Building a Muscle for Improvement

Meet the students of Little Flower School (name changed) – a school in the peri-urban area of Bengaluru. A common sight you would find in this school is young business leaders working on their projects. The school runs a student entrepreneurship program – helping students develop skills like conceptualizing and designing a product (like earrings or bags), marketing and selling that product, thinking about the pricing, and collaborating with others to run this business.

The program began with the school leader and teachers thinking about the needs of the community the students came from. It then matured into a vision of enabling holistic development of children and nurturing an entrepreneurial mindset. Today, this program is supported by a few teachers, as well as the students themselves. Parents are involved in the progress of the program, and local communities are often ‘customers’ for these little leaders.

Both teachers and parents have talked about how this initiative has led to their children having greater confidence, creativity and communication skills. Being able to see this kind of impact gave the school team – leaders and teachers – enthusiasm and confidence for taking up further such improvement initiatives in their school.

Let us look at another story. This story is from a cluster of government schools in semi-rural Karnataka. These schools are located close to the border of two other states. This results in a diverse body of students who came to the schools. Teachers and Headmasters recognized that a big part of language learning is from the environment around children – words, text, sounds that children pick up from people and print material around them. Therefore, while teaching in the classrooms continued, teachers and school leaders came together to imagine what a ‘print-rich’ and enabling environment would look like for children in their schools and how they might transform their schools into such environments.

They realized that this would need support from multiple stakeholders. School leaders and teachers worked with the School Development and Management Committees (SDMCs) for mobilization of resources and funds for material. They also held parent-teacher meetings to gain support from parents for enabling a similar environment at home. School leaders and cluster level leaders also supported teachers in using such materials on a regular basis – their school rounds and classroom observations focused on the same. In fact, it is the children themselves who co-created some of the materials. These schools not only became vibrant, print-rich environments after this, but school leaders and teachers also spoke about how they had been able to engage the school community so well – something which they had found challenging in the past.

A few things would jump out as common, when we look at these two stories together: the central focus on children’s development; the entire school coming together to contribute to children’s development; and, the support systems for the school. These stories give a glimpse into what ‘school improvement’ means to us: a distinct approach to educational change that enhances student outcomes as well as strengthens the school’s capacity for managing change (Hopkins et al., 1994, Chapter 1).

At Mantra, we focus on all these three aspects. First, for planned educational change there needs to be thought-through and data-based planning of focus areas and pathways to improving schools. Second, we focus on student outcomes. Schools exist to serve students. Any school improvement initiative must have explicit student-level outcomes (not necessarily just learning outcomes) at its center. Third, develop school capacity. As in both the stories, the schools not only were able to improve student outcomes, they also developed a ‘muscle for improvement’ along the way – in the ways in which they were able to collaborate with each other, in planning the schools’ journeys, in leveraging data, and so on. This ‘muscle’ would help the schools sustain such initiatives, as well as lead further such initiatives in the future.

The School As a Unit of Change Like the stories of the two schools, our experience has been that for any sustainable, effective improvement in student outcomes, all three environments that the student is a part of – the classroom, the school, and the home and the community environment – need to be addressed. For anything from foundational literacy and numeracy, attendance, physical health, and socio-emotional development, the three environments need to improve in alignment to effectively impact student outcomes.

In our work at Mantra, we believe in enabling school leaders to nurture these three areas in their schools. The classroom environment includes teaching-learning practices, student-teacher interactions, peer interactions among students in the classroom, and the curricular materials to which the children have access. The school environment includes the overall school culture and norms, interactions among students, teachers, and administrators, the physical school’s environment, as well as key school processes like assemblies, staff meetings and teacher support mechanisms. The home and community environment includes parental involvement in students’ development, interactions with other family members and siblings, the physical home environment, as well as community perception and involvement in children’s education. There are some aspects like child safety, which are spread across all these three environments.

The Critical Role of School Leadership Both research, and our experiences of working in the field, converge on one very important aspect of school improvement: the development of school leadership. Education reforms often focus on student achievement, and the role that teachers play in enabling student achievement. While this is critical, the role of school leadership is often underemphasized. If any sustainable, schoolwide initiative were to be implemented, lack of involvement of school leadership would ultimately lead to the failure of such an initiative. A focus on school leadership also enables developing the ‘improvement muscle’ spoken about earlier.

Our focus is to enable school leaders to lead the school’s improvement journey over time. This involves, in essence, to be able to sense what is happening in the school, make sense of the data and observations to draw trends, learn new skills and concepts, connect with other peers and mentors, and finally, take concrete steps to improve. Our aim at Mantra is to enable schools as a self-healing system that can lead their own improvement journeys over time – run these cycles of ‘sense – make sense – learn – connect – improve’. Keeping this in mind, our programs also focus on ‘early wins’ during the first phase of the programs. This is to instill enthusiasm and confidence in the school’s beliefs about driving change.

Since school improvement is a long-term, intensive process, schools also need to be chosen with care. A combination of criteria help decide which schools may benefit from such a program. School’s acceptance of the areas that need improvement and a willingness to take effort in improving them is critical. Collaborating with the school on a whole school assessment and discussing the findings with the school gives a good sense of the school’s acceptance and willingness to change.

Motivation of school leaders in driving the change process is important. Ultimately, keeping the sustainability of the intervention in mind, school leaders would need to take the school’s improvement journey forward. Investment of school leaders in the improvement process is another significant aspect. School leaders’ motivation is insufficient unless they are also able to take time out to invest in the school improvement journey. Sufficient availability of teachers is critical, as teachers may not otherwise have the time or energy to engage in schoollevel processes. While this could be difficult in government schools, a cluster approach (looking at a cluster of 10-15 schools as a ‘distributed school’) may be helpful.

While there is baseline data collected on these selection criteria, as well as the areas of school improvement mentioned above, there are also continuous sense-making exercises done by the Mantra team to gauge how leadership practices, teaching-learning practices, student development, community engagement, and school culture are improving. However, for the program to be truly owned and taken forward by the school, the school stakeholders must also own such data.

Over time, school leaders and teachers are equipped with tools to continuously sense how their school is improving. Classroom observations done by school leaders, peer teachers or mentor teachers are an important source of data. Holistic school self-assessments, which can be done on a half-yearly or yearly basis, are important. Feedback/survey tools can be used to sense parents’ perceptions and engagement. Student attendance and performance data can be made available in an easy to use manner for utilization on an ongoing basis.

To sum up, our model of school improvement includes three principal components. First, empowering leaders by making tools, research, and guidelines readily available to schools so that they may lead their own improvement journeys. Second, developing the capacity of school, cluster, and block level leaders to support school improvement. Third, enabling districts and states to develop conducive support systems such as rewards and recognition systems, allocation of resources and communication mechanisms that help schools thrive.

While the focus remains school improvement, our programs can be co-created with block, district, and State institutions such as State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), District Institute of Education and Training (DIET) – who then become the primary stakeholders we work with.

The programs in turn are focused on enabling school level actors – school leaders, teachers, parents and students. These programs are co-created based on an in-depth analysis of both system level indicators such as involvement and support of state and district departments, as well as school level indicators on school leadership practices, pedagogical practices, student development, parent and community involvement, and overall school culture and environment.

School Support System: Our Model

A few months into (physical) school closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic, schools realized that remote learning was here to stay for a while. This also led to a reflection on the greater role that parents and community would play in supporting their children in learning. This would mean that school leaders and teachers would need to orient and support parents. School leaders in Uttar Pradesh focused on improving this area. School leaders organized school-wide parent-teacher meetings, and helped teachers plan the meetings in an effective manner – which not just included sharing certain information with parents, but also supporting and addressing parents’ queries and concerns.

School leaders were supported and encouraged through three key means. They were provided with tools, resources, and guidelines which they used for planning their parent teacher meetings. School leaders were given some capacity enhancement (including peer learning) in terms of planning parent-teacher meetings, and supporting teachers in the implementation process. Finally, they were also given opportunities to share their experiences and learning with the rest of the schools as a celebration of their efforts. You may want to watch the video here to know more about this initiative.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Mantra’s journey began with the journey of a single school. While we worked closely with schools and took a ‘school by school’ approach, three things became apparent. First, school leaders play a critical role in enabling school improvement, and ensuring sustainability of efforts towards student development.

Second, if we truly want to see a different state of education, nurturing lighthouse schools or islands of excellence would not be enough. We also need to shift the equilibrium to enable system-wide change.

Our third key learning came when we began working with state and district institutions. It becomes easy to start focusing on the larger system and think about state level or district level needs.

These include how the budget is utilized in a state, or the way capacity enhancement programs are planned by the state government’s departments, or in how data is collected and used. We have learnt to remind ourselves that we need to focus on systemic school improvement and not on just ‘systemic improvement’. Keeping our eyes, ears, and feet firmly on schools has rooted our planning, communication and perceptions of success.