Capacity Building of the Team in Swatantra Talim Foundation

Team members are the foundation of all organizations. Without a good team, it is difficult to move towards the desired vision and mission of the organization. The key task here is to clearly articulate the organization’s vision and mission as well as identifying the right set of people having the passion, skills, knowledge and mindset to help in achieving these.

While Swatantra Talim work on nurturing critical and creative thinking among children, a question that kept on arising during staff meetings was how to nurture this? One of the team members, after looking at children playing in the village and thinking of innovative ideas, suggested that play could be a good tool to nurture creative and critical thinking.

It sounded great! But, there were some questions like what does playful, making-centered learning and teaching look like in ‘Khoj Shaala’ and how can play and playfulness support children’s academic learning and understanding?

Playing and Learning: Learning the State of the Art

Having grappling with this issue, the team did research, looked for articles in various magazines and journals, talked to mentors, and found out the course on teaching strategies for playful learning by Project Zero run by Harvard University Graduate School of Education (For more details, please see the ‘Box Item’ in this article).

The various elements of the course were looked at in terms its time duration, content knowledge, assignment commitments and whether the same is done at an individual or at a group level.

The course was to be done at a group level (minimum of three members) in which four of our team members enrolled having interest in play-based learning. The structure of the course was in line with the different programs of the organization. The assignments were part of the work plan; therefore, very limited additional time was to be given in addition to the usual work responsibilities.

Swatantra Talim has a program called ‘Khoj Shaala’ which is around a maker space. Its goal is to enable children to question the status quo

The group courses helped in a wide variety of discussions within the team. It also helped in integrating learning and the consequent application of the same in day-to-day work with children. The course had an element of project work which helped in visualizing the impact of the course as well as in applying the learning immediately.

After doing the course, the team crafted the indicators of playful learning which helped in designing the framework and approach for the organization.

Thinking to Learn, Learning to Think

We as teachers are deeply curious about the way students think. We as teachers need to probe further when we are not sure that a student has responded fully. We were interested in their thoughts, ideas and mental models; but it was difficult for us to make these visible.

Useful Websites

https://pz.harvard.edu/projects/pedagogy-of-play
http://www.pz.harvard.edu/projects/visible-thinking
https://fablearn.org/about/
https://teacherauthor.in

Thinking is highly meta-cognitive and quite abstract as a process and very difficult to visualize. On this pretext, a teacher finds it extremely difficult to know the level of students’ learning having to resort only to summative assessments. While most students are good with thinking, they might find it difficult to express themselves in the standard paper-and-pen test based on set curriculum and syllabus.

Through the same process of research, subscriptions and taking advice from the mentors, we found that there is course on ‘Making Thinking Visible’ by Harvard University. The course is based on three main principles: thinking routines, the documentation of student thinking and reflective professional practices.

Three of our team members did the course and their reflections were to apply, see, think and wonder about the thinking disposition to bring out our perspectives as a group on students’ thinking and dispositions.

We as a group saw students being able to observe the creative things around them. They were able to identify these creative elements and appreciate them. They were also able to think about the nuances around creative objects and ideas.

As a teacher we all still wonder how students have gone beyond the creative elements being restricted only to objects and things to the deeper level of emotions and feelings. For the first time the students were able to find the opportunity to apply their abilities.

The thinking routines provided an ideal balance to us which helped students identify and follow their creative pursuits; it helped us to simultaneously visualize students’ thinking in a systematic manner as well. The best content is not which is fancy, elaborate or tech-savvy but the ones which enhance students’ learning.

Through such workshops, at the individual level, there was a shift in the way team members approached their lessons as the focus became more on the process of learning rather than the product of learning.

It wasn’t easy to find the most suitable course but when passion and purpose converge, then magic happens. This magic could be seen once again when we were thinking about our core work around ‘maker spaces’ that spark children’s imagination, curiosity, critical and creative thinking.

Fellowship in Making

Swatantra Talim has a program called ‘Khoj Shaala’ which is around a maker space. Its goal is to enable children to question the status quo leading them to tinker and make something which could bring a change in their perspective and of the community.

But, to move ahead in the work one needs a set of like-minded people who are doing similar kind of work. Swatantra Talim thought of looking for a network of people or organizations working in the space of ‘maker movement’.

Through our research we found about ‘FabLearn Fellowship’. This is a two-year international fellowship which advocates and supports constructionist, equitable learning experiences for all children.

Their central idea this year is how to “make maker-spaces culturally and contextually relevant” which was quite similar to what Swatantra Talim was striving for.

Ridhi, co-founder of Swatantra Talim is now a FabLearn Fellow. The thought process of the fellowship is completely in alignment with the organization’s work. Therefore, the time allocated for webinars and for writing blogs etc. for this Fellowship program, has contributed towards its core work.

During the fellowship, Ridhi has had chances to interact with experienced educators in formal and informal learning spaces worldwide. This helped her in linking research and practice about making and makerspaces in education, along with development of open-source educational resources.

Thinking is highly metacognitive and quite abstract as a process and very difficult to visualize.

This fellowship provides ample opportunities to interact and have dialogues with theorists as well as practitioners around the world. It has opened up a different spectrum for Ridhi as well, when people who have worked with Professor Seymour Papert for a long time implementing constructionist theories come and interact with the fellows.

Thus, this fellowship contributes towards organizational performance by helping the team build their understanding around the nuances of maker-spaces and making.

A Workshop in which Teachers Learn to be Authors

In a similar manner, one thought that completely resonates with Swatantra Talim’s work is writing stories and poems for children and how can teachers be reflective writers, authors and practitioners.

Since the community teachers expressed their need for a course related to these concerns, three team members subscribed for the ‘Teacher Author’ workshop conducted by Sheetal Paul this year.

In this workshop, teachers read, discuss and reflect on existing children literature. Efforts are put towards enhancing skills and knowledge of the participants to write children’s literature from within their own context as well. This way, children would learn easily and more effectively.

One of the reflections of the participants in this workshop was “my highlight of the course was the literature shared during the course, some incredibly beautiful, funny and crazy stories.

I think I have enough to sustain me for a year or two, be it all those beautifully illustrated story books or be it a poem all in texts. Every assignment we tried was returned with a nice little feedback from Sheetal. The feedback definitely helped me understand where I’m lacking better”.

One other reflection is “I understood the different psychological theories and aspects of children, like how children of different ages react to other stories and story patterns. The importance of rhythms and rhyming in the poems was explained very well”.

In Conclusion

The central idea for building capacity of team members is to first identify the direction in which the individual or the organization wants to move, keeping in mind the mission and vision of the organization. It is important to look at the strengths of the team members and perform a need-gap analysis. Further, to identify the right set of courses and workshops, different research tools are to be adopted. Then one has to finally square down to the course or the workshop that best suits the organization and the team members.

Once the course is done, it is important to reflect on the learnings of other team members and implement it with a set of students and other teachers through project work, day-to-day lessons and many more experiences.

As teaching is not mere ‘teaching’ but ‘lifelong learning’ too. We feel that if organizations work collectively and build capacities of each other, then it is quite certain that changes can surely be brought about at a systemic level.