AIF-TSIL CSR Partnership

Learning Centre Inauguration in TSIL Campus

Launch Meeting in TSIL-From Left Executive Director TSIL, MD TSIL,  BEO and Myself

AIF entered into a CSR partnership with TSIL for implementing the DE program in 50 schools of Keonjhar district. Out of these 14 schools are in the CSR command area of TSIL and have been provided with laptops and projectors by TSIL. This is the first corporate partnership for DE in the state of Odisha. 

AIF-Stir Partnership

DE Odisha implemented a new program focusing on identification of “Bright Spots” / micro-innovations by teachers. The program started with a workshop held in Hyderabad in July, which was attended by me and selected team members. In fact I was initially skeptical given the multiple program launches slated for the month of October 2014 as part of the DE Odisha Program. We adopted a well thought out strategy focusing on three districts – Sambalpur, Bargarh and Ganjam which we visited to kick start the process. At the same time we encouraged the team members of the other three districts to try and identify as many micro-innovations as possible even through telephonic conversations with the HMs and teachers belonging to schools they could not visit, given the short time span. By the end of a fortnight we could identify 163 bright spots from all the 6 districts with Ganjam topping at 111 out of which 23 were shortlisted and sent to Stir. They in turn shortlisted 6 bright spots and the respective teachers were invited to Delhi for the Stir event on the 5^th of October. The second phase of the program was launched with a two day workshop in Bangalore held on the 8th and 9th of October. 

For more information on the program visit www.stireducation.org

A Decade with AIF

Receiving the Award from Ravi

I completed a decade with the American India Foundation on the 1st of September 2014. My memory goes back to 25th of June 2004 when we had the first meeting with the APC and Secretary School and Mass Education Dept., where the intervention was approved in principle and September 2004 when the MoU was signed by the then State Project Director Santosh Sarangi. Personally for me it has been a great journey and I have learnt a lot. For a person who had never wanted to work in Odisha, I am amazed and at times shocked at how fast a decade has passed. In fact I had been so involved with my program giving my heart and soul to it and having literally ate, slept and dreamt about the program all the time, coupled with a great team who have continued with me for so long, that I have literally  and never realized as to when a decade had slipped away. 

Core Group Meeting, Bangalore

I feel the program has not only provided a platform  for me but for all the team members, to unleash their creativity, tap their potential and significantly increase their knowledge and understanding as far as how learning happens, and the centrality of techno-pedagogy / instructional design in increasing learning outcomes is concerned. This knowledge will last a lifetime.

From the time we started in 2004 the program has undergone a lot of changes with the major inflection in 2010 when we introduced the "centralized training model" to learning achievement tracking

from 2013 on wards.

I was given the "long service award" by Ravi Kumar, CEO AIF in Bangalore as part of the DE Core Group meeting, held in the month of June 2014. Seriously I never expected an award for something which is so integrally interwoven with my life but then an award always makes one feel good - as after all I am but a fragile human being.

Workshop on Financial Literacy IIMA

Workshop in Progress

I was in IIM Ahmedabad in July to attend a workshop on "Designing Financial Literacy Programs" which was organized by Prof. Baruah and Shobhesh Agarwala. I was pretty much impressed by the design of the workshop and the way it was conducted. The research that was carried out by IIMA on designing effective intervention tools for FL shows that a combination of training plus videos proved to be most effective as far as retention is concerned. Being financially literate requires not only knowledge of the concept but also use of various financial instruments leading to inculcation of the desired habits which in turn leads to attitudinal change in the long run. One of the presenters in the workshop "Tamol Bandhopadhyay," "Executive Editor Live Mint," Mumbai did drive home a crucial point: he mentioned that we are generally wrong in thinking that individuals living below the poverty line lack knowledge of FL. That is one of those "partial truths which begets total errors." He gave an example of his driver whose home he once happened to visit and was amazed to find that he saved money that he earned from different types of work such as salary, money for taking the dog for a walk, extra money for over time etc. into different containers with different labels such as health, education, general expenses etc. He sent money back home located in far away Nepal from these savings. Tamol took the first step by bringing his driver within the formal banking system by opening two recurring deposit accounts for him with the State Bank of India, which he still maintains.

IIMA

We as part of the DE intervention in Odisha are rolling out a pilot FL program in all the 100 government schools spread across 6 districts and Tamol's point will always be a guiding statement for me. Whether it is adults or children all of us are pretty much aware of the concepts of earning, saving, spending, budgeting, investment etc. (which comprise the core of FL ) and make use of them in some rudimentary form as part of their day to day lives. The only problem being that most of the sophisticated concepts that we use to describe the same cannot capture these rudimentary forms of the same. We need to take cognizance of this fact while designing our FL interventions.

Steve Jobs

Click on the link below to watch one of the most inspirational videos that I have seen - Steve Jobs speech at Stanford.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO6cFMRqXqU

Mid-Line Study DE Program Odisha

We just completed the mid-line study report and it took almost close to two and a half months to shift through the massive amount of data generated as part of the study. The study was administered in February 2014. The results are interesting and extremely motivating for me and my team members. Although I had expected an increase of about 10% in student learning outcomes in mathematics, science and geography the results show an increase in the range 25%-30% in the first year itself. The results have been shared with the School and Mass Education Department, Govt. of Odisha. They are interested in integrating the learnings as part of their mathematics and science module development. The study shows a very strong correlation between the DE methodology (Edukit usage, e-Samdhan, collaborative projects, Flipped Classroom methodology, regular coaching and mentoring of teachers by DE resource persons through regular school visits) and the top three performance areas in science, mathematics and geography in case of treatment I schools which clearly brings to light the impact of the DE Program.

As far as grade VI is concerned there has been a 29% increase in average scores (maths, science and geography combined). Similarly in case of grade VII there has been a 23% increase in average scores (maths, science and geography combined). Click on the link below to access the complete report.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BymNjPjjdn8yMWM4V1ZTMzdHNDA/edit

Learning Achievement Levels in Govt. Schools

I am returning back to writing on my blog after a long time and that too with something as serious and complex as "learning achievement levels of kids in government schools." The topic has become a toast for the nation's intelligentsia and strangely eludes an easy solution. As part of my program intervention in government schools in Odisha we did a learning achievement baseline study and the results are interesting. I thought it will be interesting to share the challenges and the key insights thrown up by this study. This study was conducted with more than 5000 students in  87 government upper primary schools spread across six districts of Odisha.

Challenges and Key Insights 

A bottom heavy structure with a large number of students in the lower performing brackets is the main challenge. Almost all of them are back benchers, having very low self-esteem and in need of remediation. Classroom observations show that teachers also are reinforcing the status quo by focussing on the front benchers only. Just training and sensitizing them will not work. Teachers need to be coached and mentored at the school level and constantly sensitized to the fact that they should not be neglecting the back benchers. Equity is the need of the hour and it should be ensured that not only the quality of instruction improves but it also reaches each and every single child.

While the best performing school systems in the world manage to stay at the top by following a beginning of the pipe approach by carefully selecting, meticulously training and grooming the candidates for the job of a teacher, we on the contrary follow an end of the pipe approach by trying to remedy a situation whereby a large chunk of people who do not have any aptitude for teaching, end up as contractual teachers. Entering the teaching profession is an option of the last resort. This has sadly made teaching a low status profession in India, where teaching figures somewhere down the list, as a career option for the young generation. This has created a vicious cycle in that the low status of the profession sends a market signal which attracts poor quality candidates or candidates who take to teaching as a profession of the last resort. Add to this the poor quality of teaching in the teacher training institutes where the trainees do not get much of a practical exposure to teaching at the school level. In addition to that there are a large number of untrained teachers also at the school level.

 

HSBC Climate Partnership

HSBC Climate Partnership

A very innovative and admired corporate-NGO partnership

Is making mistakes an essential part of learning

The answer is yes. A study led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this essential part of learning “making mistakes” and how it helps one in learning faster. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes than others? After all everybody screws up. But what follows is important. Do we ignore the mistake, brushing it aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we investigate the error seeking to learn from the snafu?

The Moser experiment is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes, both of which can be reliably detected using electroencephalography (EEG). The first reaction is known as error related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a screw-up and is believed to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex, a chunk of tissue that helps monitor behaviour, anticipate rewards and regulate attention. This neural reaction is mostly involuntary, the inevitable response to any screw-up. The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness. It occurs when we pay attention to the error, dwelling on the disappointing result. In recent years, numerous studies have shown that subjects learn more effectively when their brains demonstrate two properties: 1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a bigger initial response to the mistake and 2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means that they are probably paying attention to the error, and thus trying to learn from it.

In this new paper, Moser et al. extends this research by looking at how beliefs about learning shape these mostly involuntary error-related signals in the brain, both of which appear in less than half a second. More specifically, the scientists applied a dichotomy first proposed by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford. In her influential research, Dweck distinguishes between people with a fixed mind-set — they tend to agree with statements such as “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it” — and those with a growth mind-set, who believe that we can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and energy. While people with a fixed mind-set see mistakes as a dismal failure — a sign that we aren’t talented enough for the task in question — those with a growth mind-set see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge, the engine of education.

The experiment began with a flanker task, a tedious assignment in which subjects are supposed to identify the middle letter of a five-letter series, such as “MMMMM” or “NNMNN.” Sometimes the middle letter is the same as the other four, and sometimes it’s different. This simple change induces frequent mistakes, as the boring task encourages people to zone out. Once they make a mistake, of course, they immediately regret it. There is no excuse for misidentifying a letter.

While performing the flanker task, subjects wore an EEG cap, a monitoring device filled with greased electrodes that records electrical activity in the brain. (Unlike fMRI, EEG gives researchers excellent temporal resolution, allowing them to precisely measure a sequence of neural events. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of spatial resolution, making it difficult to know where in the brain the signals are coming from.)

It turned out that those subjects with a growth mind-set were significantly better at learning from their mistakes. As a result, they showed a spike in accuracy immediately following an error. Most interesting, though, was the EEG data, which demonstrated that those with a growth mind-set generated a much larger Pe signal, indicating increased attention to their mistakes. (While those with an extremely fixed mind-set generated a Pe amplitude around five, those with a growth mind-set were closer to fifteen.) What’s more, this increased Pe signal was nicely correlated with improvement after error, implying that the extra awareness was paying dividends in performance. Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right.

How Computers are Transforming Teaching and Learning

Courtesy of: TeacherPortal.com

Back Pain and MRIs

Back pain has reached epidemic proportions. The figures are sobering - there is a 70 percent chance that you will suffer from it at some point in your life and a 30 percent chance that you have had a back pain attack in the last 30 days. At any point of time about 1 percent of working age Americans are incapacitated by their lower lumbar regions and treatment is pretty much expensive accounting for $26 billion per year which is about 3 percent of the total health care spending. 

There has been a marked difference in the way we treat back pain with the discovery of MRI in the 1980s. Previous to that doctors had very little information or idea about the lower back region which is an exquisitely complicated body area full of tiny bones, ligaments, spinal discs and minor muscles. In the absence of information the only recourse that a doctor could take was to advice bed rest and surprisingly this proved to be a very effective remedy in that 90 percent of the patients got better within seven weeks. With the discovery of  MRI in the 1980s doctors have a stunningly accurate image of the lower back region but ironically that has made the problem worse. The machine simply gives too much of information and doctors as a result are unable to distinguish the significant from the irrelevant. The stunningly accurate images of the lower lumbar regions seen through an MRI are often misleading. The disc abnormalities which are apparent are seldom the cause of chronic back pain. In a 1994 an interesting study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, obtained images of the spinal regions of 98 people who had no history of back pain whatsoever. The images were then sent to doctors who didn't know that the patients weren't in pain. The result was shocking. The doctors reported that two-thirds of these normal patients exhibited "serious problems" such as bulging, protruding, or herniated discs. In 38 percent of these patients, the MRI revealed multiple damaged discs and nearly 90 percent of the patients exhibited some form of disc degeneration. These structural abnormalities are often used to justify surgery which sounds quixotic for people who have no history of back pain.

Similarly a large study published in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) randomly assigned 380 patients with back pain to undergo two different types of diagnostic analysis. One group received x rays while the other group got diagnosed using MRIs which provided the doctors with much more detailed information about the underlying anatomy. Which group fared better? There was no difference in patient outcome. The vast majority of people in both groups got better - thus clearly more information didn't lead to less pain. But stark diff fences emerged when studies looked at how different groups were treated. Nearly 50 percent of the MRI patients were diagnosed with severe disc abnormalities requiring intensive medical interventions. These treatments were obviously more expensive and they had no measurable benefit.

Thus there is a danger of too much information and it can seriously interfere with our understanding. When the prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed, a person can no longer make sense of the situation. Correlation is confused with causation and people end up making theories out of coincidences. MRIs make it easier for doctors to see the lower lumbar region in vivid details highlighting all sorts of disc problems and so they reasonably conclude that these structural abnormalities are the cause behind back pain. They are usually wrong. Medical experts are now encouraging doctors not to order MRIs when evaluating back pain. A recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine, that MRIs should be used to image the back only under specific clinical circumstances - such as patients with a strong clinical suggestion of underlying infection, cancer or persistent neurologic deficit. In the latest clinical guidelines issued by the American College of Physicians and the American Pain Society, doctors were strongly recommended ... not to obtain imaging or other diagnostic tests in patients with non-specific low back pain. In too many cases expensive tests proved worse than useless and all the vivid imagery and detailing got in the way of effective diagnosis. Doctors thus performed better with less information.

 This interesting write up with some amount of editing on my part has been taken from the chapter titled "Choking on Thought" from,  How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, New York, 2010.

Techno Pedagogy

My interest in actually understanding effective integration of techno pedagogy in teaching learning made me design a pre test and a post test on "rotation and revolution" a topic taught in grade 6 and which is much used and abused due to lack of clarity on fundamentals on the part of the teachers leading to extremely confused students. In fact in one of my recent field trips an HM who has been teaching the topic for close to a decade admitted in front of everyone that he cannot answer the questions raised by me and my team members on the topic and thereby clarify the hard spots and requested for help. In fact we explained the students and the teachers present through activities and animations and questioned the students after that to check whether they have understood. The results were encouraging.

 There are a number of hard spots in this topic and the most difficult part is the internalization of rotation, revolution and inclination of earth's axis at one go and it's effects. Tests were conducted for students of grade 7. We did have a control group and an experimental group and compared the scores. 

In one of the schools in Berhampur the tests show a marked difference and students who scored zero in pre test have scored 12 which happens to be the minimum score, in the post test and a number of them have scored very high marks. The reasons for this are mentioned below:

1. We had a resource group meeting for geography teachers the day before, exclusively focused on this topic and I was present in the meeting. The meeting started with a PPT titled insights which mentioned the hard spots in this topic and the reasons for them being so.

2. Some excellent animations were shown and hard spots analysed and explained. The teachers were very interested and said that they had never thought that this topic can be so interestingly dissected to understand each and every hard spot through corresponding animations.

The same test was done in a school in Cuttack and I was again present. The only difference being that although animations were given to the teacher handling the experimental group and she went through the same the marks did not show much of a difference when compared with the control group. The reasons can be stated as follows:

1. The teacher did not get sufficient time to go through the animations and understand the same. She spent about 30-45 minutes in going through the animations before the session.

2. As a consequence there was not proper planning and sequencing of the transaction process.

3. Some of the animations used in the resource group meeting in Berhampur were not shown.

Conclusion:

While it is good to train and provide teachers with all the support the teacher needs to focus on the content and plan out the transaction process. Too much of information unless internalized leads to confusion rather than clarity. It distracts rather than focuses. Our brains are designed to focus on a limited number of things at one time. This proves that technology unless properly handled leads to a situation that is worse off rather than better off. 

In the latter case although the teacher had been teaching the topic for a long time close to 5 years almost, still providing her with information on the hard spots lead to a worse off situation as she was distracted due to the information overload and could not give much time to focus.

Based on our experience this far we are now planning resource group meetings on specific subject areas focused on specific topics with a thorough preparation on the same by the team members

School Visits

I normally visit two districts a month and try to find out what is working and what is not working at the school level - and this is of utmost importance from the programmatic point of view. School visits  almost always provides a fresh perspective and interactions with the teachers and students tests one's assumptions and pre-suppositions thereby preventing the onset of a fossilised thinking process - which is the bane of most of the ICT interventions - a disconnect between plan and reality. Even the best designed ICT interventions have failed because of an absence of reality check followed by mid-point corrections at the policy level. We often start with tall promises as it is the easiest thing to do and break those promises at the earliest opportunity again because it is the easiest thing to do. The need for a shift from a procurement model to an output oriented model is imperative and the success of all ICT interventions is predicated on this somewhat tectonic shift.
My visits to a number of schools spread over the six districts did reveal an interesting mix. My observations are mentioned below:
I seriously feel ownership is the biggest issue at the school level. At a macro level this is a systemic problem and the school only mirrors the larger system. The absence of an ICT4E policy lies at the core.
The direct consequence of the absence of an overarching framework is the absence of a total system planning (factoring in all costs including deployment, training and maintenance etc.) resulting in a "procurement approach" rather than a "output oriented approach." Thus we are involved in a quixotic situation whereby we are "pre-occupied with painting the tower turrets while the castle is crumbling."
The centralised training part is working well but the fine print is missing. To close the gap the trainers need to increase their level of awareness which calls for a wider reading habit. They should be choosing words carefully and ensure that the trainees understand the full implication of the trainer - rather than being under the impression that the trainees have understood the point. In many instances I feel that even the trainer has not understood the point but has gone about the training in a very methodical manner without deep knowledge. For example I have never found a single teacher as of now who has correctly understood my question - as to whether technology integration is a technology or a pedagogic decision. Most of the trainers (might be all of them also - I am not very sure) have missed out on the subliminal part - it is pedagogy which weaves together technology and content knowledge and this requires a very through understanding. People like Dr. puny a Mishra, have been researching for years in this domain space and a number of TPACK based lesson plans are available on the web, like the one which I have forward edge you all. I hope team members read through the mail and try to cultivate a genuine interest in this area as it is pretty complicated and scratching the surface hardly leads to anything.
At the school level infrastructural and other issues like ownership are there but even then I have found glimpses of brilliance in our teachers and students. In a govt. set up we will obviously encounter problems and many of them will be outside our control. But then if each of us feels that we have a responsibility towards the system, towards, the school and most importantly towards the students, than we can start making small inroads, in as far as impacting student learning outcomes in a positive manner is concerned. Well this is an inside out approach and not an outside in approach. We need to internally feel that we are adding value to our lives and doing something purposeful.
A thorough understanding of a teachers portfolio for the ensuing month and a genuine interest in helping them out in delivering their lessons well is the need of the hour. This requires a thorough ground work, meticulous planning and a hunger to excel in our field of endeavour. We are set on the right track and if we have worked this hard so far we can surely make a dent on the system and make the critical stakeholders stop and listen to the serious work that we are doing. If you internally feel confident that you have done a thorough job than it is as good as done.

THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS: The Surprising Secret to Selling You

THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS: The Surprising Secret to Selling You: There is no shortage of advice out there on how to make a good impression – an impression good enough to land you a new job...
Heidi Grant Halvorson's latest write up posted on the HBR blog, really makes you think when you hire the next candidate or put yourself up as a candidate, ready for an interview.

THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS: How to Keep Happiness From Fading

THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS: How to Keep Happiness From Fading: No matter how miserable you are feeling at the moment, if you look back, there have surely been events in your life that ha...
Interesting - read on to find out yourself...

State of Education

check out these interesting videos

How to Be Assertive (Without Losing Yourself)

Conventional wisdom says that assertive people get ahead. They tell people what they think, request the resources they need, ask for raises, and don't take no for an answer. So what are non-assertive people supposed to do if their company's culture rewards these actions? If you're shy or reserved, don't fret. You can ask for what you need and get what you want, while still being yourself.

To read more of this stuff check out the link below....

http://blogs.hbr.org/hmu/2012/08/how-to-be-assertive-without-lo.html

What makes leaders

Recently a three day workshop was organized in the state office on "what makes a leader." The basic proposition on which the entire discussion hinged was "are leaders born or made." "What distinguishes great leaders from merely good ones." In conducting this three day hands on workshop which involved a number of evaluative exercises, focusing on increasing one's level of self-awareness and understanding one's emotions, I focused on the "Covey time management matrix," "the 360 degree evaluation based on the seven emotional intelligence indicators" and the "Jungian personality types." 

It was a very interesting experience for me in trying out the 360 degree evaluation on the EI indicators (emotional intelligence)  and I do sincerely feel that I tried my best to make my team members peel apart the hardened layers of social conditioning in trying to understand their own emotional make-up and thereby how they act and react to different events and circumstances in their day to day life - understanding one's emotions, strengths and weakness, needs and drives and their effect on others. It was a lot easier for the team members than under normal circumstances as they have worked together for a sufficiently long period of time. The workshop also focused on the physiology of the brain - especially mirror neurons, spindle cells and oscillators and how they determine one's actions and reactions. Great leaders are those whose behavior powerfully leverages the system of brain inter-connectedness. The main point I wanted to drive in was that "emotional leadership isn't just putting on a game face every day. It means understanding your impact on others - then adjusting your style accordingly."

The "Jungian dichotomy" was used in evaluating one's personality type while the "Covey Matrix" revealed how effectively we spend our time in the course of a day - especially by realizing in which quadrant we are - true emergencies, personal pro-activity and power, fire fighting and waste.

Resource Group Meeting

Resource group meeting were held in all the three zones recently. Selected teachers who have demonstrated effective use of technology in teaching learning, were invited to attend these workshops. These workshops cater to the special needs of the star performers as far as technology integration in teaching learning is concerned. These workshops were preceded by extensive discussions at the school level in which both the teachers and the monitoring experts participated, leading to the identification of hard spots, which formed the basis for designing innovative teaching aids as part of these workshops. The central zone workshops, held in Kendrapada and Cuttack respectively combined a hardware training as part of these workshops. This training basically focused on identifying minor hardware problems and rectifying them at the school level - thereby preventing delays as far as repair and maintenance is concerned. There was a focus on the preventive part also such as virus scans, defragmenting, registry cleaning etc.

Personal Effectiveness/Effective Leadership Workshop

A two day workshop on "Personal Effectiveness" and "Effective Leadership" was recently held in Gopalpur-on-Sea. The workshop focused on personal effectiveness leading to effective leadership through self-awareness. The Jungian theory of personality types was extensively discussed and used for mapping and self-assessment.  The wind, surf and sea provided an extremely relaxing atmosphere for the team members and facilitated self-introspection and deep diving within. A quick interaction with selected team members showed that the workshop was extremely helpful, timely and more such workshops are needed in future. A detailed feedback form will be administered to all the participants and based on their feedback the next workshop, will be planned. I do sincerely hope that the team members will consciously try to implement the learning's at least in a piece meal manner to start with - because by bringing about small changes, one can ultimately bring about the overall change that one wishes to see in oneself.