Student leadership and redefining learning

“What is the purpose of the brakes in a vehicle?”, my aunt had asked me one day. My aunt has this unusual habit of using anecdotes to make me see the world in a different light. I thought for a while and I stuck to my mechanical chain of thoughts- “to stop a vehicle”. What do you think is the answer to this question? Take a moment.

I have been working in the education sector for three years now. As a TFI fellow, I taught a bunch of 64 students in a low - income school in Malwani, Mumbai. Working with students helped me realised the complexity of the problem at hand - equity in education. It gave me an understanding of how jobs of their parents in an unstructured economy, poor health conditions of a community, inaccessibility to resources and other problems cause multiple setbacks for a student to learn. Having experienced working in a classroom I wanted to work at scale.

While working with LFE, I have had the opportunity to visit government schools in various districts in Maharashtra. These schools have to tackle multiple challenges on a regular basis. One of the biggest challenges for our system is to improve the learning levels of the students in the school. Recently, I got the opportunity to visit the Washim district which lies on the border of the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. Most of the residents are farmworkers in this region and farming is the major occupation of these districts. Washim has been listed as an ‘Aspirational District’ with a lot of efforts being put to improve the socio-economic status of the district. I visited Washim to understand the initiative taken to improve the Education index of the district.

Currently, our classrooms look something similar to - A teacher with multiple responsibilities struggling to finish the syllabus while working with students on different learning levels. The students learn what the teacher is able to deliver and in most cases, their learning is limited to that extent. The focus is more on what the teacher is able to deliver. The belief is that the better or more the teacher is able to deliver, the better will be the learning of the students. In a setup as such, a few questions that occur to me. In a world where information is no longer dependent on experts and is so easily available, is this current method helping our students?

My visit to Washim helped me see a learning model where the learning is more dependent on the learner. For our visit to the schools, we travelled between farms on kaccha roads which had diverted from the state road, crossing water canals and resting farmworkers. The schools you would imagine as any of the village schools- a thatched roof structure with 3 to 6 rooms with a huge tree in the courtyard.

In one of the schools, the students were sitting in the courtyard in groups of multiple grades (grades 1 to 4) practising mathematics. The students were given a list of activities that they had to do in their groups and the teachers were supervising the space. I joined one of the groups. Vaishnavi, a grade 4th student, was practising increasing order and decreasing order of numbers with her group. She had given different questions for practice to every student and correcting their answers. In this manner, she had managed to work on addition, subtraction, multiplication and division questions. In a general classroom, one would have seen a bunch of questions on the board and the entire class trying to solve the questions and later the teacher solving the answer.

Here what I witnessed was that students were learning from each other, they were able to communicate their challenges, encourage each other to think about how to get to the solution. It felt so different from a general classroom where so many students struggle but are unable to voice and clear their doubts. The environment of the groups and thus the class here was of trying, failing, learning, and trying again. As adults, don’t we do this regularly? I felt the students