Deconstructing the system

Let’s begin by taking a pause. Imagine you are inside a school. You see children playing hopscotch in an open space, their laughter echoing inside the walls of the schools. Some children sitting in the corner are helping each other make a “4” with their fingers, and a few others are listening intently to the colorful stories of wedding celebrations in the village, enjoying their day in the bright shining sunlight. This imagery leaves you with a smile, does it not? For this safety, openness and care to become a reality in all the schools in India, we need teachers equipped and supported to lead this change.

At SEF, our vision is to ensure that children across government schools thrive. And we believe that a key enabler in this journey is the teacher. A teacher who is highly skilled, loving and intuitive can transform a student’s learning experience. We are working with government institutions like the State Council of Educational Research & Training (SCERT) and the District Institute of Education and Training (DIET) across three (3) states (Punjab, Delhi and Uttarakhand) to build capacity within their teams and their more than two (2) lakh current teachers.

To move toward this ambitious vision, we consider it important to ground ourselves in the realities of our teacher support system. We do this by understanding context and taking learnings from our eight (8) partner schools. We test solutions in these schools before we launch them at scale.

Challenges of scale

However, as we scale, the challenges we face change, requiring constant adaptation and brainstorming. When we first entered the system, we faced resistance from the stakeholders. Questions on our experience and understanding like, “How many days have you spent on the ground?,” “We are already doing our best, don’t share more resources, we will not use them,” were common.

One hour into our first-ever training with teacher educators, the core facilitator stopped us and said, “This won’t be useful for teachers. Why should we take this ahead? You have not been on the ground much. So how do you know what training will be valuable to teachers? We will not take this training ahead.”

It felt disheartening and challenging to not get a chance to share what we were offering. However, this also pushed us to think differently.

Learning from challenges and adapting our approach

We needed to modify our approach to work meaningfully with the government. We needed champions in the system who would be the torchbearers of our work. We faced some key challenges. These pushed us to shift our approach to build investments and strengthen collaborations with the system.

Focusing on stakeholders’ well-being and voice: The first challenge was that our stakeholders were not feeling involved. Hence, we shifted our approach by keeping the stakeholders’ voice and well-being at the center. We have built strong collaborations within the system by conducting co-working spaces for the system’s stakeholders. The goal has been to ensure that they are part of the process from the start to the end of the intervention design and execution cycle.

“We all felt valued and heard, as we could see our suggestions were being incorporated during the workshop. Sometimes, when we facilitate, our whole focus is on delivering the content. But these two days, we felt that our wellbeing was at the center. It made me realize how important it is to establish this ‘Learner at the center.’ Gratitude.” – Monica Sharma, Mentor Teacher, Delhi

In all our co-working spaces, we add elements of well-being, e.g., starting with a check-in question, checking on with stakeholders individually before to understand their mind space, being flexible with their requirements, etc. These practices have helped us build authentic relationships.

In these spaces our stakeholders feel they can share openly. This increases their investment and involvement.

We also leverage the co-working spaces to hear their on-ground experiences. We are, thus, able to understand the context in detail, brainstorm with them, and get reviews. This helps us to modify our interventions to make them more relevant and contextual. It has also helped in building accountability and magnifying the quality of our work.

Building alignment on shared goals: When we started, our stakeholders did not find our interventions to be relevant. To navigate this challenge, we focused on building alignment on shared goals.

Working with the system has its own complexities. Many a times, the system’s priorities shift and hence creating alignment takes more time. We particularly remember an instance where SEF, in collaboration with SCERT, Delhi, had launched a teacher competency framework as a guiding document. The overall goal was to build key competencies of teachers of Delhi’s government schools.

As the leadership changed, the focus also shifted from competency-based training to general training, e.g., road safety, etc. Revisiting the shared goals in the form of a teacher competency framework with the stakeholders helped in realigning our priorities. It also brought the focus back on competency-based training, which would have otherwise been deprioritized.

Co-creating trust: Trust is a foundational requirement to build any partnership or to collaborate. Initially, there was a massive lack of trust in us. With this realization, we consciously chose to prioritize communication.

To build the credibility of our work, we constantly communicate authentically about the progress we have made. We also share the challenges we have faced with the stakeholders. This helps to close the loop of communication. It also fastens the decision making process.

We share fortnightly progress emails and intervention-wise reports. We also conduct progress and brainstorming meetings with bureaucrats and other governmental stakeholders. Most importantly, all our intervention WhatsApp groups have relevant stakeholders who can constantly see the progress.

They add their inputs and support us whenever we are stuck. This has made them feel a part of the process. They also understand that any good collaboration is a two-way street and needs efforts from both sides.

These three shifts in our approach, and deeper understanding of our stakeholders, have helped us experience changes in the way our stakeholders show up. There is trust in the system, for who we are, and the work we do.

We now hear things like, “Let’s do this together,” “This is a great idea and would be a helpful resource”, “I need support in conducting an activity-based lesson,” etc. This spirit and motivation to collaborate is our source of energy on all days, knowing that what we do creates a meaningful impact.

Key learnings from our journey of deconstructing systems

We have some key learnings that have stayed with us. These have emerged from our engagements with the system and stakeholders. These learnings inform our work in all systems programs.

Context matters: In our experience of working in different spaces and settings, the context has mattered in making the interventions relevant and meaningful for stakeholders. But what does it really mean to understand the context? The context includes the physical setting and the environment. It also involves the way people engage and interact with one another. The stories that bring the culture to life, the beliefs, value systems, motivations, and assumptions held, everything is a part of understanding context.

“Team SEF was awesome. Each one of you was aware of your roles and delivered the content timely and effectively. It was a wonderful experience.” – Sunita Chauhan, Mentor Teacher, on her experience of a collaborative design workshop

Authentic relationships: Certainly, we have all built and experienced relationships in our lives. And often, it is easy to know which ones are genuine, and which ones transactional. Similarly, stakeholders, irrespective of where you work, can see through relationships that are transactional and have a certain intent in mind, for the sake of getting things done.

Building strong, genuine relationships, and understanding others’ perspectives and needs, require ongoing effort and empathy. However, it helps sustain investment and build trust for the work we do.

Identify your champions: In our work, we have seen that working with individuals who have clarity of their role and influence in the system is important. This ensures that interventions have a stronger buy-in, and are executed with pace and quality.

A healthy practice is to be observant, and consistently take stock of multiple points of leverage. If things change within the system, this helps in maintaining some level of stability and trust.

We have consciously formed core teams in the work that we do with the in-service and pre-service programs. The goal has been to enable multiple people from the system to be involved in every step of the process, from design to execution. This ensures that irrespective of changes, a few individuals will continue to be strong anchors, supporting the work and other team members who join in.

Challenges we are yet to unlock

We have had strong learnings and experiences while working with stakeholders. However, we continue to experience a few challenges. We are continuously working on learning from these and work on improvement. We discuss a few of the challenges we are trying to address below.

Multiple decision-makers and delays in decision-making: Decision-making is an important part of any individual’s, especially a leader’s, role. It is imperative that decisions are made that are informed, agile and adaptive, ensuring a positive impact. Yet, this process often becomes complex in any system, which involves multiple stakeholders at different levels, taking the decisions and being impacted by them.

In our work, we have often experienced delays due to changes in the leadership, conversations going in loops without clear direction, and inconsistencies in the execution of decisions due to fear of failure.

In such cases, it is essential to be clear of who needs to be involved, who is taking the decisions, and how to ensure execution of the said decisions. This can help ensure that we are being deliberate and effective in this process.

Stakeholders’ buy-in: As shared previously, there are different people involved in different roles and decisions, hence, gaining a buy-in is a complex and time-consuming process. Each stakeholder brings in a unique perspective and priorities. These need to be factored in to design any intervention. Engaging in dialogue, and building a shared vision, through Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) and one-on-one meetings, has often helped us address misconceptions and build alignment. However, dissonances prevail, given the number of stakeholders we work with.

Constantly changing priorities: Priorities of government institutes often evolve according to the changing political and social environment. Hence, there is a constant need to be agile and adaptive. It needs us to constantly rethink our priorities and align with the stakeholders. This process also requires us to build some stability in the highs and lows experienced, while taking cognizance of our emotional states as well as that of our stakeholders.

These learnings and challenges have enabled us to show up with empathy. We strive to build a collaborative environment, where we value the wholeness of each human, their reality and context, without wavering from our pursuit of excellence.

As an organization, when we started this journey, we did have moments of creeping fear of not knowing or being enough, of being unsure of the next step and not feeling hopeful of achieving our vision. However, over the past few years, we have learnt to embrace the reality of this being a marathon and not a sprint. We realize that our journey will require consistency and grit.

We have co-worked with some wonderful humans across leadership levels. They have supported us. They have been our light on difficult days. They have often helped us brainstorm to ensure that initiatives materialize with quality. These individuals have been instrumental in solidifying our work. We have now reached a space in a few of our programs where trust is present and collaboration is organic. In these initiatives our stakeholders in the system push us as much as we push them, to produce a solid quality of work each day.

“Co-working with our system educators has helped us understand the context in a deep and meaningful way. Personally, conversations with stakeholders have been mini-learning lessons. One such conversation was with a mentor teacher who said, “Oftentimes teachers are overwhelmed and when they enter classrooms, the overwhelm of too much work translates in the classroom atmosphere. As a mentor, I ask my primary teachers to take five deep breaths before entering a class.” These experiences, challenges, and best practices bring relevance to our training design, allowing teachers to feel a stronger connection with the content when they attend sessions.” – Shinjinee Pal, Manager, Udaan-Delhi Systems Project

In this journey, we have learnt that it is imperative to work with different stakeholders and systems. No one of us can achieve this vision in isolation. It is our collective responsibility to show up with grit, purpose, and excellence for our children every day, bringing this vision to life