Special Report

Wipro’s school reforms initiative

Over the past three years the Azim Premji Foundation and the Wipro Applying Thought in Schools programme have been playing pioneering roles in raising teaching standards in the school system by convening teachers’ workshops and school education upgradation seminars. Summiya Yasmeen reports

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A persistent and growing criticism of Indian industry is that despite it being the greatest user/ beneficiary of India’s education system, its captains and leaders tend to suffer a blind spot towards education. The phenomenon of India’s new generation of IT (information technology) millionaires endowing and enabling their alma maters is of very recent origin. And for mysterious reasons this welcome development has been nipped in the bud by Union human resource development minister Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi who recently issued a diktat that donations to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) — and presumably to all government-run education institutions — must be routed through the ministry’s Bharat Shiksha Kosh (trust). Unmysteriously the flow of donations into the ministry’s trust has dwindled to a trickle (see EW January cover story).

But if education in general is a blind spot of Indian industry which costs it hundreds of crores annually in terms of in-house training of personnel (another blind spot of industry), school education is even more so. Industry leaders — and perhaps even the leading lights of academia — generally fail to make the connection between declining standards in the country’s 15,600 colleges and 311 universities and their feeder institutions: schools. Though typically, contemporary India boasts a sprinkling of high quality independent, traditional and new genre international schools, 90 percent of the nation’s primary and secondary schools are owned and managed by the Central and state governments and the overwhelming majority of them would not be classified as ‘schools’ in developed countries. These government schools whose number is estimated at over 750,000 across the country, have remained totally beyond the ken of Indian industry — and academia.

Fortunately the picture is not entirely bleak. Several captains of Indian industry have — even if belatedly — made the academia-industry connection and are utilising their formidable skill-sets to address the problem of declining standards in Indian education. Among them encouragingly is IT tycoon and reportedly the world’s richest Indian Azim Premji (est. net worth: Rs.30,820 crore) who has diagnosed the vital importance of upgrading the quality of school education, particularly in the government sector. In 2000 he promoted the Azim Premji Foundation (annual budget: Rs.20 crore) which is committed to upgradation of academic standards in government schools especially in rural India. In 2001 Wipro Ltd launched its Wipro Applying Thought in Schools (Watis) programme to upgrade teaching/learning standards in urban schools.

Over the past three years both these initiatives have acquired momentum and are playing a pioneering role in raising teaching standards in the school system by convening teachers’ workshops and school education upgradation seminars. On March 15, 60 knowledgeable educationists from across the country converged on the 10-acre hi-tech Bangalore campus of Wipro for Watis’ third all India seminar titled the ‘3rd Partners Forum’ to discuss ways and means of recasting the exam-centric, highly regimented and rote-learning driven school education system.

Premji with teachers: belated academia-industry connectivity

Yet the true significance of Watis is that Premji and his team of Wipro professionals have invested the formidable business analysis and management expertise of this interna-tionally competitive corporate into this education upgradation initiative which has clear objectives — teacher upskilling, education leadership and parent awareness.

The initiative which was launched in May 2001 has thus far trained more than 2,700 principals and teachers from 120 urban schools in 12 cities. "We invite proven educationists to partner with us to transmit best teaching practices to teachers and principals of participating schools. For example in the teacher training module, we work on transforming teachers into thoughtful classroom practitioners using latest pedagogical techniques. This transformation is effected through workshops and extensive school-based support. On the other hand in the leadership programme, we work with the school directors and principals to prepare them to lead this transformation. And with parents we try to change their ideas about the true purpose of education. In the broader context we want to transform curriculums from being content heavy to ability enhancing," adds Gupta.

The high quality organisation and management skills Wipro is introducing into the poorly managed education sector was evidenced in the conference itself. Right from choosing the appropriate mix of knowledgeable participants with impressive track records in school education from across the country, coordinating and arranging their transport to Bangalore to managing the agenda of the two-day forum, the formidable project management skills of this world-beating corporate were very much in evidence. They were perhaps a lesson in themselves to educationists, teachers and NGO (non-government organisation) leaders who had convened for the conference on March 15-16.

The mix of delegates to the workshop included for-profit education companies such as Educational Initiatives Pvt Ltd, Ahmedabad; Educomp Datamatics Pvt Ltd, Delhi; EZ Vidya, Chennai; iDiscoveri Education Pvt Ltd, Delhi; as well as NGOs and not-for-profits such as Azim Premji Foundation, Bangalore; Eklavya, Bhopal; Homi Bhabha Centre, Mumbai; the Network of Enterprising Educational Ventures, Delhi; Sparsh, Pune; The Teacher Foundation, Bangalore, Vidya Bhavan Society, Jaipur; Schoolscape, Bhubaneswar; Centre for Education Management and Development, Delhi and the Vikramshila Education Resource Society, Kolkata. This eclectic mix of education entrepreneurs and NGO leaders ensured that the workshop featured lively and animated discussions on ways and means to upgrade the nation’s fast-obsolescing school education system. Representatives of these high-performance organisations presented 13 papers on themes ranging from new pedagogies and techniques in elementary education, creating awakeful cultures in schools, teaching social sciences to the relevance of child assessment methodologies (see box p. 68).

The introductory paper was presented by Rohit Dhankar, director of Digantar, a Jaipur-based NGO, which runs three schools for children of economically disadvant-aged families in Rajasthan.

Dhankar: quality definition debate

While Dhankar’s presentation and the lively discussion which followed threw light on the definition of quality education, the pre-lunch session coordinated by the Pune-based Sparsh — a non-government education think tank — led by its co-promoter and director Devika Nadig enumerated practical advice on delivering fair and just education. Her presentation, ‘Drishti — the relevance of secularism, gender, sexuality, and adult-child relationships in the classroom’ highlighted the efficacy of a training module designed by the Sparsh team to help teachers examine their own prejudices and biases which could impede the delivery of just and fair education in their classrooms. Sparsh’s training module prompts teachers to reflect upon various types of discrimination in Indian society and helps them discern manifestations of social inequities inside their classrooms while advising them how to make appropriate interventions. Thus far 100 teachers in Pune have been trained by Sparsh to tackle various types of discrimination in their schools.

In her light and sound presentation which included a five-minute video of teachers’ responses in a Drishti workshop in Pune, Nadig observed: "No matter how liberal, open and accepting a teacher may believe she is, she brings societal prejudices and biases into her classroom. These prejudices and assumptions necessarily inform and influence her teaching and interactions with students. Drishti helps teachers to detect and address these biases and suggests ways and means of overcoming them. The programme takes teachers through a process of self-transformation and highlights the importance of the ideals of equity and social justice. We designed this programme because we believe that no longer can issues of communalism, sexuality and gender injustice be swept under the carpet."

Nadig (left): intensive training module

The central and critical role of teachers in delivering quality education was also emphasised by Ashish Rajpal, co-founder and managing director of the Delhi-based iDiscoveri Education Pvt Ltd. Orchestrating a session titled ‘Creating an awakeful culture in schools — Beyond constructivist philosophy and towards truly engaged teachers’ Rajpal highlighted recent innovations in the recruitment, induction and training of teachers "to create a culture of genuine belief and meaningful learning within the teaching community".

Idiscoveri is an experiential learning, teaching and research company promoted in 1996 by several highly qualified alumni of Harvard University, INSEAD, the IITs and XLRI. Its activities include curriculum development, teacher training, development of life skills, environment, adventure, personal development and executive education programmes. Thus far over 12,000 children and adults across the country have participated in iDiscoveri’s learning courses. The company’s latest venture is the promotion of the kindergarten-class XII CISCE and International Baccalaureate Organisation affiliated Strawberry Fields World School, Chandigarh, which commenced classes last month.

Rajpal (seated): unusual recruitment process

Nevertheless at this symposium as in most others on the subject, there was general awareness that while upskilling teachers and improving pedagogies is critical to raising academic standards in the nation’s estimated 843,000 schools, syllabus contemporisation and curriculum design is if at all, only marginally less so. This was stressed by Shubra Chatterjee, executive director of the Kolkata-based Vikramshila Education Resource Society in her paper, ‘Context-specific curriculum — Curriculum as a dynamic process beyond the syllabus’. Chatterjee detailed how Vikramshila (est. 1992) has achieved a breakthrough in designing a needs-based curriculum for 275 primary school children in its experimental lab school in Bigha, a village four hours by train from Kolkata.

Chatterjee (left): curriculum design breakthrough

Quite obviously the prerequisite of teacher upskilling and curriculum development programmes in schools is enlightened leadership. Increasingly school promoters and principals are being required to function like successful corporate sector chief executives who are judged by their capability to mentor, nurture — and perhaps most important — retain the brightest and best teachers. With a rash of upscale ‘international’ schools offering unprecedented pay packets springing up across the country and Indian teachers in demand abroad as well, inter-school teacher migration has assumed epidemic proportions. This changed scenario was highlighted in a panel discussion on the subject ‘Leadership challenges in developing a quality school’ featuring six eminent school principals and educationists including Deepa Sridhar, principal of Sri Kumaran’s Children’s Home, Bangalore and Jayashree Oza, director of the Centre for Education Management and Development, Delhi.

"With the emergence of several so-called international schools in and around Bangalore, teachers are in great demand and are being offered fantastic salaries. Given our middle class fee structure we find it difficult to match the corporate style pay and perks offered by these new schools. Therefore school principals need to learn extraordinary motivational and developmental skills to retain teachers whom we have nurtured and skilled over several years," said Sridhar, echoing a common predicament of school principals at the symposium.

Some posers relating to school leadership problems as also to syllabus contempor-isation and development were answered by Francis Fanthome the high-profile and tech-savvy chief executive of the Delhi-based Council of Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) which is proclaimed as India’s most preferred all-India school examination board (see EW December 2003 cover story) and has 1,286 schools (including the majority of upscale boarding schools) affiliated with it. In his paper on ‘Evolving quality schools — Vision and action’ Fanthome announced a new CISCE quality education initiative based on the Watis model. He informed the workshop that in association with Watis, the council is developing a Wipro-Indian Schools Excellence Empowerment (WISE) programme to enable and empower CISCE affiliated schools to introduce new pedagogies which will stimulate creativity, develop the logical reasoning and problem solving skills of students.

"WISE is a new partnership programme open to council-affiliated schools whose leaders voluntarily want to move from memory-based to integrated learning systems. The programme will be flexible and focus on developing children’s environment sensitivity, innovation and creativity, independent judgement, and value systems. The syllabus will be developed by us and the evaluation method will accord due weightage to understanding of concepts and application of content and creativity," he said.

Yet perhaps the greatest infirmity of post-independence India’s school education system is that curriculum and pedagogy reforms tend to be confined to upscale private sector CBSE and CISCE affiliated schools. Government schools run by indifferent if not under-qualified state and local government educrats tend to be resistant to change and innovation with the result that their students are handicapped when they enter college and later the job market. But as delegates to the conference discovered, there’s hope on this front as well. In her paper ‘The learning of social science — Issues in the pedagogy of social science in elementary schools’ Anjali Noronha of Eklavya, Bhopal, among the first NGOs in the country to rebel against obsolete syllabuses dumped on government school students, spoke about the unique low-cost inquiry-based curriculum the Eklavya team has designed to teach social sciences in middle school (classes V-VII).

"The objective of Eklavya’s social sciences curriculum is to develop a modern democratic citizen — an individual who can make choices based on critical analyses and systemic understanding of societal development. To fulfill this objective our textbooks attempt to provide critical analyses of social, political and economic systems. We use story-telling and illustration techniques as pedagogical tools to explore and develop concrete images of complex social and political realities," said Noronha. Thus far Eklavya has impacted 100,000 children in 1,000 government schools in Madhya Pradesh.

Rajagopalan (right): skills-based assessment model

Quite obviously a publication such as EducationWorld which is governed by time and space constraints can at best highlight the papers and sessions which in the admittedly subjective opinion of this writer, were the most interesting. Nevertheless it needs to be stated that given the mix of high-performance participants invited to the symposium/ forum, all the 13 papers presented were of high quality and shed considerable light on the fundamental problems of the school system and highlighted their creative responses to the challenge of declining standards in school education which is adversely impacting national productivity.

In the circumstances there’s no denying that a large number of benefits were derived by participants through the exchange of ideas and best practices. Comments Vijay Gupta, who orchestrated the 3rd Partners Forum: "The workshop has made a valuable contribution towards building the momentum of the movement towards quality school education in India. Our major achievement was to gather these high-achievement oriented educationists to share their experiences and learn from one another. The valuable ideas and system upgradation proposals generated at this workshop will be disseminated to the entire teachers community through a book we intend to publish shortly."

Kant (right): organisation lesson

Yet the larger significance of Wipro’s Azim Premji Foundation and Watis and the high quality workshops and symposia they orchestrate is that they have lighted a path for other corporates which take their social responsibilities seriously, to establish a mutually beneficial connection with the education system. Indian industry is the largest user and potentially the greatest sufferer of a moribund education system which is in urgent need of the analytical, management and evaluation skills which corporate India has in abundance. It is in industry’s own interest to ensure that some of these skills are transferred to under-managed and floundering education institutions.

And therefore Wipro’s constructive engagement with rural and urban schools is a model which needs to be replicated on a grander scale.