Two Interventions in School Improvement

Kotak Education Foundation (KEF) works to support youth and children from underprivileged families to rise above the poverty line and lead a life of dignity. With the youth, we work by providing scholarships to complete higher education and livelihood training to dropouts. For supporting students, KEF works with government-aided and privately managed vernacular (Hindi, Marathi and Urdu) medium schools in the slums of Mumbai.

KEF works with these schools on school leadership development, teachers training, parents intervention, spoken English program for students, and health and infrastructure provisioning. As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization ran a program ‘Digital Learning Solutions’ for teachers and students as well.

What Does it Take to Improve Schools?

School improvement is as much a science as an art. Only intuition and direct ground experience, while useful, are not enough. We also need to explore the available body of knowledge on school improvement.

It is important to know and understand that external and internal contexts of schools are unique and that these matter. The interpersonal dynamics in a school, the collective efficacy of teachers and the quality of school leadership are important considerations as well.

Each school requires a context-specific set of interventions, strategies, skillsets, and human, intellectual and material resources. Bringing all stakeholders to work together produces faster and sustainable results.

There are studies that state that infrastructure does not have much correlation with student learning outcomes. However, in a resource poor context such as that of our country, working on infrastructure, mid-day meals and health is very critical for any intervention to succeed.

While working with government schools, it is important to loop in DIET officers and Kendra Pramukh, and trustees in case of privately managed schools. The journey is not linear. To be able to move upward constantly, you have to keep space in your design and monitor the spiralling process.

KEF’s School Improvement Journey

KEF has been running a School Leadership Development Intervention for six years post first two years of pilot design. Eleven schools have graduated a 5-year intervention life cycle, whereas 100 others are still a part of this journey.

It has also been piloting an intervention called ‘Whole School Turn Around Project’ in three schools for the last two years. Each school may have a different combination of interventions depending upon shared needs of the school and KEF’s parameters.

The understanding with which these interventions work is that the school as an organization/institution improves when school processes and systems change for the better. Student learning outcomes are enhanced because of this process. The focus in this article is upon school improvement, as KEF has attempted it through School Leadership Development Intervention and Whole School Turnaround Pilot (WSTAP).

The location of the schools that KEF works with, in 60-70% cases, is in the heart of the community. The implications of the same for school improvement are that the Head Teacher and other teachers in these schools need to fight many invisible and unrecognized hurdles on a daily basis. These schools often lack the infrastructural identity of a school.

From ‘How can I do it?’ to ‘I can do it’.

“I used to be involved in organizational responsibilities in my school and used to call myself ‘the highest paid clerk of the school.’ However, through the LEAD (School Leadership Development Intervention) program, I realized my multiple roles as a school head and its impact on students, teachers, parents and the society as a whole. The LEAD program changed my mind-set and I have emerged as a school leader by action rather than a school leader by position. It has been a journey for me from ‘How can I do it?’ to ‘I can do it’.” – School Principal, Mr Mohammad Fazzlur Rehman Khan, Noorul Islam High School, Participant of Leadership Development program cohort 2014-19.

In fact, in most cases, these schools are essentially some rooms rented together, loosely scattered in close distance in the community, not necessarily within one boundary. Most schools run on a double shift and do not have a staff room for teachers. As a result, having staff meetings or holding processes for teachers in school when there is a free period is a challenge. Playgrounds, functional toilets, proper ventilation and enough light in the classrooms are luxuries.

When we started working with these schools, any suggestion for change was met with, “What can we do?”. Overall, there was a sense of helplessness, fatigue and burnout. In the very first year we realized that any improvement in the way these schools function needs the force of individual agency to be strengthened first. This discovery is applicable universally, but it is far more emphatically true in the context of the schools we work with and their social milieu.

The Four Pillars of KEF’s School Improvement Initiatives

The designed logical outcomes chain for School Leadership Development Intervention begins with the strengthening of individual leadership of school leaders and ends at the school having set up a culture of continuous improvement in systems and processes by the end of the 4th year. Team leadership and instructional leadership are the other two pillars of the intervention that the program tries to strengthen. The intervention is designed as a 3-5 years long intervention depending upon where the school begins. The interventions are broken down into small specific, measurable practices, and are delivered in schools through three key activities. Once a year, an exposure visit to an international or national level education conference in an outside state for 3-5 days is one of these. These visits expose them to what is going on in the rest of the country and the world. It often proves to be a beliefbreaking event for them. It creates a sense of positive restlessness, fuelling the momentum to initiate change in the school.

Annually, four group workshops for the cohort, typically 30-40 school leaders together going through the change, are organized. These strengthen community building processes. These also work as a scaffolding as one goes through the change process and create sustainability effects after KEF exits. The network these schools build with each other continues to be available to them. The third activity involves facilitative sessions in the school, twice a week, with school leaders. These try to break down theoretical concepts and frameworks to bring in action and practice in particular school contexts, and solving problems and challenges using these frameworks and concepts.

Noorul Islam School, Govandi, Mumbai, LEAD Cohort 2014

KEF collaborated with Noorul Islam School in 2014, just a year after Mohammad Fazzlur Rehman Khan had joined the school as the principal. He was then fighting all kinds of internal and external battles. His school has more than 2000 students. Since he was an outsider joining as Principal, school staff was not willing to support him.

The school had four court cases by internal staff, 3-4 RTIs filed every month and 2-3 parents barging into the principal’s room for some or the other complaint, on a daily basis. Mr Khan would land up spending majority of his time in responding to RTIs and attending court cases. The school lacked enough infrastructure, had no boundary walls and no culture of teachers/staff/parents meetings.

It took Mr Khan two years to have his first full staff meeting and discuss teaching learning processes in the school. After that, there has been no looking back. He used the first two years after his appointment as the principal of the school to strengthen his individual leadership to stabilize a volatile situation and bring the individual teachers together as a team.

In the next two years, he worked on developing a vision for the school, improving teaching learning practices, and in getting everyone to focus on student learning outcomes.

Testimony of Mohammad Fazzlur Rehman Khan, Principal of the School

I used to be reactive. Now, I ensure that I am responsive and better organized. I have a growth mind-set. As a result, neighbouring school heads have high regards for me and reach out for guidance. My management has developed trust in me, despite me being the junior most in my school. LEAD helped me build my capacity in understanding school leadership, conflict management, team building processes, and developing a vision for the school.

With LEAD, we developed a vision for my school – a shared vision – five years back. My journey is on to translate our shared vision into reality with the help of all the stakeholders. We make the School Development Plan year on year, in alignment with the school vision. Teachers, who worked based on their individual interests, work as a team these days. I have second and third line of leadership in my school now and that makes for high school effectiveness.

Teaching learning processes in the school now try to ensure learning outcomes rather than gearing towards completing the content/ syllabus, especially up to class 8th. Teachers of languages and math have freedom to develop their own syllabus, especially up to class 8th, to ensure that students develop the relevant literacy and numeracy skills in order to translate the school vision into practice.

The school has developed a teachers’ logbook based on learning outcomes, teaching plans, and the improvement records of teachers and students. Teachers have been trained for 21st century, skill-based lesson planning and teaching. It is a habit change process for teachers; they are guided occasionally on it. The school tries to ensure that the students can learn in an environment that is safe physically, mentally and spiritually.

Parents’ attitude towards the school is very positive now. They believe that their children are in safe hands. The school conducts students-led parents’ meetings twice a year, to ensure that the participation of parents in the institution’s processes is high.

For the year 2022-23, we have developed our own bridge course in math for classes 5 to 10 as a response to academic loss due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The school has special programs for literacy and numeracy development of academically weak students as well. Dropouts from the school (from 8th to 10th grades) have reduced by 12% in 3 years.

Shri Venkatesh Vidya Niketan, Vikroli, Mumbai, WSTAP Cohort 2019

The school had 726 students then along with eight secondary section teachers and four primary section teachers. The HM of the school had a major rift with the schoolteachers. She was not able to engage with them. She, in most of her sharing, pointed out things like:

“I am not confident about myself.”
“I do not know how to lead and change my school.”
“I cannot do it or I do not think, we as a school can achieve it.”
“Kaisay hoga, sir?”
“We will have to work extra hard if we don’t want to do it.”

Students did not have much sense about what to do after graduating from school. The school did not provide any information, knowledge or support on the issue. These things, along with the teachers having ego clashes, ensured that not much collaboration, creative designing and communication with each other was happening.

Testimony of Vishal Bandgarh, a Trustee of School

The largest part of change that is visible to me is the confidence and working of the HM in the school. Previously she used to call me for everything and ask me about it. Today she first looks at the situation and analyses it, creates her own action plan, and then shares it with me. She is able to engage with parents and students on her own. She knows the details of each child. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, she conducted online classes, home visits, and engaged in detail. All this helped us improve student attendance.

The creation of the SDP, and then doing a monthly plan, and reviewing it, have helped us get all our teachers together. This has helped us bring changes in infrastructure, engagement patterns, SLO, TLM and other such practices. We follow up the monthly planning and review meetings conducted in the school with relevant action. Due to our engagement and learning from WSTAP, the processes of engaging with parents and other stakeholders for school improvement has become easier.

Teachers who earlier pulled each other down are now working as a strong team, learning from each other and solving problems on their own. They take the case of each child who is having challenges and share their best practices and actions with each other.

Daily debriefing and individual coaching with teachers has helped the school achieve this big change. The WSTAP facilitator helped the head teacher set up classroom observation processes. This has led to a mind-set shift of both the teachers and the head teacher about themselves and their roles.

Today, in our classrooms, we see that teachers give individual care and focus to each child knowing that each child’s learning is different from the other. This has helped the children develop their potential. This has a direct relationship with the increase in students’ confidence levels. This has resulted in agumenting teachers’ confidence as well. This in turn helps in enhancing the confidence of the head teacher.

Parents now want to contribute to the lives of their children. This started happening when they saw us conducting career guidance workshops and training for their wards. They started thinking that, “If the school is so much concerned about what my child does after completing school, then I being a parent must be more focussed.”

Parents, thus, have become more aware about their children’s future possibilities. They are committed to support their children in higher education and do the required financial savings. They are better engaged with the children now. The students have become more aware about their skills and future prospects as well.

Organizational Development for School Improvement

The second model we experimented with (having run LEAD for two years in schools) is the Whole School Turn Around Pilot (WSTAP). The guiding approach is that of organizational development. In this intervention, we create a core group consisting of school trustees, the head teacher, select teachers (30%) and two student and parent representatives from each class from grades 4 to 10.

This core group assesses the school in their respective groups (students, parents, teachers and school Management) on seven parameters as defined in the tool Shaala Siddhi. We contextualized the tool as per the objectives of WSTAP.

Each group rates the relevant domains on the bases of defined evidence. Then a collective inquiring and questioning happens amongst these stakeholder groups about ratings. KEF facilitators try to facilitate courageous and authentic dialogues in the school ratings.

This core group then draws up a School Development Plan (SDP) for three years. It also reviews this plan every month and makes all the necessary changes. SDP achievements reflect in school assessment, which happens at the beginning of first year and at end of the first, second and third years.

Measurement Matters

Having an assessment framework helps chalk out the journey and set realistic goals. Even if no framework is close to your context, you can tweak it in a relevant manner. A framework gives the required directional sense.

Shala Siddhi is a tool developed by National Institute of Education Planning and Administration (NIEPA, Delhi) used for self-evaluation by Indian schools. This tool is very effective, when used meaningfully, as has been the experience of school leaders we have worked with.

https://shaalasiddhi.niepa.ac.in/pdf-doc/Framwork_English.pdf

McKinsey has studied 20 country systems and they have used a four-scale metrics, which is quite comprehensive. You may also contextualize it for your specific needs. The study also shares a specific set of interventions to move from one stage to another stage.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/how-the-worldsmost-improved-school-systems-keepgetting-better

Right from the beginning of the intervention, all stakeholders of the school are supposed to work together simultaneously on school improvement. In this model, there is no single hero to carry the burden. These processes lead the school to the next level when followed systematically and consistently by the entire core group. This is a model of school improvement through collective agency at play. We have run this pilot for two and a half academic years now in three schools.

WSTAP’s outcomes chain design has the first outcome as a culture of high expectations in the school. In our ground experience, outcomes of all stakeholders in schools are low, as they do not have high expectations of themselves and each other. The school team coming together and raising questions, offering support, co-building a vision for the school and owning it together, are some other simultaneous outcomes to be worked on.

One facilitator works with the school all through. The role of the facilitator is to inspire and utilize group wisdom and resources available in the school and to bring in minimal resources from the outside. This strategy tries to ensure that whatever a school does, it is sustainable as there are no substantial additional resources required, be it space or learning material.

Matoshree Vidyalya, Mankhurd, Mumbai LEAD COHORT 2013

Mr Desai has the reputation of being a disciplined school leader. He has a good rapport with his teachers and trustees. The grade 10 results have been above 90% almost every year under his tenure. His school had infrastructure challenges, on the surface of it.

Mr Manohar Babaji Desai, Secondary Head Master

I used to do planning before as well. However, LEAD helped me structure and prioritize better. We have made our school vision and we are working on that through a systematic School Development Plan. I was able to have more time for teaching and learning.

I observed my schoolteachers earlier. With LEAD, I learnt how to make observation a reflective process for teachers. I started delegating, and giving choices to my teachers when I gave feedback. My staff meetings and parents meetings have become better organized.

I have set up individual development plans for all teachers based on observations. I send them for training programs to upgrade them. Our schoolteachers have received training in 21st century lesson plans and they follow it through.

The Education Department has appointed me as a trainer for 21st century skills, along with another LEAD school headmaster.

We have started pastoral care in our school to provide emotional and intellectual support to all our students. Their parents are not always in the best condition to listen to them and to support them in finding solutions. Pastoral care in our school has become popular with students and well known in other schools. I even presented a research paper on it. State Education Department awarded me for this innovation.

Our school conducts professional learning communities. Many times teachers from other schools come and participate. Our school has become a centre for other schools to observe our meetings, PLCs etc. I support and guide other headmasters; if they have any problems, they come to me now.

The biggest learning and benefit has been the skills of networking and collaboration I learned through the program. I have been able to generate the required infrastructure support for my school. We now have science labs, IT labs and classrooms. When the roof was in bad condition, I was able to get a grant for 30 lakhs from another organization to get new rooms constructed.

Conclusion

As shared earlier, different kind of schools will have different interventions/approaches working for them. LEAD has been a very popular program with School Leaders. A majority of them have experienced changes in self, team, instructional leadership and student learning outcomes. With 310 hours of annual input, it is considered an intensive program. But KEF has had more than 70% School leaders showing 100% target attendance in 2020-21, despite it being a COVID year. Their close-line achievements have been very competitive as well.

WSTAP can be very intensive and not all schools may have the stamina to go through the kind of intensity it requires. While KEF is yet to conduct a hypothesis validation study for WSTAP, there is already some evidence that LEAD improves individual school leadership and positively impacts team dynamics, quality of instruction and student learning outcomes. But it takes longer to impact school wide change. WSTAP brings changes in the entire school much faster. One important reason behind this being that facilitators are in the school through the day, five days a week. In LEAD, the facilitator is in the school only for two hours, twice a week. That makes a lot of difference. Even more importantly, change targets are decided by the school team together and all stakeholders are working on it simultaneously. School improvement, thus, becomes the entire school’s agenda.