Pankaj Jain did his fellow program at IIMA in the seventies – and has been in academics since then. He has been associated as faculty at IRMA and  visiting some western universities. I first heard of Pankaj through his fellow program batchmate, Ashok Pratap Arora, who has been my teacher at IIM Calcutta. Later on, I got introduced to him through my friend Meher Gadekar, who has been his student at IRMA. Pankaj runs an NGO, Gyan Shala, which works on educating kids from the poorer sections of society. Gyan Shala started its work in Ahmedabad at the start of the millenium. They have worked in 4 states: Gujarat, UP, Bihar and West Bengal – and have taught around 250,000 kids over the years.

The idea of Gyanshala was conceptualised in Bangladesh. Pankaj was visiting the country as part of a consulting project and found Bangladesh doing much better in girls’ education than its relatively rich neighbour, India. He delved deeper into what makes Bangladesh tick. Where India had islands of excellence, Bangladesh was a sea of educational competence. So what could be done to change the tides in India’s educational sea? Start with the masses. Pankaj’s assumption was that what works for the poor, will definitely work for the rich, as the challenges to the poor are always more. For example, parental mentoring is a given for the middle class kid, but is rarely available to the slum kid.

As of 2015, their flagship elementary program – which runs from Grade 1 to 3 – had 45,000 kids. (The numbers have been falling from 2015 to 2017. Data after 2017 is not available on the gyan shala website) This program runs single teacher single room schools in slums. The advantage is that schools are walking distance for both students and teachers, so there is a lot of social security for girls, convenience, as well as zero transport costs. Classes run for 4 hours a day, without breaks. Many classrooms are used for two shifts. 

The volumes are higher in their government school quality intervention programs. In 2015, they were working with 500,000 students in 7300 Bihar schools.

Pankaj believes that learning outcomes of Gyanshala programs can be measured reliably when done by external agencies. So Gyanshala has invited organisations like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Ahmedabad based Educational Initiatives, which runs the Asset program, to do its annual assessment. Internal daily assessments are done by teachers using subject worksheets, and quarterly orals and six monthly written tests by senior teachers. Gyanshala kids are doing 60-70 % better in standardised tests than municipal school students. Their grade 3 scores are comparable or higher than the average of India’s best schools.

The program places emphasis on children doing individual and group work each day in the class under teacher supervision. Supply of high-quality learning material is given huge importance. Each child gets to work on a one-page worksheet each day for each subject stream. A teacher spends around 20% of class time in full class teaching, and 30 % on individual attention to each child. The remaining time is given to group teaching-tuition and supervision of group work by children.

Pankaj did not want to build a model predicated on finding good teachers. Good teachers are important for learning outcomes, but good teachers are rare. What was needed was good quality, on a large scale, at a cost lower than government schools. The focus at Gyanshala is learning. Instead of worrying only about teaching capacity, the question Pankaj tried to answer was how can we improve the child’s capacity to learn? Learning takes place in the mind of the child. In most schools, 70 % of education cost is teacher salary and training cost. In Gyanshala, it is 35% – and student learning material spend is 20%. 

But this does not mean that teachers are irrelevant. What Pankaj did was to build a system that converts ordinary teachers to competent ones. The curriculum planning and lesson preparation role of the teacher has been transferred to a curriculum design team. Class teachers are recruited from the community, so they are familiar with student backgrounds and comfortable in working in the slum. Gyan Shala lays emphasis on ongoing teacher training compared to one long teacher education program. Teacher training comprises 12 days orientation training at the start of teacher-role, supplementary training of one day each month and 4-5 days during festival break. Every year, 8-10 days refresher training is organized during summer break. Weekly visit of a senior teacher to each class also acts as teacher-training cum demonstration exercise. For every 10 classes, a senior teacher with graduate education is deployed who attends each class once a week. The senior teacher also takes care of  administrative issues, letting the class teacher focus 100% on learning. 

The class teachers for grade 1-3 are required to have passed higher secondary, though graduates also take up the job. Senior teachers also act as an interface between teachers and the curriculum design team, as well as between the school and parents. 

There have been a lot of changes in  society in the last 70 years, no reason to believe it will not be as drastic in the next 70 years. Gyan Shala aims to have a curriculum that would prepare children for the challenges over the next 70 years of their life, within the framework.of formal state approved curriculum. Two hallmarks of the gyanshala system: well integrated and always learning. 

Initially, the elementary school program had three major subject streams: local language (Gujarati, Hindi, Bangla etc.), math and project work. The latter covered EVS, but more importantly, it helped the children to learn independently. School time is divided into activities: periods of 15-20 minutes to match the typical attention span of small children, with language and math-related activities claiming around 60 percent of the class time. Gyan Shala integrated extra-curricular activities in the daily class schedule and allocated these a space comparable to individual math, language or project modules. 

English was later introduced as a second language, under pressure from parents. Pankaj believes that students who do not speak English at home do worse in English medium schools than if they were in local language schools. For 95% of jobs, English does not matter. English does matter for the 5% though. Gyan Shala classes take students to a level where they will easily pick up English once they transfer to an environment where English is spoken and/ or used in written form. 

The middle school program, for grades 4-7, in contrast to the primary program, has seen numbers increasing regularly. As of 2017, there were 2600 kids enrolled, most of them in Ahmedabad. For the middle school program, the first challenge requires teachers to have subject expertise of significant depth, which most individuals cannot be expected to have in many subject streams, spanning language-math-science-social studies. This program, therefore, needed specialist subject teachers for each stream, while in elementary stage; one class teacher could oversee and facilitate the learning tasks in all the subject streams. Further, the learning tasks in an elementary program could be handled by teachers with grade XII education, but middle school teachers required a greater depth of subject knowledge, requiring graduate-level education, and specialization in one particular subject. A minimum of 4-5 teachers taught in each middle school class. The third challenge required the program to invest in teacher training much more than in the elementary program and building high-quality conceptual foundation among the teacher trainers, who could help teachers to overcome the gaps in their university education to a certain extent.

I asked Pankaj about the lockdown experience at Gyan Shala. Most of us would have expected Gyan Shala to have become digital. But Pankaj’s assessment of technology differs. He started by telling us that the first use of tech actually dates back to the 1950s, when use of radio in education was tried for the first time. TV replaced radio. Computers replaced TV. But research and experience show that tech does not work for younger kids. Maybe the experience is marginally better for Grade 8+ students. Tech works if a school system has broken down. So Pankaj’s conclusion is that tech cannot replace, but only supplement interaction between a child and a teacher or a child and a book. 

So when the lockdown started, Gyanshala learning material was sent across to students. Teachers started going to student houses – but students were not comfortable. So teachers started calling students in groups of 5 to the existing classes. By putting up TVs in the current classrooms for middle school, they switched to an asynchronous learning model, with lectures recorded by experienced teachers. This reduced the efforts of the teachers as teaching class of 5 does not fit the economic model. Teachers spent time instead helping students once they had seen the TV shows. Learning outcomes, however, are only 60% of usual in this model.

What is really outstanding about Pankaj is his focus on evolving his frugal educational model. He insists that his single classroom schools should continue to be on rent in order to have capex frugality. He has declined two opportunities to start or run ‘proper’ schools. One of Ahmedabad’s top builders offered to construct a school next to the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation. There are slums close by. But that did not meet Pankaj’s standards of operational efficiency. In Gyanshala’s model, capex is only 15% of total cost. 85% is opex. In another instance, an old aided secondary school (with an unaided primary wing) in old Ahmedabad, run by a Mumbai based industrialist, approached Pankaj asking him to take over the trust. His experience of running this school is not very positive, given the regulatory and competitive environment. 

Next time I speak to Pankaj, I should seek his opinion on Shanti Bhavan, (https://www.shantibhavanchildren.org/ ) which is also doing good work with slum kids. But they have taken a different approach – of adopting these kids and putting them up in a residential campus, where food and hygiene are both taken care of. The idea being that these are also important in child development. I can already imagine Pankaj rejecting this model for his work, as it does not meet his criterion of scalability. One model that we did discuss was the Pabal model of working on building employability in secondary school kids. (http://vigyanashram.com /) This is one model that has personally interested me for a long time. Take kids after 8th – and get them employment ready. It is OK, if they want to continue their education. Pankaj does not have too much experience outside of school education – so he hesitated to give advice outside his area of expertise.    

I sought advice for Peepal Tree school. Pankaj mentioned that affiliation is important. It is difficult to convince parents to continue their kids in higher classes without affiliation. We can ‘tie-up’ with a regular school for certification requirements. NiOS is easier to affiliate with, but it also has its own share of bureaucratic hurdles. Maybe we can look at the Ghole road based Technical Training Institute, where we get students to visit a skill school once a week. He felt that our teachers are very underpaid – compared to the qualification. Michael and Susan Dell Foundation can be approached for donations. Pankaj is disappointed that Peepal Tree school has not scaled well. He observed that tortoises can win races, but the important resource for learning by mistakes and their correction is not money, but time. To recognize mistakes and course-correct for a three year program for grades 1-3, took Pankaj 5-6 years. At 52, in Corona times, I may be running out of years fast!  

More about Gyan Shala at https://gyanshala.org/

Feedback from Arvind Gupta

Arvind: I saw Ravi’s name as a trustee of  Gyanshala. He is a dear friend for 40 years. I am attaching his reply for a more wholistic view.

Ravi: I was a trustee of Gyan Shala many years ago and left because of differences with their policies. I would be surprised if my name is still shown as a trustee, because I resigned. Pankaj Jain, the founder, believes in running schools by paying teachers only minimum wages. I was even unsure of whether they were paid that much. I am opposed to that since I believe that the work of teachers is one of the most important in society and they cannot be treated as unskilled wage workers. Would love to catch up with you on the phone. My term as director of HBCSE will end in June and I am dearly looking forward to that.

K. Subramaniam

Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR, Mumbai

Atul: About Gyanshala, I would agree with Pankaj about salaries. I think when you need to scale fast, every rupee counts. I may not be sure of the cost effectiveness of their research team. Am a bit mystified about their journey in last 5 years. No data on site. I suspect numbers are down drastically. Will be speaking with Pankaj in June. Will update you then..

Gyanshala Visit, Jul 21

Ashram Express was on time. Stopped at Sabarmati station, crossed the river and arrived at the main Kalupur station. Noted the cloudy weather and decided to walk to Paldi. Like Pune, the river separates the new city from the old. Walked past Sarangpur bus stand, 200 metres from the railway station. Google maps also took me past Gita Mandir, the Gujarat ST terminus of Ahmedabad. Then I walked past Jamalpur, the APMC mandi. Bought Chirantan 1 kg of jamun from there. From Jamalpur, crossed the Sabarmati river and went past the main campus of NID at Paldi. Had 1 coconut water, value for money at 40 bucks. Took me 1.5 hours to walk the 5.2 km. 

It was a pity that I could not meet with Professor Pankaj Jain. He had been invited by the Uttar Pradesh director of education for a meeting in Lucknow on Monday, so had taken a morning flight on Sunday itself. Chirantan is part of Pankaj succession plan. He will be looking after fundraising and government licensing. One of his colleagues, Zalak, will be looking after academics. The numbers at Gyanshala had been falling even before the pandemic happened. From a peak of 40,000 numbers are now down to 26000. A lot of it is due to migration of labour. 

One major insight was about the NIOS experience of Gyanshala. They had started 8-10 section using NIOS certification. Although the school used to conduct examinations in February, results would come in only by September. Too late for students to take admission in any college. So after a few years of experimentation, the NIOS project was dropped and now gyanshala is only up to grade 7. This is in spite of the fact that the chairman of NIOS is a personal friend of Professor Jain. Moral of the story for Peepal Tree: go in for a tie-up with a local state board school and forget about NIOS. Or run only upto grade 7. Gyanshaala did talk to some government schools for affiliation relationships. but most government school principals do not like to take a risk working with the unorganised sector. 

Chirantan has led a nomadic life. Grew up in Mumbai, where his dad worked with BARC. Went to VNIT Nagpur to do his Civil engineering. Worked with L&T ECC, but realised within a year that it’s not his cuppa tea. Pivoted to journalism. Covered business related issues at Chennai for Deccan Chronicle. Wanted to cover civic issues, but his Tamil was not all that great. 

After 3 years at Chronicle, decided to do his PG. Wanted to get into the social and cultural communication PG program at Tata Institute of Social Studies, Mumbai. Got through the written, but could not clear the interview. They have an intake of 20 students in this program. Chirantan did not want to take the risk of waiting another year. Took the CAT and got into IIM Kozhikode. 

IIMK campus job was at ITC. Started off in soap sales, then moved to consumer research for cigarettes. The last stint was in the notebook division, Classmates. It was a seven-year ITC affair for the bachelor Chirantan. By then, the loan that had been taken for his MBA had been paid off. And the 7th year itch to do something more meaningful had started. 

He left to join a startup that was like TED.com, the difference being that the mode was interviews and not public talks. The speakers were the common men and women around us. The Lalit, Bangalore, sponsored them to do a series on transgenders. Chirantan’s partner then decided to get into documentary filmmaking, and the duo parted ways. 

Chirantan toyed around with the idea of joining the fellow programme at Azim Premji University. One of his relatives suggested that he come down to Ahmedabad and meet with Professor Pankaj Jain. He came for 2 days, and has stayed back for three years already. After chatting for some time at his lovely booklined home,  we left for breakfast at Udupi cafe, at Paldi PanchRasta. Enjoyed the idli vada and set dosa. Washed it down with some lemon tea. 

There are 6,500 students in Ahmedabad and Surat, mostly in the grade 1 to 3 sections. The students are sponsored by corporates like UBS and Tata. There are three design teams, sitting in Gujarat, UP and Bihar. The design team always is from the vernacular background. The team is also involved in teacher training. There is a team of about 22 designers at each of the three state headquarters. Out of this 10 work in grade 1-3 and 12 work in grade 4-7. In UP they have this team split between Lucknow and Farrukhabad. in Bihar the team is split between Patna and Muzaffarpur. 

I asked Chirantan what they would do if they wanted to expand into Maharashtra. The first target would be to have at least 100 classes. This means about 2000 students. This would imply about 50 classrooms. Gyanshaala will put in a field team in place who will go around slums and look at areas where school enrollment is less. They will identify 50 teachers but the beginning will be made with supervisor recruitment. The ratio of supervisors to teachers is such that a supervisor will attend every class once a week. 

We visited Pravin nagar, a low income locality in Vasna, where Gyanshala runs a 3 room school. The school has three teachers, all of whom work two shifts. Each shift is 3 hours. Most of the kids are from the Hindi belt of UP and Bihar.  Met with Jhalpa Chavda, one of the teachers at the Pravin nagar school. Her dad is a daily wage earner. Her mum works in a hospital as a sweeper. The brother is in 12th standard pursuing arts. Her grandfather is a cobbler. They stay in Pravinnagar itself. Jhalpa studied in a Gujarati medium government school in a village called Paliyad, District Botad. Her family shifted 2 years ago to the city, because there was no income to be made at the village. She has been working for the last two years with Gyanshala. The teacher Jhalpa liked the most in her own school was Rizwana, who taught her Gujarati. She liked Rizwana because she was a teacher who never lost her temper. If Jhalpa bunked class, then Rizwana would go out of her way to get Jhalpa up to speed. 

Jhalpa teaches two first grade classes in two shifts,  each with 21 kids. She teaches them Gujarati, English, Math and Project. Attendance is typically 17 nowadays. 10 to 11 of them do homework and come. Class books have been printed. Homework is given in plain exercise books. 

The attention span of the 1-4 kid is only for 10 to 15 minutes. So you need a change every 10 to 15 minutes. Kids are rotated across benches after every 15 minutes. The first 10 to 15 minutes of a class are spent in teaching. The next 10 to 15 minutes are in group activity. And the last 10 to 15 minutes are on the worksheet, which has to be done in class. Instructions for conducting the class have been given in the teaching manual. 

Jhalpa finds her biggest problem to be teaching English. She and her class kids are at sea when it comes to spoken English. Till 3rd standard, the classroom teacher manuals have been translated into Hindi. Later on they are all in English. Jhalpa will have to improve her own English skills before she can improve her students’ skills. She did not have any questions for me. Also, she did not have any suggestions for improving the system at Gyanshala. I guess, in the same way her kids also don’t have too many questions for her. 

After Jhalpa left, we had a long chat with Bhavna ben, who is the senior supervisor at Gyanshala. She has spent 15 years in Gyanshala. Has been a science teacher and has taught from grade 4 to grade 8. She was part of the experiment of grade 9 and 10, when the school had a tie up with Anand Niketan school. She got promoted to supervisor after 8 years. And four years later, is now senior supervisor. She has a cluster of four supervisors reporting to her. Each supervisor is in charge of eight classes. Supervisor’s task is to attend each class every week. The supervisor also acts as a demo teacher for new teachers. 

The supervisor looks after books, fee collection in the erstwhile days, and in inventory management. She also makes the receipt for the fees. Most parent issues like attendance etc are handled by the teachers themselves., but some do get escalated to the supervisor. The supervisor does home visits.

A senior supervisor has 9 supervisors reporting to her. Ahmedabad has got 4  senior supervisors. Surat has 1. Lucknow has 2. Farookhabad has 2. Patna has 2 and Muzaffarpur has 2 too. They have closed down Bengal after the lockdown. A total of 13 senior supervisors. Each supervisor is looking after about 2000 kids. A total of 26,000 kids. 

Gyanshaala’s MIS system tracks attendance of teachers and students. Monthly meetings are held with supervisors. Baseline and endline tests are there. Grade 1-2 tests are mostly oral with a little bit of written. In Ahmedabad this is done by a company called Convegenius. (It was earlier called grey matters.) In other locations, it is Educational Initiative, which does these tests. Got the sad news that Sridhar’s wife passed away last year. He has now shifted base to Bangalore. 

There is a core training which lasts for about 10 days. One subject is taught for two days. There are a total of four subjects. 2 days are spent in the philosophy of Gyanshaala and in trying to develop the teacher’s communication skills. In these two days, they are also taught how to use the teaching manuals. After they finish their training, teachers go to live classes and shadow existing teachers for about 2 to 3 days. After they finish the shadowing, they do two to three days of supervised teaching, where the supervisor attends the class to hone the teaching skills. Chirantan feels that the training cost of a teacher is about Rs. 8000. 

I asked Bhavna about the challenges at Gyanshala. She said that salary is the biggest issue. Today the average tenure of a teacher in Gyanshala is about 2 years. Malls end up poaching any teachers, who can speak reasonably good English. It takes about 1.5 months to train a teacher. For the lower grades 1-3, the payment is Rs. 2000 per shift. For the higher grades, from 4-7, the payment is Rs.2,800. Bhavna feels that the salary should be between 3,000 to 3,500 per month. I asked if we could cut down the number of teachers and increase the average salary of the remaining teachers. We could cut down some of the “extra teachers” (5% of population), the buffer that is maintained for absenteeism, but it may lead to the number of students in a class increasing. There are currently 20 students in a class – it may shoot up to 25. 

A majority of the new teachers leave within 3 months of joining. That’s a lot of wasted money. The profile of teachers has been changing. Earlier, teachers would join the school when they were in their late twenties or early thirties. They already had families and were stable. Income stability and status was very important to them. Nowadays most teachers who join are either studying in college or graduates. They look at Gyanshala as a temporary job. And jump ship whenever the next slightly better paying opportunity presents itself. Or we change our recruitment idea – and go back to the old model? Or has society changed so much that the good old days of housewives are gone forever? Would we have lower attrition rates when we take our ex students in as teachers?

My suggestion was: why don’t we charge Rs. 100 to 200 fee from parents of children who can afford it. I was told that they were charging about Rs. 50 fee before the pandemic. They have stopped the practice since the lockdowns have started. 

During Corona days, Gyanshaala tried using videos and phones, but that did not work out too well. I wanted to check a few of the videos. Chirantan has promised to mail on Google drive or WhatsApp. There was an old Crown second hand television that had been installed in the classroom. but the television remote was taken home by Jhalpa ben so that it does not get misused. Bhavna ben believes that recorded sessions should be continued even in normal days post lockdown. It helps the teacher. and definitely will help in teacher training. I think this is a model which Gyanshaala can pivot to so as to improve academic delivery quality. There should always be a teacher in class – but teaching can be a shared activity between the design team and the physical classroom teacher. The role of the local teacher will be more in doubt handling – and student motivation.  

Bhavnaben has been in the Gyanshala system for more than 15 years. This is a very long time – and gives her a perspective about what students have been doing in their school afterlife. 

• 3-4 have gone on to become engineers. 
• A few ITIs and 3-4 diplomas. 
• There are a few in college. 
• Quite a few have got into the business which was being carried on by their parents. 
• Some are working in other people’s shops. 

About 80% are doing the same kind of work that their parents are doing. Profession is a metric we need to focus on. We would like students to take a small step up the socio-economic ladder with the education we impart. It would be a good idea to contrast Gyanshala’s model with Muni’s model – and check outcomes in this space.

Have promised to come back to do some teacher training at Gyanshala. All that they need to do is send me 3rd AC tickets and arrange for a place to stay at Ahmedabad. I hope that Chirantan will share some of the templates for books, manuals and quality systems with me. I have promised to translate his books and manuals from Hindi to English.

Post Gyanshala got dropped off to Shankar Tekwani’s house. He has done his diploma in engineering from DY Patil, Pune. Has two kids. Daughter is in 11th and is preparing for fashion design entrance tests with BRDS. Son is at Narsee Monjee. He got into the BBA program, but dropped out after a year to shift to their hospitality program at Navi Mumbai. His classes are online and all theory is being done early. Narsee Monjee hopes that they will be able to compress two years worth of practicals into 1 semester, starting January 2022. One of the attractions for hotel management was his grandfather’s hotel. Shankar’s dad passed away a year ago. He had run a restaurant for almost 40 years. 

Shankar worked for a couple of years after his diploma. Then came back to Ahmedabad. The entire family was in business. He partnered with his cousin and they started off in the cables business. After a few years he started his own factory, Spectrum Cables, in a 6,000 square feet plot. Employs about 10 to 12 people. Has purchased a 20,000 sq ft plot in GIDC Sanand. Will be moving factory in the next few months. Has divested his stake in the joint venture factory after the passing away of his father.

Most of his work is in signal and control cables. These cables tend to be shielded ones. 20% of revenue comes from the conventional cable business. Like Anil, Shankar believes that word of mouth marketing is the best. Whenever someone has a tough problem to solve in wiring Shankar is a go-to guy. I asked him for an industry wise breakup of clientele and he confessed that he has the data but has never collated it. 

Shankar took me out for some roadside chai. Was gifted a bun maska for my dinner. We then went to Sumesh bhai’s place. Sumesh is a solar evangelist. Learnt a lot from him. He also is the owner of an Okinawa and one more electric scooter. He talked of the times when EVs where called bakris in Ahmedabad – mostly for their low speed and short lived batteries. His suggestion to Okinawa was to focus on build quality and service. Did the shoot and then took a shared auto to Vasna. From there got the 150 number bus to Saharanpur. Buses were operating at 50% capacity. So had to wait 30 minutes for a suitably empty bus to arrive.

Reached by 1900 hrs. It had started drizzling. Ran over to the railway station and the drizzle became a downpour that was still going on when the train departed. Had chola batura, or make that puri batura, at an AC restaurant at the station campus. They serve you in thermocol disposables even inside the restaurant nowadays. Need to avoid such McD inspired restaurants in future.

Gyanshala Report, 16-17-Nov

Action Points

We need to look at English medium schools with better teachers as an additional revenue stream. 

Use of activities in training.

Came back to the session and talked about the importance of discussion at the end of the activities. 

Make a connection made between the activity and applications in real life. 

For role play we need to brief our teacher-students on the typical problems they see in the classroom – and have a discussion based on these after the demos. 

We need to use a peer learning approach and club younger teachers with older ones.

We could sponsor graduation studies for young teachers like Alina, who has only finished her 10th grade.

Buddies are students who are in adjacent intelligence baskets. 

Ashok ji has promised to mail Pankaj ji whatever documentation is there with him. 

Need to share the recording of Ashok ji’s talk with Chirantan on Google Drive.

At Muni school there is an eye test poster and kids are checked for eyesight at the beginning of every month. 

Irrespective of parental supervision, kids need to be doing HW. It helps build a discipline of self study. 

More stress on pehchanna rather than padhna, translated into english it means recognition rather than learning. 

Did my usual walk from Kalupur Railway station to Paldi to Chirantan’s house. He is getting married on 5 Feb, from then on I will need to check with him before I visit. His fiancee is based out of Delhi – and she is working with the government. Bought some vegetables en route at Jamalpur. Made ourselves a banana breakfast. After which I had a quick shower and we reached the training centre for another round of breakfast. My ADI Pune train ticket did not get confirmed. Requested Chirantan to book a Tatkal ticket. Tatkal Booking for AC starts at 10:00 hours. He managed to login and get me a confirmed Tatkal ticket for the Pune journey. Peace of mind. The training was happening at the unaided Genius school. The rent for 10 days was a very reasonable Rs. 30,000. I was stopped by the security guard at the gate, because of my attire: I was wearing shorts as usual. I decided to become aggressive and asked the watchman if Gandhi had walked into the school in his dhoti would they have stopped him at the gate? He let me in.

Attended sessions of Math training. Niharika behn began with some slokas and song. She trained the teachers on using a Gujarati song which was full of numbers. Getting them up to speed on counting. One of the big advantages of starting a class with singing is that it ups energy levels, for both teachers and students. I wonder though about how our Muslim teachers react to the Shlokas. At the start, Niharika tried hard to maintain silence. The previous day training had been cancelled thanks to an autorickshaw strike, and the class size was doubled to 55, so that they could squeeze in two sessions at the same time with a faculty. Vaishali behn made teachers talk about problems they faced in the classroom. The younger teachers were hardly asking any questions. We need to use a peer learning approach and club younger teachers with older ones.

Chirantan shared with me that 25% of the content changes every year. Some of these changes get recycled after 2-3 years. One interesting observation was about how they write numbers. 0-9, 10-19 etc. ((At Peepal Tree, we do 1-10, 11-20). The advantage is that all the numbers in a column start with the same tens digit. Students were asked to find patterns in rows and diagonals. Vaishali behn talked about the decimal system. Contrasted it to the binary system. ‘How would you feel if I asked you to write 15 in the binary system?’ she asked the teachers. A similar problem is faced by students who study the decimal system for the first time. She went on to talk about place values. She started by discussing powers of 10. And how to convert a number, say 324, as 3*100 + 2*10 + 4. She asked teachers to make alternate permutations using say 2 hundreds, 120 tens, 25 tens and 74 units, etc. Teachers were encouraged to come up with as many permutations as possible. We could have used bundles of tens for this as an activity. The carry over and marbles would have also made a lot of sense over here. Numbers like 2,538 and 23,849 were given and teachers were made to write it in words. 

I wondered why such basic exercises need to be part of training. But I realised later that most of the teachers have dropped out of school after 10th. And we were supplementing the meagre school education that teachers had received during their own school days. Another assignment was to make them insert commas in large numbers like 9003 or 200002, which were given in words. The bigger the number, the more the importance of the comma. I found almost all participants were attentive in the session. Some thoughts on role play: During the teacher demos, the instructor played the role of a student. For role play we need to brief our teacher-students on the typical problems they see in the classroom – and have a discussion based on these after the demos. Was happy that one of the demo students got the class to do reverse counting. And then she also got them to do horizontal counting 11,21,21 etc. Very nice. Found that the demo teachers’ talktime was too high. Student interaction and probing was not happening.

In Surat, there are 10 Hindi medium Gyanshala schools. They have translated some of their Gujarati medium books for these schools. I don’t really think that was required. We should have used either the UP or Bihar books. Chirantan mentioned that they could get into trouble with the Gujarat education board if they had not done this. I guess in junior classes the board does not create too much of a problem. The only thing the Gujarat government would be concerned with is the inclusion of Gujarati as a subject.

If we look at the age breakup, I found that there were two clusters of 30-50 and 20-25. There is a depressing gap of almost no teachers in the 26-30 age group. It is pointing to a serious attrition problem. We are not able to hold back younger teachers. If we look at the breakup of teacher’s own education qualifications, there are very few teachers who have completed their graduation. Most are 10th or 12th pass. (There were a few 10th fail as well.) We could sponsor graduation studies for young teachers like Alina, who has only finished her 10th grade. It would be an amazing retention tool.

Then I moved on to an English session. Extempores had been organised. Teachers had to pick up a topic using chits. Most of the teachers spoke quite confidently, in Gujarati. Here is a typical structure of a 30 minute English class: 5 minutes for rhymes, 10 minutes for commands, 10 minutes for subject teaching, 5 minutes for worksheet completion. The same rhyme continues for 5 days. In rhyme, you have got music and actions. Students are told the meaning of the words used in the rhyme. The instructor also got the teachers to mug up the instructions in the english class which had to be given in English. The same teacher typically takes all subjects, so the English skills of the teachers are as good (or as bad as) what we have at Peepal Tree.

The command part was done with actions so that students can get hints about action word meanings through the actions themselves. For example, when she says ‘Step forward’, the teacher actually walks a step forward. Most of the commands discussed in the class were quite simple – show me a bottle, show me a duster etc. Pairs of teachers went on to play a command game. Then the entire class did the command activity together.

We broke for lunch after this session. My problem with the food was the presence of too much plastic. I was told that Pankaj ji’s mathematics was at work here. If teachers started washing their own plates, it would be taking away from teaching time! Can’t digest that logic. In food, we also agreed to disagree about dairy. Pankaj ji is a big fan of milk – he consumes more than a liter a day. And so does his wife, Rekha. His first job was at the National Dairy Development board where he worked in Mr. Kurien’s office.

Ashok Ji landed up from Delhi around lunchtime. Immediately after lunch we attended a science session. The subject matter was matter. Different categories. Hard vs soft. Teachers were told to come up with examples of soft materials. Witnessed an interesting discussion on a teddy bear. It’s the cotton stuffing inside that is soft, not the bear himself. Again in Rexine, it’s the sponge that lines the rexine that is soft, not the rexine per se. Wy talked about wool and butter. Then moved on to fragile objects like glass, ice etc. Then transparent and translucent. There was some confusion about the working of a one way film. I wonder how you would categorize it – transparent or translucent?

After we left the science session, Chirantan got all the supervisors together and Ashok ji addressed them. The session started at 15:30 hours and went on till almost 1700 hrs. Ashok ji asked the supervisors about what Gyanshala stands for? Serving the underprivileged. Typically most of our children come from slums and both parents are working. The school happens for only 3.5 hours so some children actually do jobs after school. Government schools are too far away. And private schools are not affordable. Has this changed in recent years? What has made government schools popular is midday meals. And an increased purchasing power has made private English medium schools, that also operate inside the slum, affordable. We are losing students today, in spite of our almost zero fee. Anything that is free has a challenge of being perceived as low quality and low value. We need to look at English medium schools with better teachers as an additional revenue stream. 

The number of children in a class is less than 30 (It is close to 20 now – with falling numbers), so there is a lot of personal attention. There is no break during this 3.5 hours so that time utilisation is good. There is no uniform, because the extra expense cannot be justified. (I agree with this part totally.) Students don’t feel that education is a chore. Projects are very helpful. One of the supervisors talked about a visit to a PSU bank as part of a project. They asked the managers a lot of questions. In Gyanshala teachers also learn a lot. Kids are motivated and come on their own. Any topic is repeated at least three to four times. There is no homework. And no kid can afford tuition. During the lockdown, teachers went to students’ houses to take classes. Teachers visit students who remain absent for more than two days. There are group activities which encourage peer learning. 

There is a general hands off policy that Gyanshala parents adopt. Most don’t even know what standard their kids study in! Although there is a nominal fee, quite a few students are given fee waivers. The only ask from parents is that they should see whether the worksheets are filled in by the students. I believe that this is more in theory than in practice. Irrespective of parental supervision, kids need to be doing HW. It helps build a discipline of self study. 

Ashok ji asked supervisors about the challenges they faced at Gyanshala.

• We have to move around schools a lot. It becomes slushy in the rainy season. 
• During our field visits we end up missing a lot of the parents because they are at work. 
• Recruiting teachers with less salary has become a big challenge. 
• Even getting rooms on rent at our budgets has become a challenge. 
• Government sometimes creates hurdles when our students shift to schools for higher classes. 
• Hindi mother tongue students don’t want to study in Gujarati medium because they think their families may migrate back after a few years.

I recorded Ashok ji’s session. Some of the interesting points as I listened in. There are four types of students: brilliant, less brilliant, average and donkeys. When you are trying to introduce peer learning use a buddy system. No crime happens alone. There is always a buddy around. Buddies are students who are in adjacent intelligence baskets. You can club the brilliant the less brilliant, you can keep the average with the donkey, you can club the less brilliant with the average, but the brilliant donkey combo will never work. They will both get frustrated. There can be no learning without experiences. Students must listen, analyse and reflect. In our reflection we need to introspect and adopt if what has been discussed suits us.

Ashok ji talked about his UPLC model for peer learning. Peer learning also sees a development of leadership and empathy skills along with a reduction in the bullying problems that every school faces.

U – stands for Understand. Students are given reading assignments to go through and then come to class. The reading tries to connect the student’s past with the present and the future. This homework is important in every class. HW is paced differently by each student and it improves class productivity by a factor of 10,

P – stands for problems. Or better still our perceptions about problems. Students identify good problems to solve. 

L – stands for learning. Students are encouraged to look at the macro picture of life. Learn in context of the larger order. 

C – stands for Communicate. It also stands for creativity, for critical thinking. What problems to solve with the concepts you have learnt. What you can create with this knowledge. After all, any science is a matter of perspective and not information.

Language should not be a separate subject at school. Existence is really what we are trying to teach. Integrated learning is key. The world is your exam. 

At 17:30, we left for the Gyanshala office. We met with Pankaj ji over there. We had a discussion about the Muni methodology. Ashok Ji elaborated about how peer learning happens and the importance of emotion in learning. We had a debate about visualisation, where Pankaj ji felt that they also use the sight words approach at gyanshala, but implementation is not as strong as it is at Muni. Pankaj ji wanted more proof and documentation about the method that Muni uses. Unfortunately that is not as strong in the Muni system. Ashok ji sees himself as more of an executor than a planner. Ashok ji has promised to mail Pankaj ji whatever documentation is there with him. The Gyanshala team will be visiting Delhi to understand the system better. I will attend if it is possible. Once the visit happens, Gyanshala team will take a call about starting a joint pilot, preferably at a location in UP. After some time, Pankaj ji left and the rest of us continued. We decided to incorporate activities in the Gyabshala books. Peepal Tree can buy these new design workbooks from Gyan Shala and use it in their system. Dinner was ordered from Sasu Maa, a local Gujarati Thali restaurant. After dinner we were entertained by a lot of army gossip from Ashok ji. Very graphic, and something I would prefer not to document here!

We had been invited to spend the night at Pankaj ji’s place. We reached at 21:15 hours. Chatted with his better half, Rekha ji, She used to be faculty at IIM Ahmedabad. She has also done her Fellow program from IIM Ahmedabad, where she was a few years junior to Pankaj ji. Chucked with her job as a PO at State Bank of India to join the doctoral program. At IIMA, she specialised in telecom and IT policy. The last 3 years she had been working on online MDPs, even before the pandemic started. She has been associated with the Baroda Railway university. After retirement in 2020, the Jains have shifted from campus to a lovely rental flat, not too far away from IIM Ahmedabad. They are thinking of not investing in any real estate at all. They do have a 5000 sq ft plot, about 6 kilometres away. Their two sons stay in Mumbai. The elder one is married with two kids. The younger one got married during the lockdown. He and his wife are both lawyers. Have invited Pankaj ji and Rekha ji to visit with us in Pune when they are in Mumbai next – and spend a few days meeting folks in Pune. 

Gyanshala school student numbers are on the decline. Tried discussing the Bengal project. Before any project starts, Pankaj ji ensures that funding is there for at least 3 years. They started with a hundred schools in Kolkata. So the scale was there. But he was not satisfied with the academic achievements even after 2 years. Pankaj ji shared that the Kolkata experiment failed because of a leadership failure. 

Next day morning, we had a raw breakfast at his place. Got the ingredients from the local veggies market. We then drove down to the training venue in Pankaj ji’s Honda Amaze. Ashok ji then had a session for teachers. I planned that we start with a question and answers, as we could then customise it to the needs of the teachers better. Here is a list of questions that the teacher groups came up with:

• Students are not attentive. In spite of our best efforts, some students just refuse to learn. 
• What do we do about academic laggards?
• Time management is an issue because there are many students who cannot complete the task in the given time. 
• Corona has been a setback for all of us. What can we do to get students back to speed? 
• Students’ handwriting is bad, so the rest of the academic work suffers. 
• How is the learning process and content different at Muni international vis-a-vis Gyanshala?

Unfortunately Ashok ji ended up repeating his spiel from the supervisor training. The good part was that Pankaj ji had attended the session and got a first hand experience of Ashok ji’s training program. It was good for me as I had not taken notes in his last talk, which I had only recorded. Need to share the recording of Ashok ji’s talk with Chirantan on Google Drive.

A mother keeps a kid for 9 months in her womb. A school keeps this kid for another 12 years in its womb. We impart skills that are based in the past and expect them to prepare for the future that way. Unlike teachers, parents receive no training to raise kids. You are what you think. Gyanshala parents are more worried about making a living on a day to day basis than looking at challenges faced in the long term. Even in rich schools, teachers face challenges. If lack of parent supervision is a challenge with the lower income schools, too much of parent supervision is a challenge for the high income school.

Traditional Indian society has always had a respect for teachers. Why? Teachers were advisors, not just to students, but to the community at large. This has been the tradition for the last hundreds of years. But then the position started shifting: from becoming gurus to becoming information providers, sources of information. Teaching has become so mechanical, that our teachers can only be called Gyan Shramiks. Practice makes a man perfect, but perfect in what? Are we all performing without thinking? Representation of information in an examination has become the end result of education. What would happen if we give all this data on the pendrive? 20 years and 35,000 hours of education neatly compressed into a few GB on a pendrive? Remember that Guru Nanak took 12 years to become a saint from a common man. The transition for the Buddha was just in 6 years. It is taking us 20 to transform our bhagwans to buddhus not buddhas. If education continues the way it is , teachers will soon be replaced by search engines. If you want to survive as teachers, you need to go back to the practice of the gurus. What gurus did was to –  

• facilitate
• motivate 
• supervise
• partner in the possibility of the child.

Role of teachers is to share what did not work for the teachers themselves. So that students can experiment in a narrower space. But students have to find out what works for themselves. This is facilitation.

Kids are not good actors, so we can easily see their motivational states from their faces. The definition of happiness changes with age. For most of the older teachers, happiness is the lack of constipation:-) Obviously the same cannot be said for students. which is the reason why sharing joys and sorrows with peers is more important than sharing it with adults. 

Supervise: What is a school? It is a place where discussions happen. It’s a place where understanding happens. It’s a place where corrections happen. And finally, its a place where celebrations happen. 

A school is not a success if 10 percent of students become successful in life. It is a success when 90 percent of students become successful. Which is why we have to work on the minds of all. 

There are no questions, only answers. No problems, only opportunities. All you need is to change the way you see things. A teacher should start with her own kids, not gyanshala kids. Why do kids watch cartoons? all of it is and the listing. Kids want action. Those who have energy are told to be silent, and sit in one place. The exhausted oldie teacher has to dance for 6 periods. If we tell kids, aao batein karein, toh kon nahi aayega? That will be the end of the atyachar that has come to define the school today. Teaching by dance, exam by chance. Kids only learn from other kids, not from teachers. We need to keep in mind that the only person who learns in most classes is only the teacher. Because you learn more when you teach. So why not make everybody a teacher in the classroom then ? After all, teaching is a check of understanding. The HW children get is to go home and teach their parents, to teach their neighbours.

Education is about habit formation. It’s about developing attitudes. It’s about making winning a habit. What are the habits that we need to inculcate? Here are 6 which Ashok recommends.

1. You are the only one who is responsible. For your past, for your present and for your future.
2. There is nothing called negativity. Sadness is the absence of joy. Night is the absence of light. Sickness is the absence of health. No child is born sick, we only lose our health on the way.
3. Every problem is a test. A test of your talent, of your hidden potential.
4. Gratitude
5. Saiyam or self control
6. Sankalp or determination.

We then switched over to English learning. Any word is made up of syllables. The maximum we can pronounce in a single breath is about 3 syllables. For example if we have a word like babubebobi then we say babu first and the bebobi next with an emphasis always on the last syllable. Always make groups of two syllables – only the last one should be three.  It is important that the students pronounce words fast. This is what we call fluency. I liked his assurance to the teachers: ‘Did you ever hear such a difficult word in your life? So relax, the rest of the stuff that you see in your books is going to be a cakewalk.’

The mind is different from the brain. Mind is the spirit, the consciousness. Brain is biology, the hardware? 125 crores neurons. 60 percent are reserved for the storage of pictures. 30 percent store data, which has finally been derived from the pictures. Only 10% of neurons function for action. All the neurons are inter connected, so there is a constant transfer between the photo box and the data box. Inside each of the boxes, there is a core area at the center. Some of our thoughts get filtered into this core, the important ideas that require longer term storage. The rest of the ideas stay on the outside – and get deleted. The picture input comes only from the eyes, for data eyes and sound both are required and action requires inputs from all the senses. The action box has a buffer that stores information only for a few days. The data box can store data for maybe a few months. 

Once something goes into the picture box it will stay for years, if not centuries. A picture once it enters the picture box memory area never gets deleted. Even the best scientist uses only 7 percent of her picture box. According to Ashokji, it all plays back in the last few minutes of your life. A kind of filmi flashback if you will. The brain works only on photographs or images. It doesn’t remember the name Sejal. With repeated use, it learns to associate the name Sejal with an image that is there in front of us. The picture box is therefore a game changer. And for that reason if you have kids who have problems with eyesight they have problems with education. At Muni school there is an eye test poster and kids are checked for eyesight at the beginning of every month. 

This is the reason Ashok ji puts more stress on pehchanna rather than padhna, translated into english it means recognition rather than learning. He poked some fun over here when he asked teachers: do you read your husband or do you recognise your husband? Then he went into philosophical mode about identity. He said that all of us chose our genders, we did not get into them by default. The choice he refers to is about the conscious or what is called the aatman. The vedas say that the aatman enters the body 3 months after a pregnancy starts. It is also the reason why abortion is allowed only in the first 90 days.

He has a very interesting technique for the alphabet. There is no writing work involved. Only recognition. Assure your kids that the Angrez have gone back but they have promised not to change the alphabet for the next thousand years. So kids don’t need to worry that what we are doing now is going to be relevant for the rest of our life. Hindi is a very simple language that has no upper case, no lower case, but it’s got 52 alphabets and 13 matras. English has just half the number of alphabets, 26 of which you can say 5 are matras.So English is actually easier to recognise than Hindi. If you remove the matras from bi you get the hindi ‘b’. In the same way ‘di’ becomes the hindi – ‘d’ etc. English actually originated from Hindi!

When a kid comes to school at the age of 3, she already knows more than 200 people, or you could say 200 symbols. Getting to know 26 more is not a challenge for this kid. In 30 minutes, you could recognise all the symbols. We are talking of recognising, not writing. Then we need to convert this into a game. Ashok believes that we should learn in playing and play in our learning. This can be done best by just visualisation. He asked this question to a teacher: How do birds fly from Siberia to Gujarat? Only because of their photographic memory. Pets recognize their owners because of photographic memories. Pigeons can home in because of photographic memories. Moving from letters, the same philosophy applies to words. This means that the word that the third standard kid sees will also mean the same thing to a sixth standard kid, So why should we be surprised if a 3rd grade kid is reading books of an 8th grader?

Ashok ji had a meeting with the education secretary and had to leave immediately after this session. So some of the questions he had not answered I touched upon. We decided to continue an activity session with the same class. Distributed props and asked teachers to come up with as many activities as possible. Here is a list of activities that teachers came up with:

• Ice cream sticks: wall piece, decorative coma shapes, list of items for wall piece, material and costing. 
• Dice: play snake and ladder, math, colour patterns of dice, addition and subtraction. 
• Daal: cooking, colour, shapes, rangoli, alphabet pattern, series. 
• Spokes: straight alphabets, shapes, games. 
• Plastic bottles: material, order in size, MRP read, arithmetic, different letters, decoration, weights comparison. 
• Cards: alphabet, 1 to 10 counting, order, colour, pairing, house. 
• Blocks: shapes, alphabet series. 
• Broken cup: jigsaw, alphabet recognition, colour,. 
• Leaves: identify tree by leaf, shapes, fall in winter. 
• Boxes: identify the object that would have come inside, volume, similar letters on boxes, how many small boxes can fit into the big box.

There should have been a reflection session at the end, but I missed out on that. 

Closed the session at lunch time. I was chatting with Sonal behn and she offered to take the post lunch activity session. I immediately agreed. Decided that in the post lunch session, each group will short list one activity and demonstrate it with a few teachers doing the role play of students. Instructions for this were not given at the start, so Sonal moved around and chatted with individual groups and informed them of this change.

As students played around with their props, I moved around classrooms with Sejal behn. Post lunch the most active classroom was Yahya Sir’s. He had come down from Baroda. He trains students in singing and Gujarati language teaching. He is blind and has a lovely memory for songs. He has done his MA and has been a gold medalist in the MA program. I wonder whether we should have separate sessions for language? Can it not be made part of science, math, SST etc. After all it is a tool and we can sharpen our saw by practice and by finding use for our language skills. At Muni, there are no separate language classes.

I interrupted a middle school math class and did one activity with them. Gave each group a duster and asked them to imagine that it is a brick. We have to use multiple bricks to create a cubical base for a statue in our garden. What is the lowest number of bricks that can be used to do this? We also handed over scales to all teacher groups to help decide that. Most teachers groups got the answer as 90 by trial and error. We had to enlighten them about the application of a LCM in this situation.

Came back to the session and talked about the importance of discussion at the end of the activities. Also get a connection made between the activity and applications in real life. As this group had not attended Ashok ji’s session, I also talked about peer learning. Some teachers went back to chalk and talk after a 2 minutes salam to the prop. Had to step in and talk about how natural language learning starts with listening, speaking, reading and only then writing. Our teachers reverse this order and create huge learning problems for students. Ended with reflections and action points. Handed the reflection sheets over to Chirantan. They were all written in Gujarati. Then spent some time with the design team where we discussed how we can include activities as part of our worksheets. This will also ensure better implementation of group work.

Chirantan then took me over to Sanskruti, a textile shop, where I purchased some ready to stitch material for Chhavi, the younger daughter, who had her birthday the next day. Next shopping destination was a store where we bought some khakra. Chirantan then dropped me off near NID, and I walked down to the railway station from there. Good decision considering there was so much traffic. Did a long telecall on the way. The train was packed, and all the lower berths were on RAC. Thanked Chirantan once again in my mind for helping with the tatkal booking. The train stopped at Shivajinagar in the morning. Got down and realised that I had forgotten the khakras in the train. Ran back and boarded the train. Managed to deboard from the moving train and walked back home. End of an eventful journey.

Category	# of teachers
10th fail	2
10th pass	16
11th pass	2
12th pass	16
Graduate	9
No Info	5
Total	50

Category	# of teachers
< 25 years	20
26-30	0
31-40	7
> 40	18
No Info	5
Total	50

Category	# of teachers
Muslim	22
Non Muslim	28
Total	50

Only one of the muslim teachers is a graduate.