The distinguishing feature which separates the Delhi/Gurgaon based iDiscoveri Education Services Pvt. Ltd (estb. 2002) from the growing number of companies entering the school education sector, is its proprietary Xseed K-VII teaching-learning programme which is taking private schools across the country by storm, and could dramatically improve learning outcomes in India’s classrooms. Introduced into the conser-vative Indian education market which is wary about wonder pedagogies and silver bullet technologies in 2007, after four years of research, development, testing and refinement by the company’s 40-strong Content, Design and Research division, in the first year of operations Xseed (priced between Rs.3-7 lakh per school) was installed by only three primaries. But since then, mainly because of favourable word-of-mouth publicity, the number of client schools has multiplied to over 300, and in mid February the number of children learning the Xseed way in 22 states countrywide crossed the 100,000 milestone.
“The unique characteristic of the Xseed teaching-learning programme is that it replaces traditional teacher-centric chalk-n-talk one-step pedagogy, with Xseed’s five-step teaching-learning system. Xseed has been designed to ensure that each class begins with setting the goals of the lesson, followed by introduction of an experiential activity, teacher-student reflection and analysis, application of learning, and assessment. Our research and experience indicate that learning outcomes of all students in Xseed classes has improved dramatically,” says Dr. Tapaswini Sahu, an alumna of JNU, Delhi and Cambridge University (UK), and partner at iDiscoveri who leads the assessment work in the Content, Design and Research division.
Yet the prime factor behind the growing acceptance of the Xseed study programme in primary schools countrywide is not merely improved pedagogy. Although iDiscoveri top brass prefer not to dwell on it, a major factor behind its success is that it takes the unarticulated aversion of the teachers’ community to new ICT (information communication techno-logies) into consideration and offers step-by-step lesson plans in familiar print medium teachers’ manuals for teaching English, maths, science and the social sciences. The programme simulta-neously provides detailed experiential lesson plan manuals; certificate training programmes in innovative teaching; a fully-trained instruction leader (trained from within the staff of client schools); and subject-wise workbooks for each child which also facilitates assessment.
“The comprehensive Xseed programme ensures that children absorb and apply knowledge, instead of merely memorizing texts. It also ensures that all teachers teach well — instead of just the exceptional ones — and all students learn,” says Ashish Rajpal, the promoter-chief executive of iDiscoveri, explaining the leapfrogging popularity of the company’s path-breaking primary school teaching-learning programme.