is the National Mathematics Day here in India to mark the birthday of the Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. While Sikshana for the first decade focused mainly on motivational inputs to enhance learning outcomes, has since 2015 started work in developing practice booklets to cover foundational math. With Cisco coming on board in 2018 to fund our Prerana 2.0, we started developing CLAP (Customized Learning Achievement Path) modules in foundational math. Basically this is a less granular version of a personalized learning system, where a group of students with similar gaps receive specific modules for them to practice and master the competency.

Prerana 2.0 was piloted in Chitradurga and Davanagere districts from October 2018, covering 1430 schools with over a lakh students. Of these based on the baseline assessment done in November 25,950 students across class 4 thru 7 identified as having gaps in foundational math concepts in number-line, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division were given specific modules to address the gaps in their learning. By the end of 5months, 8,465 students had shown acquisition of these competencies and while the rest of them moved from one competency on to the next one as per their customized learning path. The graph shows the number of students identified as having gaps in baseline and endline assessment also shows the movement of students from one competency to the next.

We are using a combination of tech/app based assessment and logistics solution along with paper based modules for children to practice. This hybrid approach has shown lot of promise and currently we are tweaking this model to enable us to scale this further to reach more children. We are also adding more foundational competencies this year and also addressing higher order learning requirement for a few children in the classroom. Stay tuned for updates on this new program from Sikshana which we are very excited about as it is enabling us to reach that last child who needs help.

“Sikshana Foundation has introduced Prerana 2.0 in our school which is very helpful as learning supplements to students in math. We are able to see the progressive transition in student’s learning levels because of this program. Remedial students are identified and grouped with peer students for helping them to learn and are given right workbooks, no one has done this before and we are very happy that Sikshana has thought of the same and is implementing it.”

Mr. Ranganath, HM, GHPS Sakkara, Hiriyur Block, Chitradurga

Imagine

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Sun, 24 Nov 2019 11:54:00 +0000

Last night got a call from a dear friend and mentor of Sikshana and soon we got into discussing current issues we are facing, one of which has been that recently inside and outside Sikshana, there has been some confusion about ownership on ideas, credit for impact etc. Since day one we have operated in a fully transparent mode where we are sharing our ideas, products, work, process, impact etc without worrying about someone claiming our product/program as their own. We did briefly touch upon the idea of introducing at least a limited copyright in the context of an internal email where I had reiterated that personally I feel very strongly that we should not get into protective mode even if it threatens our existence itself.

I got this call when I was in the middle of practicing for my new hobby drumming, for the song “Imagine” by John Lennon. After the call when I went back to the practice, I couldn't help but start thinking if only we can start helping without any expectation how would that be… Imagine.. and my thoughts flowed to the tune of the song as below which I recorded today. Also, since 2007 when ever people asked me why I joined Sikshana my answer has always been “to shut it down!!”, meaning we have focused on creating solutions which should make us irrelevant. So thought of weaving in that idea into the song. With due apologies to John Lennon, 😊 here goes…

Imagine there's no copyright
No trademarks too
No patents on ideas
That can help every child

Imagine all the NGOs, not owning anything ... Ah h

Imagine creating for impact
You ideate for scale
Credit when you execute
Till then it is just a view

Imagine all the NGOs, sharing everything … wooo hooo

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And we all just help as one

Imagine no NGOs
I wonder if you can
Build solutions to problems
That just shuts you down

Imagine all the NGOs, turning obsolete ... wooo hooo

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And we all just help as one

Who really owns Sikshana?

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Sun, 03 Nov 2019 18:15:00 +0000

About 30min into my Sunday run earlier this morning, I started hearing a small conversation…

Brain: Hey you two (legs), do you mind picking up the pace?

Legs: Sorry can't do, we are already maxed out.

Brain: What do you mean maxed out, we have covered just 5km so far.

Legs: Yep we know, but like we said, we are kind of maxed out.

Brain: Ughh what’s matter with you two (heart & lungs) now?

Heart & Lungs: Sorry, there was a sudden surge in demand for oxygen and we had to step up without your permission.

Brain (thinking out loud): What’s going on here. My data shows that this same body did a 50k a few months ago with no issues and now suddenly all this puffing, panting, sweating doesn’t make sense. I am sure the lazybone is controlling the strings…. time for me to take charge.

Brain: Ok legs I don’t care how you are feeling I just want you to step up.

Legs: Sorry dude it ain't happening

Brain: This is an order and as your owner I expect compliance

Legs: Dude listen, hate to break this to you…yes, you kind of own the entire body but you really don’t own anything now.

Brain: Sorry come again

Legs: Look after we did the big 50k and you got all the glory what exactly have you done for us eh? Did you check our protein levels, worry about our muscle loss, take us to a gym or even a short run? Nope you were lost in your own world. Remember how you used to check with us every day for almost a year before the big run making sure we got stretched, fed properly etc., ah the good old days. We really liked working with you and listening to your ideas back then….

Well the conversation continued as I managed to finish a 12k after five months of no running or much physical activity due to a family medical emergency. But my mind quickly started drawing parallels with our work in Sikshana.

In Sikshana, I have tried to maintain a team philosophy where “anybody can own anything, but nobody owns it until they commit and then go on to deliver”. While we do have a hierarchical org structure on paper, we are doing our best to stay flat and allow people to move across. We are blessed to have in the team, highly qualified and talented folks with various skill sets and each one is encouraged to identify the area where he/she feel can bring the best value to the org. But they need to come up with a plan for the same, take ownership and execute the project to completion. In addition to this, folks are encouraged to collaborate freely across product lines and help each other to ensure we meet our deliverables. Even the ownership that is initially allocated may be temporary and depending on the situation there may be a change in the owner or in some cases even multiple owners may be required.

This philosophy is not just limited to the products but extends to all aspects of the organization including the operations team. I keep reminding our field staff (called Mentors) who manage 15 to 20 schools each, that as far as the org is concerned, they are the CEO for those schools, and they need to take total ownership of those schools. Their job is not just to carry out the program as defined but also go beyond and collaborate with the teachers and implement innovative and effective solutions (after informing their line manager) to ensure schools improve their learning outcomes. All these feedback from the schools bubble up into our board room and product teams. This “Collaborative Growth Mindset” approach has helped us to ensure that we are creating programs that are finding new owners in lakhs of teachers and millions of children across thousands of schools!

To sum up, Sikshana programs are owned by all our donors, partners (ngos & govt), volunteers, our trustees, board of directors, employees, education department officials, teachers and children from the schools as long as they take the responsibility and deliver on it.

For our Stars even Sky is not the limit !!

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Sat, 10 Aug 2019 21:42:00 +0000

Under our motivation program Prerana, small colorful stars are provided to teachers so that they can use the same to promote positive behavior among children inside the school. There are 3 different colored stars with Silver for academic, pink for sports and arts and the green for hygiene and environment. With these the teachers are able to motivate children to participate in schooling with a positive attitude. In Patta Somanahalli Govt. School (see video below) the teachers took the stars beyond the school and gave a few stars to the members of the School Management Committee and to some senior students in the village and asked them to reward positive behavior among children outside the school and in the community !! The impact is amazing and we will surely encourage the rest of the 50,000 schools to take the stars to the community and motivate the entire ecosystem. Thanks to 100s of teachers like Dharmesh from whom we keep learning and improving the Prerana program for a greater impact!!

Yes even now every child means ...

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Sat, 09 Mar 2019 18:11:00 +0000

5 1/2 years ago with our program coverage having gone up from 10 thousand to 180 thousand children I used to wonder if we are still reaching every child and stories from the field assured me that we were on track and I wrote a blog post Every Child Means... Now with significant changes in our programs and with a coverage of nearly 2.8 million children I can't help but wonder if our programs are still able to impact every child.

Student TJ all excited to show his ICT skiils!

Yesterday's report from our tech head Smitha during her school visit reassured me that we are still on track! The school in focus here is the Govt. Primary School in Vaderahalli village, Ramanagara District near Bangalore where our technology program STEP is running for the last 3 years. In this program we focus on children working in groups on projects which are curriculum aligned with a goal of developing 21st century skills especially communication and collaboration.

In this school a boy named TJ who was born mute has transformed into an eager learner ever since the laptop came to his school. He is extremely good in creating graphics (both digital and non-digital) and does all the creative work in the group projects. He is the star of the group and the other team members have also learnt sign language to better communicate with him. The kids had used a highly collaborative approach to the project execution with equal opportunity provided to all the group members. These 6th and 7th graders had learnt the ICT skills from their seniors the previous year and so in return they were proud to have already trained the 5th graders for their next year projects. All the kids in this school appeared to say "21st century here we come"!!

We have designed STEP very carefully keeping in mind every child, starting with the messaging to the teachers and children, project planners, tracker sheets, recognition etc and the story from this school fills me with immense confidence that we are on track in our vision of ensuring Quality education to EVERY child in the public school system.

My "Go To Guy" Sharanu

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 09:21:00 +0000

April 2008, Sikshana was getting ready to hire a team of mentors to start the academic year program in an entire taluk for the first time and in walked Sharanappa Kattimani (Sharanu), a B.Ed., with very little work experience, from the small town of Sadem, Gulbarga hoping to earn a decent living and at the same time find a way to help the less fortunate. At that time, Sikshana had a very flat org structure with all the 8 mentors reporting directly to me (dotted line to our founder chief-mentor ESR) and worked as a team managing 127 schools in Kanakapura taluk. Very quickly he emerged as a leader in the group and started taking an active role in helping me manage the program in the taluk. Among his many positive attributes, his ability to organize, focus on the program execution, ability to think through and willingness to take up challenging tasks stood out clearly.

Baby Step: A year later when we got a chance to expand outside of Kanakapura it was a great opportunity to test out our ability to scale the Sikshana concept. Up to that point all our schools had regular visits from me, ESR and our very active board member Subbu. So, I wanted to try to expand out in a new area where the three of us would not visit schools and interact with teachers etc., but leave the entire block management to a mentor. Here Sharanu was a natural choice for me and against his own fears moved him to Anekal taluk near Bangalore, gave him a new hire called Ranjini and asked him to manage 30 schools on his own. It was a significant step for us and he finished the task successfully, very aptly blogged by ESR here (http://sikshana.blogspot.com/2010/04/experiment-at-anekal.html).

Solo Walk: The next opportunity we got was to set foot in North Karnataka for the first time with support from Deshpande Foundation(DF) and Yahoo. We decided to work in a set of 60 schools in Kalghatgi taluk, Dharwad District identified as one of the most backward taluks in the State. Here again my go to guy was Sharanu and this time I tempted him with an offer to move him half way to his hometown. He took up the challenge and we had a promising start which I have blogged here (http://sikshana.blogspot.com/2011/08/sikshanas-first-solo-walk.html).

Decentralized Hiring: Another important milestone for Sikshana at that point was the change in how we hired mentors. Knowing the potential of growing with DF, I got tempted to send experienced mentors from South to Kalghatgi, but I resisted and asked him to build a new team from local area. I was so serious about this, even to this day Sharanu recalls how I was sitting in the far corner of Library room in DF with my back against him working on my computer as he interviewed a few candidates but refused to make myself part of the interview process. At the end of the process he told me that he wanted to hire one of them by name Shambu. I told him “my choice is your choice let us go with him”! He later added Kashi and Shivanand to form a formidable trio in Kalghatgi. Having worked under his wings for a few years, Kashi and Shambu rose to being 2 of the 3 Program managers (managing multiple taluks) in Sikshana today. Also during my interactions with mentors, I had one simple message – “To move up in the organization make yourself useless in your current place and train someone else to take over your responsibility”. Before moving out of Anekal, he recommend a volunteer from the local area called Ashwath to replace him and today Ashwath is our 3^rd Program manager! As I type this section I recall a few other mentors like Vishwa, Muttu, Suresh N, Roopa, Shivanand etc., who have made significant contribution to Sikshana over many years and I will write a separate blog on the team that got us to where we are today.

An Entire District: The next big opportunity came a year later when we got a chance to cover an entire district (Dharwad) for the first time and hit our 1000 school mark. Here again my natural choice was Sharanu who got promoted from being a block mentor managing 60 schools and a team of 3 to a program manager managing 535 schools with 68 mentors! The 3 years we were there in the district was an exciting time and it needs a separate blog by itself to list all the learnings, but to summarize in one line I would say it helped us refine and centralize the Sikshana model to make it an easier sell to the government for adoption.

Sikshana Lite: Even though over the years we tried to trim the fat from the program to make it lean and scalable, we still wanted to change a few features in the program and doing so in schools where the program was already running was a challenge. So, in 2015, we decided to go into a new district Davanagere with just concepts of Sikshana and not much else. We planned to add the most essential inputs that is necessary to improve learning levels. Again Sharanu led his team in this effort and this allowed us to develop the model for scaling called the “Accelerator”. This is now being integrated with the department as a pilot program in 2 districts in a partnership model described here (http://sikshana.blogspot.com/2016/11/karnataka-government-partners-with.html).

After 8 years and 10 months of service to the organization, Sharanu has finally decided to move on. The only way I could keep such a talented guy all these years was because I could give him fresh challenges regularly, and even though I had a bigger one waiting for him next year it would have meant he had to move to Bangalore again further away from his hometown. At this point in his life, his family needs him in Sadem and, he along with Kashi wants to do something significant in their district. So, when they got an opportunity to work in their hometown with a heavy heart they decided to leave Sikshana. We in Sikshana will surely miss them, but are extremely happy for the new opportunity they have and again Sharanu has made sure a few more of his team members are the future Sharanu’s in Sikshana.

And on a personal note, I thank him for providing me an opportunity to work with him and his willingness to work with me in every step of the way. He being a product of a government school in a small village Kurakunta, who spent few months lifting bags in a cement factory always talked about his wish to do something for under privileged back home and here I would like to share one small story about him. This goes back to 2010 when we took part in the Sunfeast 10k in Bangalore. For the first time, we setup a booth to raise some funds for Sikshana as part of the event. It was an extremely disappointing experience with having 1000’s of visitors to the stadium, only a handful of them took time to come to our booth and talk to us and a few of them donated some small change. The highest donation we got that day was Rs.500 and that was from Sharanu! He was earning about Rs.9000/mo at that time and knowing his family needs, I knew the value of 500 for him. That day I really understood the power of “urge to help people” and for that and many more Thank you Sharanu!

Measuring Behavioral Changes

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 03:30:00 +0000

Sikshana has been most effective in schools where the teachers have not just embraced the program as their own but have gone on to adapt the program concepts to suit their environment. This makes perfect sense as Sikshana started in schools as a decentralized model with the basic premise that, teachers need to find localized solutions to the challenges they face in their schools. As part of scaling up we had to centralize the intervention to enable the adoption by the state education department. Starting this academic year the Dept of Education is running Sikshana program in over 1200 schools in two districts of Karnataka. As part of the knowledge transfer to the state we are developing an analytic platform which will enable the state to monitor the program implementation & impact. While the basic metrics are easy to get, we are looking at developing new metrics to measure the behavioral changes in the children, teachers and the school ecosystem.

In our experience the use of survey, interviews etc have enabled us to capture the intent to change or an acknowledgement of the value of the change. While "intent" is a necessary first step, in the environment we are operating in with millions of children passing through without acquiring the necessary skills every year, we need action and now!

The proliferation of smartphones among the teachers is already helping us in data collection. We now have an in-house developed android app deployed in the field to collect various usage parameters. This will be a perfect channel to capture actions by teachers which we could use to determine behavioral changes. But in addition to that we are thinking of simple changes in our messaging printed on the physical inputs we provide to the school and use the mobile app to push periodic positive reinforcement messages.

We are refreshing our Theory of Change document and plan to include specific behavioral change metrics. If you like to take part in developing the metrics, please drop an email to prasanna at sikshana dot org or share this post with someone you know who might be.

Karnataka Government partners with Sikshana Foundation to deliver student motivation programmes in public schools

noreply@blogger.com (Smitha Venkatesh) — Wed, 23 Nov 2016 15:20:00 +0000

Bengaluru, November 8, 2016: The Karnataka Government and Sikshana Foundation have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to deliver student motivation programmes for over 1 lakh students in 1,500 government higher primary schools of Chitradurga and Davanagere districts. Sikshana Foundation will work with Sarva Shiksha Abhiyana (SSA) and the Department of Primary and Secondary Education over a three-year period to develop and to deliver student motivation programmes through government officials and teachers in the two districts. The Rs. 11cr (cash and in-kind) agreement has been signed under the Public Private Partnership model, with 50% of funding coming from public and 50% coming from private sources. Vibha, funding the work of Sikshana since 2005, has come forward to be a partner for the next three years in this effort.

Dr. P.C. Jaffer, State Project Director for SSA, said “The Government of Karnataka has been working through in-house projects, and with a number of NGOs to improve the quality of learning materials and teaching methods available to students in government schools. Sikshana Foundation has shown that student motivation programmes can be a low-cost but effective input to further improve learning outcomes.”

“We have therefore decided to develop these programmes further and deploy them in two districts as a pilot through an innovative partnership model, where the Government bears no more than half the project cost. Sikshana Foundation will be raising the remainder of the funding from private sources.” he added.

Prasanna Vadyar, CEO, Sikshana Foundation said “We are very excited to partner with SSA in this innovative approach as this will establish a model whereby Sikshana-developed student motivation programmes can reach the 50,000 government schools in Karnataka alone and then go beyond to impact the over 15 lakh schools in India. The successful launch of this model has been the result of over 18 months of work, made possible by Vibha, who co-imagined and nursed the project with us.”

According to Keyur Shah, Board of Directors of Vibha, “We have partnered with Sikshana Foundation for more than a decade and have seen the learning impact their programmes create. We have seen the results of the Sikshana programme and have tremendous faith in the change-making vision and ambition of Prasanna and his team. When the project was discussed with us at a very early-stage, it was unclear as to how an effective government partnership could be brought about. We decided to seed the project and work with the Sikshana team in a collaborative effort to grow and scale it. We are very pleased to see how far and how quickly the project has come. This is a perfect example of how Vibha works collaboratively with all stakeholders to find solutions that solve systemic problems facing underprivileged children in India. We have strong connections with our NGO partners and are able to work with them over a long term to nurture their capabilities. Together we are able to help our supporters be part of the creation of large-scale and meaningful impact.”

Sikshana offers non-financial rewards such as star-shaped badges for basic good behaviors such as attending school regularly, class participation, participation in sports and extracurriculars, personal hygiene, etc.

Peer teaching helps in creating collaborative environment where students don’t feel embarrassed or scared to try new or difficult concept. A rapport is built between students and gives them a sense that they can count on the support of their peers.

Sikshana provides writing booklets to students in order to ensure that they do not lose interest due to a lack of resources to practice. In addition, math booklets are also provided to engage students. The booklets are designed to present each concept using different methods – if students are not able to make progress with one method, they can try to break through with a different one.

The Learning tree is a graphical representation of the competencies the students have mastered. This helps them in tracking their progress, understand their gaps and also to set goals as to what they want to learn next.

Sikshana student clubs provide highly valued leadership opportunities to top performing students (class 4-7) to organise cultural, sports and environmental activities in the school. These student club leaders are mentored by Sikshana Champion (usually a senior teacher or HM).

The Right Partner for the Long Run!

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 03:38:00 +0000

Though I have been running off and on over the past 3-4 years with distances from 5k up to maximum 10 miles, there is nothing like running in a well-organized race. So after my last midnight half marathon in Bangalore in 2012, I ran today (Nov 6) in the Vibha's Dream Mile Half Marathon (http://thedreammile.org/) and it felt like my Austin days running in early 2000s. I ran my best (post 40yrs) time of 2hr:16min 21km! This should have been my time for 17km and so I could not believe my pace today. Yes the weather was a perfect chilly morning, a fantastic course to run on and since the run was for a very good cause, it was quite motivating. But in addition to all that I credit the energetic bunch of Vibha volunteers and their kids and Vibha youth chapter volunteers who lined up the course at various points. Their smiling faces and cheers really got me pumped up and I was able to keep up an excellent pace throughout the race. So if you are ever planning to run a 5k, 10k or the half marathon check out the dreammile website which lists the various cities in US and there is one in Bengaluru too which is a super fun run. And the best part of the Vibha run is at the end of it you get excellent food like today it was Upma, Kesribath, Pongal :) plus plenty of fruits, bagels, cakes etc.

A very similar parallel is present in the other Ultra Marathon Run that I have been part of in the last 10 years which is Sikshana! We set out to create a scalable and replicable model with focus on motivational inputs and then convince the government to adopt the same. The biggest challenge for us is that very few people involved in improving Quality of Education are focusing on improving motivation levels among the rural govt. school children. This also meant that we needed to go the extra mile to convince the world that the impact they are seeing in Sikshana schools is due to specific motivational inputs. The next challenge is to create cost-effective motivational inputs that will scale across the state and beyond among children of various backgrounds. The third challenge is to make sure that there is well-defined process which will enable the government system to adopt the model. What this means is that at various stages during the evolution of the model we had to take risks and introduce new initiatives, test these across hundreds of schools in one shot, allow process to evolve during the course of program execution and various other unorthodox moves. This meant that we needed a steady partner who understood our model and believed in our long-term goal and support us through the various stages of our growth. And this is exactly what Vibha has done for us. Over the last decade some of the major milestones in our evolution funded by Vibha has been as follows:

1. First full taluk (block) funding – helped in incubating the concept of model across the taluk
2. First outreach program – to reach out to Andhra and Gujarat
3. First remote marketing – Foundations team based out of California got grants from YEF, Juniper, etc
4. First pilot of the Accelerator model at District level - this is now being adopted by the govt.
5. Funding the entire cost of knowledge transfer to the department during the 1st year of the partnership

So to summarize if you are in for the long run you need a partner like Vibha! (www.vibha.org)

Volunteering for significant impact

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 14:47:00 +0000

For the last 9 years of being involved with running Sikshana, I have argued that NGO’s cannot build systemic solutions dependent on volunteers. Even though I would still argue the same, I will now admit that volunteers can play a significant role in growing and running organizations which are creating systemic solutions, all thanks to the work of one man who has been at it with us for the last three years.

What prompted me to write this blog was my call to Bangalore office this past Saturday morning for an update on a planned interview with a successful student from one of our villages in Kanakapura. After speaking with a couple of staff members, I asked for the volunteer just out of sheer habit even though it was his day off only to find out that he was not keeping well. This was the first time in the last 2 years since I left Bangalore, that he was not available in the office when I wanted to talk to him! I called his home to find that he had sprained his ankle and could hardly walk and hence he did not show up at the office. And the sprain happened most likely when he was helping shift some heavy boxes in the office.

So exactly what does this volunteer do other than lifting boxes?

Well for starters, he helps brainstorm on technology pilots within Sikshana and helps in implementation.
He visits schools regularly and analyses the usage of the workbooks and effectiveness of tech intervention
Interacts with teachers, parents and other department staff and obtains valuable feedback on overall Sikshana program implementation in the school.
Performs data analysis when needed, acts as the office Intranet server admin, researches new technology products and recommends the best option for Sikshana.
Represents Sikshana when called upon in meetings with donors and education department staff and provides value add to the discussion.
Writes scripts to help accounting department to export Tally files into more manageable formats.
Repairs out of warranty laptops, trouble shoots office printers and other tech devices.
He maintains an open communication with the field staff (mentors) and counsels them when they seek his advice.
Is willing to just about take up any task that is needed by the organization.
And once he owns a task, he sees it through end-to-end, all the way from design, production, getting the best price, scheduling and coordinating delivery to schools.
He has been a fantastic sounding board for me over the years.
And finally he spent the last year researching and designing an extremely well received Mathematics workbook series which is now on its way to reaching every child studying in a government school in the state of Karnataka.

All this he does in his unassuming, characteristic easy-going no frills attitude. A very simple and extremely disciplined person he is normally the first one in the office at 9 in the morning and stays in as long as necessary and needed.

Getting kids excited about using GeoGebra (L) and (R) inspecting how kids are using the Math Workbooks

I have known him since mid ‘90s in Austin. He has had a career as a very successful VLSI designer who ran his own small design firm Signet for over 10 years in Austin providing high-end design solutions. He moved back to Bangalore permanently 3 years ago and started volunteering full-time with Sikshana. His name is Venkatesh Reddy but more commonly known as just “reddy”. I and Sikshana would like to extend a simple thanks to Reddy for all his contribution and look forward to many more years of his support.

The Monsoon Spring

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 21:35:00 +0000

As I start writing this blog the annual monsoon has made its entry into Kerala albeit with a slight delay, bringing hope and joy to the entire country from the farmers to the traders on the stock market. This same week it feels like Spring time for me, no not here in California, but in my thoughts as I imagine all the school kids in India starting off a new academic year with dreams and aspirations of their own. For nearly a decade now, this time of the year has become my spring season as we in Sikshana sit down and analyse previous year results, design new programs, think of exciting new ways to motivate the kids, give the final touches to the diaries we provide to children, tweak our parent engagement activities, come up with new ways to measure our impact etc,.

Three years ago we hit the 1000 school mark in our coverage and since then we have worked with nearly 2 lakh children every year trying to make their day in school more exciting and an enriching experience. What sets us apart is that we start by trusting the academic capabilities of the teacher in the system. We recognize the challenges the teachers face in the classroom and ease it to the extent possible. We then focus on the needs of the children by providing them with the required learning resources and motivate them to put in the extra effort. To ensure sustainability we bring the parents and the community in the villages closer to the school and to the learning process of their children. We have set this up as a set of processes for the field staff to execute which largely hails from the local populace. Judicious use of IT in the learning process, impact assessment and in running of the organization is making the effort a highly scalable model.

The chart above shows the impact in terms of the learning levels over a period of 3 years among 7th class students in Arithmetic and Kannada across the 734 higher primary schools in Karnataka under Sikshana. We measure ourselves against the Karnataka State Average as per the ASER report put out by Pratham (www.asercenter.org) every year. We are very proud of the efforts of the children, teachers, department, parents and the community which has resulted in such a significant sustained improvement. Also credit to our field mentors who work in the most challenging circumstances and still find ways to motivate the stakeholders to strive for 100%.

While we are very excited about our impact we are still humbled by the fact that we now cover just over 4% of the higher primary schools in Karnataka. Sadly this also means that we are allowing lakhs of children to pass through the primary schooling without acquiring the basic skills. To say that we find this simply unacceptable is putting it very mildly. We have set ourselves an ambitious 2020 goal: Help every government higher primary school in Karnataka to deliver an average of 90% or higher on the state assessments. This will of course mean we take a new approach to spread the concept and increasingly use technology for rapid scaling. We are in the process of finalizing the approach and will start the pilot in many more taluks shortly.

This effort needs not just more money but also passionate people who are willing to lead from the front. We are very fortunate to welcome into the team, our new Chief Operating Officer, Chalam Plachikkat, who comes to us from Amazon, Seattle, where he headed the International Consumer Gift Card business. Chalam will be relocating to Bangalore to run the operations and to pilot new ideas on Blended Learning. And more importantly it is very heartening to see more and more young men and women from the villages where we work coming forward to join the team as mentors and bring about a change in their own community.

We in Sikshana are very excited about the possibilities as we set out to nurture the seeds of hope sown by the children, teachers and the parents of the communities we work with and beyond.

PS: If you are keen to follow our work or get involved please write us at info@sikshana.org and we will keep you posted on the monthly progress and send out specific action requests.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 07 Mar 2015 07:22:00 +0000

Language Acquisition through Non-cognitive Skills in Karnataka Rural Schools

A Pilot Study by Sikshana Foundation

E S Ramamurthy and K K Subramaniam, Sikshana Foundation

Arjun Shankar, University of Pennsylvania

May 2013

Abstract:

This article is based on a pilot study conducted by the Sikshana Foundation, an education NGO working with primary students of rural government schools in Karnataka, India. The study was designed to understand the relationship between language acquisition – in this case, Kannada which is the primary language spoken in Karnataka – and non-cognitive skills such as grit and motivation. The goal of the study was first, to understand how a large group of students can be motivated towards acquiring particular reading skills and second, to assess the improvement in skill acquisition given these parameters. The defining research questions were: how does one motivate a student to put in the desired effort to learn a skill and how does one ensure he/she maintains motivation until the identified the skill was acquired? An appropriately designed program was first piloted in one school and then “scaled up” in two phases: first, in 43 schools in two different districts in rural Karnataka, Kanakapura and Hoskote, then in 705 schools all over Karnataka state. Students were immersed in a 30-day continuous skills acquisition course, under similar parameters across the populations. The results were striking; of over 18000 students from 7^th Std who participated, 96% had acquired basic Kannada reading skills within the 30 days, a statistically significant number given that the State average was only 65%. The article discusses the method by which Sikshana achieved such positive results.

Introduction

This article is based on a pilot study conducted by the Sikshana Foundation, an education NGO working with primary standard students in rural government schools in Karnataka, India. The study was designed to understand the relationship between language acquisition – in this case, Kannada which is the primary language spoken in Karnataka – and non-cognitive skills such as grit and motivation. The goal of the study was first, to understand how a large group of students can be motivated towards acquiring particular reading skills and second, to assess the improvement in skill acquisition given these parameters.

There are a number of important facts regarding primary education in the Public School System in Karnataka state that have contributed to defining the scope of this study. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), provides data on children’s enrollment and basic learning levels; it has been conducted every year since 2005 in all rural districts of India. In the 2012 ASER report, it was reported that 27.6% % of the students in 7^th Standard lack the ability to read in their own language; and 51.7% of them cannot divide a three digit number by a single digit. These are skills that, going by the Syllabus prescribed for Primary schools in Karnataka, the students should acquire in the normal course by Standards 4/5. The report is a cause for concern in that the problem if not attended to at this stage, may go unaddressed through High School and may eventually become lifetime issues for these students.

Sikshana Foundation witnesses these problems everyday, as it intervenes in over 1200 schools in four States, most of them being in the state of Karnataka. It seeks to evolve a sustainable and replicable model for an effective and decentralized public school system, in which local stakeholders take responsibility for Sikshana introduced practices over a stipulated period. Sikshana’s strategy has been three-fold. The first was to motivate and encourage schools to set and work towards well-defined learning level goals in a time sensitive manner. The assistance from Sikshana, in addition to financial / material inputs, was in the form of a Mentor, brought in mostly from within the community or neighborhood. These mentors identify particular issues that occur at school sites and work with other members of the organization to find appropriate solutions to these context-specific problems. Second, Sikshana has developed a series of low-cost, high-impact motivational tools to change classroom culture in its schools. These include “spot prizes” – pencils, erasers, etc. – for positive work within classrooms, along with trips to Delhi for those students who perform best on previously identified goals. Third, Sikshana measures the impact of their intervention and holds schools accountable to pre-set and 'mutually agreed upon' goals by administering nationally recognized tests both previous to and after interventions. Thus, Sikshana has devised an approach that recognizes local ground realities while providing a system that can be used across its school sites.

As part of the ongoing, qualitative research that Sikshana Foundation conducts during its site visits – primarily through mentor observation and reportage – two findings were drawn regarding school culture. First, teachers were well equipped to develop reading comprehension skills in students, both in terms of their qualifications and experience, a fact which complicates much of the literature on teacher inadequacy in the Indian context (Tooley, 2009). Second, students had the requisite intelligence and ability to learn basic reading skills, a fact supported by the philosophical experiments of Jacques Ranciere in his work The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Ranciere, 1991) and scholars of intelligence, who argue that the brain should be considered a muscle capable of development in the same way as any other muscle in the body (Blackwell, et al., 2007). However, despite these observations, students had not acquired the basic skills of reading in their native language. Thus, the result was a paradox in which teaching was taking place, learning was possible, and yet learning was not taking place.

It was within this context that Sikshana decided to conduct a study to develop a system necessary to ensure the acquisition of basic reading skills. The defining research questions were: how does one motivate a student to put in the desired effort to learn a skill and how does one ensure he/she maintains motivation until the identified the skill was acquired? An appropriately designed program, discussed in detail below, was first piloted in one school and then “scaled up” in two phases: first, in 43 schools in two different districts in rural Karnataka, Kanakapura and Hoskote, then in 705 schools all over Karnataka state. Students were immersed in a 30-day continuous skills acquisition course, under similar parameters across the populations. The results were striking; of over 18000 students who participated, 96% had acquired basic Kannada reading skills within the 30 days, an astounding number given that the State average was only 65%.

The rest of this article discusses the method by which students achieved such rapid skill acquisition. The next two sections of this article will first, articulate the theoretical framework for Sikshana’s intervention and second, will outline Sikshana’s method for intervention and the findings from it. It will be argued that Sikshana’s successes stem from three connected ideas which they use towards their intervention: first, a theory of motivation; second, a peer-based model of learning; third, a theory of emergent design. The article will conclude with potential next steps for Sikshana Foundation and the implications for future NGO interventions into rural schooling especially in the context of acquiring essential life skills - such as Reading, Writing, Expression and Basic Numerical Computation.

Theoretical Framework

The Kannada language is a language spoken in India predominantly in the State of Karnataka and is spoken by over 38 million people. Given this context, teaching and learning in Kannada remains an important feature of primary and secondary education.

The Kannada language has some important features that make it unique in relation to Romanic languages, like English. The first, and most important is that unlike English, which is an alphabetic language in which the letters of printed words map to the speech sounds, Kannada as an alpha-syllabary language is based on the akshara system, in which each akshara maps to phonology at the level of the syllable. Again, unlike Indo-European languages which are comprised of 24 to 32 letter units; Kannada is made up of over 474 CV symbols, with further diacritic marks for consonants (Nag and Snowling, 2010). In a study conducted by Nag and Snowling of the University of York, it was found that learning the Kannada aksharas continued into grade 4 and 5 and that mastery of the akshara script had a strong correlation with reading comprehension i.e. the act of understanding what one is reading (Nag and Snowling, 2011). Nag found that: “The specific features of the akshara demand cognitive processes that are particular to this orthographic unit, and different from what has been documented with the alphabet. For example, syllable awareness predominates in the early stages of literacy and phoneme awareness seems to be a true consequence of literacy. The orthography-phonology mapping makes unique processing demands and acquisition of akshara knowledge is more drawn out. (Nag: http://www.york.ac.uk/res/crl/old/britishacademy.html).

One potential implication of Nag’s finding is that sequencing of language learning from syllable awareness to phoneme awareness is a necessary step towards the acquisition of higher level Bloom’s skills such as reading comprehension in languages such as Kannada. Sikshana’s intervention in schools took this implication seriously and the 30-day intervention was geared towards the mastery of syllables and phonemes, with little attention paid to student’s ability to comprehend beyond basic vocabulary knowledge. However, as will be discussed in greater detail later, this particular method has been considered a necessary phase I, before a phase II which will deal specifically with higher level comprehension of text.

Many scholars have argued that the creation of a linearity between phoneme awareness/decoding and higher order comprehension skills such as the ability to summarize texts is not advisable given that research shows budding readers can learn new information as they are developing their reading skills and even skillful readers can develop new strategies to increase comprehension” (The Reading Comprehension Guide). In other words, decoding and comprehension can be seen as simultaneous skills and should be self-consciously regarded as such when teachers teach in classrooms.

While this may indeed be true, Sikshana’s decision to create their particular model for intervention had another, primary reason: motivation. Sikshana’s program was designed around the idea that student’s initial successes would beget the motivation necessary to continue along the path towards attaining higher-level reading skills. In Vygotskyian theory “the zone of proximal development” (ZPD) describes that space between what a learner can do without help and what a learner can do with help. When students are still in need of assistance for basic decoding, then success is best assured by creating small, achievable objectives that students can build upon over time] The 30-day program was designed primarily with this in mind. The message was that students could acquire skills in the specified time frame.

However, motivation should not be considered a thing or a condition; it is never a permanent state but a processual state, meaning that motivation increases or decreases, giving behaviors its “drive” or “direction” (Reeve, 1992, 3). Therefore, scholars have addressed two separate issues with regards to motivation: first, why do particular human beings direct their energy towards a specific goal; second, what determines the intensity of their pursuit of said goals. Gardner provides one matrix by which to understand motivation. He argues that four elements – two cognitive and two affective – together allow for student motivation: a goal, desire to achieve the goal, positive attitudes, and effort (Gardner, et al., 1985). As importantly, Gardner’s model accounts for socio-historical context, which plays a key role in shaping these motivational variables.

As part of Gardner’s model, which has been taken up by a number of researchers since, he defined two types of motivation: integrative and instrumental. Learners who are integratively motivated generally want to learn a language so that they can better understand people around them. On the other hand, learners who are instrumentally motivated want to learn a language because of a practical, extrinsic reason; for example, to get a job or get a better grade (Gardner, 1996). Gardner attempted to test the integrative motivation of students through the Attitudes/Motivation Test Battery. Using this test, it has been found that integrative motivation is significantly correlated with language acquisition, a finding which greatly informed Sikshana’s intervention (Gardner and McIntyre, 1993; Clement and Gardner, 2001).

In the United States context it has also been found that providing external rewards and developing instrumental forms of motivation actually diminishes the integrative motivation of students (Lepper, Green, and Nisbett, 1973; Reeve, 1992). In such cases the reward itself becomes the primary reason for action. As soon as the reward is no longer present, students will no longer seek to learn the particular content material. MacIntyre (2002) writes that such results occur “with a task that was intrinsically motivating before the reward was offered” (MacIntyre, 2002, 59). In the case of students in rural schools in Karnataka, because the task at hand was to develop skills in their primary language – Kannada – students already have a high integrative motivation to learn the language.

However, despite the fact that students had a high level of integrative motivation, they still had not acquired basic skills in Kannada; a fact which seems to contradict Gardner’s findings. However, recent scholars have addressed this problem by expanding Gardner’s framework, seeking to include other variables to his socio-economical model. Oxford and Shearin (1994) provide a long list of motivational concepts that assist in language acquisition. Of these, two directly informed Sikshana’s intervention: first, reinforcement; second, goal-setting. These factors, it was hypothesized, when emphasized and developed from the beginning of the 30-day intervention would result in significant skill gain in the student population under consideration.

Sikshana also had one more important theoretical premise for their intervention: the use of a peer-learning model to enhance the teacher-centered learning approach to skill development. In a study conducted in 129 primary schools in Scotland, led by a team of Durham University and University of Dundee researchers, children aged seven to twelve who received at minimum twenty minutes of peer-tutoring a week had a consistent positive attainment in reading and mathematics (Tymms, et al, 2011). While teachers remain in classrooms to oversee the sessions, students are empowered in two ways: first, the peer who is ‘teaching’ skills gets valuable reinforcement of skills and develops higher order Bloom skills; second, the student who is learning within this model gets the one-on-one instruction necessary to develop skills which they have not been able to acquire in formal learning situations.

To test the correlation between these specific factors and language achievement, Sikshana utilized the ASER standardized achievement test, which they administered to all the students who went through their program.

Finally, given that context variables will always be different, the means by which students can be motivated will always vary. The implication is, of course, that no pre-determined model can sufficiently account for context specific variables, and therefore will not beget the results which one desires, motivational or otherwise. Thus, Sikshana approached their intervention using an emergent design model of research and intervention. Emergent design is a model developed extensively by Cavallo (2000), which provides a “theoretical framework… for investigating how choice of design methodology contributes to the success or failure of education reforms” (p. 768). The benefit of this model is its recursive, inductive approach: researchers and practitioners gain insights through ethnographic research in the field, changing the approach to intervention in response to the insights gained. Again, the approach takes seriously the specifics of a social milieu and works from knowledge gained at the local level to create better intervention strategies. Christies writes “Underlying [emergent design] research is the notion that group work is a dynamic, iterative process. Goals and tasks transform; understanding and perceptions of a project evolve; and members undergo changes within and outside of the group, causing interactions and outcomes to emerge in ways that are sometimes out of the control of the group…” (p. 271). Given the nature of this form of engagement, plans must remain flexible and projects must change as the contexts within which they are implemented dictate. In Sikshana’s case, the nature of their intervention changed as they piloted their language acquisition curriculum; new strategies were employed and assessed, the design itself reflecting the complex nature of the context and student population in question.

The following section outlines the specifics of Sikshana’s intervention and their findings.

Pilot Study Design and Findings

As mentioned earlier, the concept behind Sikshana’s program was that reading fluency is not something to be learnt; it is a skill, needing practice for mastering. Moreover, the mastering of such skills was based on motivational factors that included goal setting and reinforcement in a peer-learning environment.

Using an emergent research approach, the organization found that the typical intervention in rural schools for those who did not possess reading skills was to teach them to ‘study’ – in the conventional sense and meaning. Through classroom observations over a five-year period it was determined that, while a teacher in a classroom can impart knowledge, skills also need a significant amount of practice, which was reinforced by the theoretical research discussed above. However, practice itself is motivationally situated, meaning that students who were not willing to put in the requisite effort would not be able to gain particular skills, such as fluency in reading.

Because it was known that integrative motivation would already be high for those learning their mother tongue, the organization hypothesized that instrumental motivational factors, such as small prizes for success in during classroom sessions, would be sufficient to increase reading acquisition for students. A pilot program was run during 11-12 in 413 schools with 9730 students with extrinsic rewards as the primary intervention strategy; in spite of a highly focused effort and close follow-up, the year long program could only result in 84.7% of the students acquiring the skill. While this was higher then the 72.4% norm at the National level and 65.8% at the State level, it fell woefully short of the Sikshana’s goal of ‘near total’ acquisition. The term ' Near Total' is meant to convey the goal that every student who, in the normal course could be expected to acquire a skill, should in fact succeed in doing so; a number, which the program established as 95% of the students in the program acquiring all language skills.

In parallel, the Kannada teachers in 10 randomly selected schools were quizzed about the feasibility and the time needed for coaching a typical class of 20 students who had not yet acquired reading skills. The responses were unanimous: nearly every teacher said that they would be able to help develop such skills provided students were under their total control and that this would be their only assignment. The amount of time suggested varied from four to six weeks. A pilot program was run in 40 plus schools with an assigned teacher – brought from outside the school in some cases – to take responsibility for this task. This met with limited success and no correlation could be established between success rate and any particular causative factor. However, classroom observations conducted by Sikshana field staff showed that wherever the teacher in charge was able to elicit a positive response from (i.e. motivate) the students in his or her charge, students achieved ‘near total’ acquisition. Since the distinguishing characteristic of such a successful resource person could not be established it made the entire process difficult to define and replicate.

It was at this stage that the two critical questions, which underlay the current study, emerged: how does one motivate a student to put in the desired effort to learn a skill and how does one ensure he/she maintains motivation until the identified skill has been acquired?

Given that teachers still claimed that students could develop their reading skills if that was the only objective in a given time frame, Sikshana decided to pilot a new phase in which roughly 30 hours of reading was spread over a month under controlled circumstances.

The contours of the program evolved along the following lines. Prior to the commencement, students who had not acquired basic reading skills in the Kannada language were identified in each school. These students were given an extensive briefing with the following message:

•Not being able to read own language at this stage is unacceptable

•This is perhaps the last chance for them to acquire this skill before they move on to High School, since there will be no more interventions of this type.

•If and when they commit themselves for a period of 30 days, there is a high probability that they could acquire this vital life skill - something that they have been unable to get so far in spite of spending years. Data from the previous pilot was shown to reinforce this point.

The practice sessions were to take place in the school premises - during working hours wherever feasible. They would be of one-hour duration, six days a week for five weeks; no break was permitted, nor was there to be any change in the timing for the session. The continuous learning space without break was to ensure that students would be able to recall a missing element before their memory of the previous episode had lapsed (Cole, et al., 2013).

In these sessions, learning was enabled from a peer rather than from a ‘teacher’. The learner student was paired with another who had the acquired the specific skill during the session. Both were given identical reading material of appropriate level. The learner was asked to try reading the text. Whenever he might come to a stop, the mentor student was required to read out the word loudly. This intervention would only happen after the learner had made an effort to read and within 2/3 seconds of delay even if the learner had not understood the word. This was designed to ensure the learner was not frustrated by persistent failures while maintaining a steady pace of reading. The entire process involved three steps: a first attempt to read, listening to the correct word from the partner in case of failure and reading it correctly afterwards while observing it ‘visually’. The learner would begin to associate the word and the sound and if the practice sessions were frequent enough, difficult words would recur to an extent that they could register permanently. A Facilitator oversaw oversee the process to ensure that the procedures were adequately followed. However, he/she was not expected to intervene in the process in the role of a teacher.

The anticipated success of the venture was built on the above process. However It was hypothesized that the factor that would play a much larger and more effective role in learning gains was the macro-message built in at the beginning of the intervention i.e. the reinforcement of perseverance, determination and grit required to acquire a skill or knowledge (Cole, et al., 2013). Once a student agreed to work within a strict regimen as described above, he/ she was already pre-disposed towards success.

To put the above to test, a Pilot was run in a school at Hosadurga with 13 students. These were students who besides having huge skill gaps also tended to skip classes frequently and were not known, based on teacher feedback, to evince great interest in learning. After the briefing prescribed above, a camp was run from 31st Aug to 5th Oct; this period incidentally included three major festival holidays. It ran with total attendance on all weekdays without a break; the students seemed to be showing an unprecedented enthusiasm and a sense of pride in their progressively increasing level of competence. At the end of the period, 10 of them passed the standard test for Level 2 reading; two acquired it after an extension of the program by two more weeks. The success rate was indeed a significant improvement on our past experiences.

A second phase of the program was initiated during October in two clusters: 28 schools with 283 kids in Kanakapura and 15 schools with 223 kids in Hoskote. Again the schedule coincided with the mid-term holidays and three major festivals of the season. Notwithstanding this, the attendance in both centers was near total. Results from this phase show that the improvement gained in a month far outpaces that obtained in earlier efforts. During this trial in 11-12, a total of 3789 students studying in 7th Std in 136 schools in Kanakapura and Hoskote were taken up for remedial action using conventional techniques. The attrition rate of students lacking skill during the year came to about 8% per month over the period. Under the current pilot program in the same two blocks, the reduction obtained during the stipulated 30 days amounted to 65%, an eight-fold increase in attrition rate.

The program was subsequently extended to cover all 7th Std students in Sikshana schools during the current academic year ‘12-13. However due to logistic constraints, data under controlled conditions could be obtained only from 705 schools in Karnataka. The program, which came to an end in March ’13, yielded the following results in these schools.

	Students Participated	Kannada Reading	%Completion
North Block	12893	12513	97
South Block	5578	5391	96.7
Total - Sikshana	18471	17904	96.9
State Average			65.8
National Average			72.4

During the course of implementing the process, there were still a number of students who were not able to acquire the requisite language skills. There seemed to be two reasons for this: first, some students simply needed more time. For those who fell in this category, the program was extended by 15 days. The results seen above were inclusive of this process modification. Second, students’ initial learning levels had a significant effect on their progress. The process worked well with those kids who had some skill in reading simple words but lacked the ability to read a given text fluently. For those who did not possess even this minimal skill the process was found to be inadequate.

Since the basic hypotheses seemed to hold valid, Sikshana came up with a second step within the scope of this process to assist those students who were unable to decode basic words. Appropriate reading materials were developed specifically addressing the needs of these students, with complex alphabets and simple words for use in an identically formatted program. Such students were made to go through these preparatory sessions for a period of 30 days before submitting themselves to the former program. Pilots ran during this period showed that, segregation of the participating students from the beginning of the program, based on their initial skill level not only improved the pass rates in the first attempt, but also contributed to a near total skill acquisition rate - as defined elsewhere in this article - at the end of the two step process.

Follow-up and Conclusions

Sikshana’s pilot study seems to hold quite a bit of promise for those interested in developing basic reading skills in students who have previously been unable to acquire such basic skills in alpha-syllabary languages such as Kannada. Their approach, which places motivational techniques at the center, introducing goal setting, reinforcement, and peer-learning at an early stage while maintaining achievable learning goals, may provide a framework for efficient and effective school intervention. To validate the study further, Sikshana will have a second round of assessments to be conducted by independent researchers. This will obviously reinforce the program’s legitimacy.

Given the results from Sikshana’s first phase of programming, there are two avenues that emerge as potential next steps in this particular intervention. First, as discussed earlier, Sikshana’s intervention focused solely on basic reading skills like decoding and vocabulary understanding, higher order Bloom’s skills linked to reading comprehension were not included given the particular questions and agendas of the 30-day trial. However, given that basic reading skills cannot be the end of any effective intervention, Sikshana plans to unveil a 30-day plan to develop reading comprehension skills in the same student population which had gone through their phase one programming. Preliminarily, Sikshana plans to utilize a scaffolded curriculum in which students will develop their ability to summarize, critically question, apply new knowledge, and synthesize lessons learned from multiple textual sources. The methodology will be based on constructivist theory, providing students the opportunity to observe, reflect, and utilize insights from their own experience to access texts at a higher Bloom’s level. However, like phase one, the program will be largely emergent in design, allowing new insights to guide the program as it develops.

Second, Sikshana’s insights into reading development may also be applied to other skill areas, including arithmetic. The ability to read may be tied to the ability to do arithmetic when the problem lies in reading fluency. In theory, reading and arithmetic are separate skills. In practice, however, they are linked by the motivational structures that shape how students interact with new material. In preliminary research, students have expressed that they were frustrated by not being able to complete reading paragraphs and this frustration seemed to affect their acquisition of arithmetic skills as well. With the acquisition of fluency in reading from the peer sessions, they seem to be increasingly motivated to practice other skills, such as arithmetic skills and acquire them too. Early quantitative studies also seem to bear this fact out, as students who went through the program also saw increased passing percentages on the ASER arithmetic assessment, with an acquisition percentage of 92%. More research will need to be conducted on the relation between reading and arithmetic skill acquisition as well as into the method by which a similar phase one program can be created geared towards the latter.

Acknowledgements:

The Authors acknowledge with thanks the support given by the Department of Primary Education of the Government of Karnataka and their staff; also the teachers in the Sikshana schools without whose co-operation this study would not have been possible. Thanks is also due to the numerous field staff who participated in this pioneering venture under most challenging circumstances.

References:

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Lepper, M., Green, D., and Nisbett. R. (1973) “Undermining children's intrinsic interest with extrinsic rewards: A test of the ‘overjustification’ hypothesis.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28, 129–137.

MacIntyre, P (2002). “Motivation, anxiety, and emotion in second language acquisition” in Individual Difference and Instructed Language Learning. Ed. Peter Robinson. Johns Benjamin Publishing Company.

Nag, S. “Reading Difficulties in Kannada, an Indian alphasyllabary.” http://www.york.ac.uk/res/crl/old/britishacademy.html. Viewed: April, 27, 2013.

Nag S. and Snowling M.J. (2010) “Cognitive profiles of poor readers of Kannada.” Reading and Writing: an Interdisciplinary Journal, Springer Science.

Nag S. and Snowling, M. (June, 2011) Reading comprehension, decoding and oral language, The EFLU Journal, 2:2, 75-93, The English and Foreign Languages University, India.

Nag, S., Treiman, R. and Snowling, M. J. (2010) “Learning to spell in an alphasyllabary: The case of Kannada.” Writing Systems Research, 2, 41-52

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Reeve, J. (1992), Understanding Motivation and Emotion, Fort Worth, T: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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Tymms, P., Merrell, C., Thurston, A., Andor, J., Topping, K., Miller, D. “Improving attainment across a whole district: school reform through peer tutoring in a randomized controlled trial.” School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 2011; 22 (3): 265

Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2012 : http://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publications/ASER%20Reports/ASER_2012/fullaser2012report.pdf

Sikshana from outside-in

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 07:29:00 +0000

Back in 2007, when I decided to quit IT, move back to India and enter the social sector I was not very optimistic of a long inning. But leading Sikshana has been such an exciting and rewarding experience, I am still part of it after 7 years. With focus on having fun while helping every child learn, we were reaching new milestones at a rapid pace. But in the last one year whenever I gazed beyond the horizon I would begin to wonder if we were heading in the right direction. And as much as I tried, being on the ship made it very difficult for me to be objective. I had to disembark, at least for a short while and thankfully personal commitment forced me to take a sabbatical and move to US 5 months ago.

Out here in the silicon valley I did some volunteering and a bit of consulting in the area of non-profit and education, spent few days in the classrooms of low income schools, observed my own daughter's schooling up close, read quite a bit and finally had enough time to contemplate!. In these 5 months, I got a chance to work with some of the most intelligent and passionate people in the for-profit and non-profit sector working to make the process of education better. I got to experience the positive energy that a bunch of dedicated school administrators and teachers bring to schools every day. Saw the power of the community running a decentralized public school with excellent infrastructure and state of the art technology. I began to wonder what we could do back in our rural schools in India, even if I could get just a fraction of what I am seeing here.

Having spent so many years in Sikshana, force of habit, I started to look closely at the outcomes of all the efforts here. The kids in most schools here are getting the best inputs one can possibly imagine, excellent pedagogical plans, dedicated teachers, wide use of varying types of technology with many schools getting close to being 100% digital classrooms. But we all know how US stacks up in the world with regard to education and a quick web search will pop up some scary numbers right here in the heart of the silicon valley in terms for high school dropout rate or college readiness. My own observation here so far has been mixed with kids in elementary schools being very engaged in the learning process and as I progressed to middle and high school the interest among kids in learning appeared to be dropping dramatically.

There are multitude of reasons for this situation and many people are working on figuring out solutions, but one area where I don't see enough action is on addressing the lack of motivation to learn among kids. Here I recall a line from our founder ESR, "If a child has decided not to learn, you can't teach them. You first need to get them to want to learn". This has been the DNA of Sikshana from day one and guess what, I think I found why I was feeling uneasy when looking beyond the horizon! We had started drifting!

Right from day one, Sikshana has been focused on motivational inputs for the children, teachers and the parents. The impact of the program was measured in quantitative terms by assessing the children's learning levels and the rest were mainly qualitative metrics which worked fine when we were in a few schools. Then the program expanded rapidly, to cover more schools and we started seeing dramatic improvements in the quantitative assessments. Gradually, scoring 100% in the student assessments started to become the focus of the team. We even changed the tag line from "Empowering government schools to improve themselves" to "Quality education for every child". I could see the subtle shift here, where we started taking responsibility of ensuring every child learns rather literally. Also the new breed of corporate donors came into the picture and started focusing on the impact measurement, accountability etc., and pretty soon with over 1000 schools to work in we all started to focus only on the academic outcome. The end result started mattering more than the process itself and this was the problem. But even with the shift, the motivational inputs are still being delivered at the school level and all that is needed now is to bring it to the forefront.

Looking from outside, I can clearly see the value of Sikshana. It is probably the only one of its kind with focus on motivational inputs and operating at such a large scale of nearly 1200 schools with over 180,000 children. This is a program that works today, with all the existing constraints and at just over a couple of hundred rupees per child per year it is a program that is worth sustaining for the long run. With just a few tweaks the program can live up to its full potential and help every child who needs a little bit of motivation to start learning.

Still Competing and Improving

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Thu, 02 Oct 2014 06:32:00 +0000

One of the girls Megha N.G. from our initial story http://sikshana.blogspot.in/2008/12/when-bare-feet-met-synthetic-track.html and http://sikshana.blogspot.in/2009/01/competing-for-improving.html is still going strong. Just got a newspaper scan of her winning the district college level championship and qualifying for the state finals. Wishing her all the best from all of us in Sikshana Foundation.

Sikshana - A New Initiative in High Schools

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 13:32:00 +0000

Sikshana was offering Scholarships to deserving students from High Schools who fare well in the final examinations to pursue further studies. During last year alone, thirty students were awarded about Rs 3000 each based on merit and economic criteria. The prospects of getting this financial assistance did have a cascading effect on others; though no serious studies were conducted on the impact, our own informal assessment was that this could have spurred at least a few hundred students towards better performance. The downside of such a program was that it impacted almost exclusively those at the top end of the spectrum, whereas the focus of Sikshana had always been on those at the other end.

We realized that the scholarship, once awarded, helps just one student - the one who receives it. That, by any standards, should be considered as a poor 'return on the investment'. We started examining the feasibility of getter a better leverage for the funds deployed in terms of student coverage, especially in the weaker segment.

After many rounds of brainstorming, we came across what looked like a far better way of doing this, without compromising on the focal issue: helping the deserving students to pursue higher studies. In each school, we identified the students who looked most likely to fail in the examinations in spite of the best efforts using the traditional approach. We asked the class whether any of the 'brighter' students are willing to come forward to helping their weak friends during the next three months in a sustained and structured imitative.

Under this, each student volunteer needs to engage with five of their friends on a daily basis. The outer parameters for the program will be as specified by us. Roughly this requires 90 minutes of combined study in a day, six days a week at a mutually agreed location, where the activity will be monitored. For such an involvement the student will receive Rs 3000, subject however to the condition that four of the five under his tutelage pass the final examinations. It was highlighted to them that such an effort at coaching others, apart from the financial incentive, will also be to their benefit since it will result in improving their own scores.

We were not sure how such a repackaged scholarship program will appeal to the students; there were doubts whether the good ones who deserve such assistance will really come forward to participate in a program with its associated elements of risk. There were also a number of sociological factors that came into play here; the village dynamics, involving gender and caste sensitivities, was pretty rigidly structured in each school zone to restrict the options available for such interactive sessions.

To our great surprise, the new idea was enthusiastically received in all the schools. Already 50 students have come forward in 20 schools to take up this challenge and go for the scholarship. This will mean that 250 kids are now being placed under an innovative peer learning program with an incentive for performance. This works out to 25% of the total number who are in the high risk category for the ensuing examinations.

At the same time, we are also running a second pilot with a smaller batch size with three 'learner' students. Here the incentive is non-financial; the students are being promised a holiday at a location of their choice.

We are keenly studying all aspects of both pilots; the success of either or both will show the way we have to go during the following years.

E S Ramamurthy

Missing Skills- A Test for Sikshana

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 05:08:00 +0000

Recently I walked into a First Year Pre-University class in Dodda Alahalli to get an idea of what happens to a typical student in the Higher Secondary Stage, something that Sikshana may have to deal with in the near future. The exposure was indeed a rude shock even to a hardened person like me.

There was absolutely no sign that these kids have really evolved into the upper teens; for all purposes they were still a bunch from High School who have accidentally strayed into the Higher Secondary stream. The class room dynamics was the same in the "You teach- I listen" mode. On the part of the lecturers too, it was business as usual: cover the syllabus, conduct tests, evaluate and grade the students. Anything beyond what is explicitly stated in the curriculum is strictly a 'no- go'. As a part of the course there seems to be no stipulation on any extra- curricular activities for the students. No one stays an hour beyond the college hours for activities such as debates, special lectures or meets of any type that will add value to the 'education' that is being imparted.

I asked the staff about the performance of the last batch of the students; as expected they had a mediocre 60% pass rate where even a pass which does not mean much in terms of academic achievement. When queried about the reason for such a poor result, pat came the standard response: the students who come in from High Schools are found to lack the "basics".

That struck a chord in me; I have heard this term- and the excuse- often enough at every stage. When students were found to lack even the basic reading skill in 6th Std the response invariably was that these kids were not their own; they came from LP schools which do a shoddy job. Two years pass thereafter in the Higher Primary schools during which a lot could be done to undo this damage but never gets done. When these kids move into High Schools, the refrain from the teachers there is the same; the incoming students lack the basics and they could do pretty little to make them pass the Tenth exams with the three years on hand. It seems to be the same story at every stage. Any surprise here really ? No, not as I see it.

There are two fundamental flaws in this scheme of things.

First, the entire system is built around fulfilling the needs of an externally administered syllabus thrust on students and teachers. Acquisition of a skill is never an issue in this scheme. An example: in the Kannada class and the subsequent tests, a student is checked for knowledge of content in the given text rather than the underlying lingual skill. A well written answer which does not reflect correctly on the content is viewed more adversely than another that gives the right one in a poor lingual format. This is what encourages rote learning; it results in kids who are unable to deal with any content other than what they have come across in their text books.

Worse still, the kids tend to miss out on essential skills such as comprehension and enunciation. For them a sentence is just a string of words and a para is one of sentences. There is no planned/ sustained effort within the framework of the existing system towards understanding, analysis and reaction to the content in the text. In effect, nothing is done to acquire the above skills; neither is there any effective tool to monitor their acquisition or absence. The net result is one or more of the following:

The kids are able to read a given text fluently but are unable to recall the gist of what they read. The few successful ones just repeat verbatim what they read, showing that it is coming from memory. Once the text becomes long enough, this ability gets stretched beyond limits to a point at which he/ she fails in this futile effort. The interface under check here is between reading, comprehension and expression.

One can narrate a simple story slowly and ask them to narrate back the gist of it at the end. Comprehension at this stage should in fact stretch far beyond this when they should be able to come up with answers for complex queries like the moral of the story. I have done this often enough and most kids fail this test even in the High School, and that too at the first level. Interfaces here is listening / comprehension/ expression.

There is always a possibility that the kids are unable to express themselves even though they might have understood the content. The kids were then given a story to read and at the end asked to write down the gist of it. The results were no different; the interface here is reading/ comprehension/ writing.

The common factor in all the three is obviously comprehension, a skill essential for all forms of learning which is difficult to define and even more difficult to measure. Sikshana came across this barrier first during its drive towards 'total' acquisition of reading skill. After all, what does reading fluency amount to if what is read is not understood? Ironically it took some time for us to realize that one does not automatically entail the other.

The subject of comprehension does not suffer from lack of learned treatises and analytical studies. But when it comes down to something that can be done in the context of a public school in an environment like ours, we found there was little to go by in terms of the following:

Tools for intervention

Tools for assessment

Acceptable and valid Benchmarks

Sikshana is presently coming with a few inputs under each of the above; a pilot program is being planned based on them.

The goal simply stated is this: A student who listens to a few minutes of spoken content is able to comprehend it and come up with a gist of what he heard. Without this skill, is there any hope of such a student grasping anything that is transacted in the classroom and use it for his academic advancement?

E S Ramamurthy

Every Child means...

noreply@blogger.com (Prasanna) — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 18:01:00 +0000

“Are we really impacting every child in our system?” is one question that I have been asking myself ever since I started heading the Sikshana operations 6yrs ago with nearly 10,000 children. Today we have set out to ensure delivery of quality education for over 180,000 children and with just over 40 of us in Sikshana the biggest challenge for me is to ensure that we deliver our tag line "Quality Education For Every Child". I always keep my ears open for stories where we are touching the last child in the system and 3 of them stuck with me for over a year now. While I am happy with the year end data of 2012-13 (shown at the end of the blog) which shows very clearly the improvement in the bottom 10%, stories such as these reinforces my belief that we are not losing out our little ones in our rapid scaling. And now the stories ....

Teacher Komala with Deepti

Meet child DP, a 3rd standard student of Kanajenahalli govt school, who is hearing and speech impaired. Our mentors over the last one year have been interacting with her during their school visits and kept encouraging her to keep attending school. They also discussed the issue with the teachers and one of the teachers Ms. Komala started taking special interest in her. A few changes in the teaching style like looking at DP while speaking and a little extra attention ensured DP was involved in the learning process. When I checked on her this week I found that DPis now in 4th grade, and is able to write sentences in kannada and solve simple arithmetic problems with ease.

The next one we came across was MK, who studied in 7th class in Doddamarale primary school. He is borderline mentally challenged and has physical development issues as well. Constant encouragement from teachers and Sikshana mentors has enabled him to pursue his studies. In the process his classmates became aware of his condition and were happy to see him progress in class and have made him one of their team. Our mentors have also visited his home and advised parents to seek medical help and things started looking up for this boy. Today his mother takes him to the Chikkaballapur town everyday so he can attend 8th class in the local government school.

MD was enrolled in class VI in the local Government School in P. Rampura village in Kanakapura taluk but never showed up in school. His teacher Natashekar and Sikshana Shala Hitaisi (volunteer) Shankar visited his house and counseled the student and his parents. Although the child started attending school, he was still irregular and disinterested. The real reason of his absence came to light when MD and his father, were caught in the act of begging in the nearby Kanakapura town. During the course of begging and going from house to house they landed in front of the Sikshana office!. Our mentors who were in the office filled the begging bowl with writing papers, notebooks, pens, pencils etc and topped it up with solid counseling. They discussed the adverse consequences of begging on the child’s future etc. After that he was very regular to school and took part in our Reading program and acquired ability to read Kannada fluently. This week when I checked on him I found out that his family moved and he took a TC (Transfer Certificate) and left since he wanted to join to a new school and continue his studies.

Our mentors have more such stories and for me such stories along with the data below from end of last year is very reassuring. We are happy to see 279 schools already at 100% and another 179 will join them as soon as they get that one last child to acquire the reading ability. And with the reading program and the renewed effort and focus this year, we are confident of hitting the 100% target in all our 735 upper primary schools by March 2014!

Total Number of Schools	No. of Children	Skill Type	No. of Schools where every child in Class7 has acquired skill	No. of Schools with just one child left to achieve 100%
735	21326	Arithmetic	158 (2658 children)	129 (2655 children)
735	21326	Kannada	279 (5862 children)	179 (4630 children)

PS: 100% means we are obsessed not with numbers but with our mission of ensuring Every Child Learns. A percentage point to us means that "Last Child" whom we don't want to lose!

An Amazing Exhibition at Hoskote

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 04:04:00 +0000

I have the privilige of 'Ghost Writing' a Blog for the first time - on behalf of one of our Mentors, Shivanand H of Hoskote. This concerns an amazing Exhibition their team conducted to demonstrate the impact of our Signature Initiative- the Sheets Writing Program as it is called. The entire text is his, except for some lingual editing done by me.

When I first saw the photo that is shown below, all I could say was "VOW". It is an awesome demonstration of various capabilities, not the least of which is the logistic management. I would prefer to give my views on the significance of this Event in another Blog as including them here will take the full credit away from Shivanand and his team, guided by Vishwanath and Raj Kumar.

E S Ramamurthy

Block Level Writing Sheets Exhibition and competition

February 08, 2013
Shivanand Hangaraki

• 208 students participated

• 104 school teachers

• Top 10 students had selected in Kannada (6^th and 7^th )

• Top 10 students had selected in English (6^th and 7^th )

An Amazing Exhibition at Hoskote

On February 8, 2013 in Hoskote. Sikshana Foundation organized Block Level Writing sheets Exhibition for 6^th and 7^th class students from 104 schools. Two students participated from each school; a total of 208 students had participated in the Exhibition.

BEO had informed all the schools that the students and teachers should gather in the morning in front of his office. Sharply at10 AM, all the students and teachers had gathered with their individual writing sheet files for exhibiting on the occasion.

Students took special care to introduce their writing sheets since every student had come to get a rank in TOP 10 in English or Kannada. Students introduced themselves and when asked questions explained about how they were in the beginning, number of sheets they were writing once they started and the improvement in their hand writing after some time.

Mr. Raj then spoke about the program: also how technology is affecting these days writing on the papers. He talked about Sikshana's support to the students to improve their handwriting, as it is required for a good future. He said how important this is even when we are using technologies face book, twitter and mobile texting. He suggested that this Writing sheets exhibition should be conducted in every cluster, then at block level. District and State level competitions should also be organized in future.

Ms. Usha then shared her experience with others. Whenever she used to visit the schools students came forward to show their writing sheets but there was no time to observe everyone. But today she got an opportunity to observe 208 students and also select the TOP 10 in Kannada and English language of 6^th and 7^th class . She told the students that all of them should get prizes for hand writing improvement though some of them only may get the ranks.

BEO Mr. Basavarajegowda gave his feedback. He said he is sure that the Students will continue to write sheets even after they go to High schools. This will bring Bangalore Rural once again to the ten Top ranking in SSLC results.

Mr. Shankarmurthy Administrator of BEO: He felt happy that Sikshana Foundation has organized for the first time in the State a writing exhibition of this type in Hoskote Taluq. He said that no NGO had gave preference to Hand Writing in primary schools till today.

In front of the BEO office, we arranged Benches with seat numbers for the participating students. One side were 6^th students and on other side were 7^th students, sitting in order to Exhibit their writing sheets.

Every student had brought files with the sheets they had written; they were in a 3 parts in terms of improvement of handwriting. There were 150 to 200 written sheets with every student. Some students had used color code on the papers like Red, Yellow and Green. The color coding impressed the observers and other schools students.

At this time, we also conducted a 15 minute writing test for all students. Within the allotted 15 minutes, more than 100 students had completed one full sheet (back to back). At that moment we realized the impact on student’s hand writing style and speed was awesome.

The students also shared with others the different skills they have learnt while doing this: time management in writing, self improvement, analyzing type of skills.

Five students each in 7th and 6th for Kannada and similarly 5 each in English were given prizes at the end. We are getting the responses from them and the school as video clips soon.

Raj Kumar talks about the Event