Vidya Bhawan Society - School transformation project

Note on WSTP in Vidya Bhawan Society schools
In 2004, Wipro and VBS came together to work in the arena of quality education after a long period of discussions and interactions for quality education under the project of WSTP- Whole School Transformation Project. The underlying belief that has prevailed throughout is that transformation is a continuous process, which has to happen from within. Besides, the nature of the movement expected was towards the goals of the existing Vidya Bhawan Schools. These include:

• Developing the spirit of collaboration and cooperation amongst students rather than of Competition.
• Stress free, child-friendly, activity-based and experiential learning atmosphere at school rather than one-sided and monotonous classroom teaching aimed at rewarding rote learning, memorization and thoughtless reproduction of texts and ideas alien to the learners' reach and scope of comprehension.
• Encouraging independent thinking , concept formation, power of expression, empathy, self actualization, leadership and creativity rather than superimposed regimentation and standardization through marks, grades, divisions, degrees and acquisition of medals and trophies

The principles that have guided the process for all these years are the following:

• Change is gradual and internally led, external intervention can only provide support. And all such interventions need to struggle against an inbuilt resistance.
• It is important to bring together on a common platform the stakeholders in the education.
• Focus on co-curricular activities and material development (of activities and worksheets) for individual and group work is critical to school
• Assessment/appraisal systems need to be more broad-based in order to encompass various elements of curriculum, cognitive as well as imaginative and creative.
• The child has to have a bigger role to play, and attempts must be made at increasing the participation. There is also a realization that this is not easy and nothing much would be possible in a short term.
• Trust building with and with in each school is the most important key to forming a partnership towards change.
• Sensitization and specific support would be needed for the leadership individually and collectively

Current Scope of the Project

Four Vidya Bhawan Schools abiding to the general philosophy of providing quality education to children from all strata of the society are the intervention field:

Sharing some of these ideas with Private & public schools as well as some state govt. run schools in and around Udaipur.

Goals

1. Understanding goals and purpose of education and the principles of Vidya Bhawan about education and about schools. Notion of a School - notion of quality education and understanding what it means.
2. Increase in internal sharing and mutual trust.
3. Development of better management practices and academic leadership
4. Capacity building of the teachers
5. Establishment of action research forum with teachers
6. Moving towards comprehensive and continuous Evaluation and Assessment systems.
7. Understanding children's learning processes, nature and ways of learning

Activities

1. Developing channels of interaction between the different sections of schools and teachers and the Society- intra school sharing channels
2. Developing inter institution sharing channels (amongst four schools and the resource centre)
3. Orientation and capacity building of institution heads and level heads in management practices and academic leadership.
4. Subject wise workshops for content and methodology as well as on nature of the concerned discipline for teachers.
5. Material development
6. Helping the teachers analyse classroom work done by children
7. Developing parent-teacher partnership.
8. Consolidating the School and class library and encouraging its wider use.

Where are we today and what are we doing?

At School level

With the Wipro project started the process of sharing and joint meetings with all the principals and teachers, it is continuing in the form of Principals' forum where the principals and a teacher representative meet every month and sometimes earlier to discuss what is happening in their schools.

The principal's of all schools have set certain academic goals as well as internal goal after discussion.

Teachers' capacity building workshops have been happening and also interaction apart from the workshops, in small groups or individually to discuss their classroom related progress and issues and the future plan is undertaken.

Planning at various levels is being undertaken by the teachers and regular subject committee meetings and section meetings are also held.

Exposure visits to other schools have been continuing since last 3 years.

In VB public school the parent teacher meetings have been more active & frequent.

Across all schools attempts are being made for two things:

• Enrichment of the central library
• Continuous and comprehensive assessment: Teachers in junior classes are trying out various things in this direction.

At the classroom level

Classroom Libraries have been started in all the classes of all the schools, though the involvement of teachers and children varies from class to class.
Teachers have also been making worksheets and selected from the exisiting workbooks developed for other states to enhance their classroom teaching.

Wider Sharing
Based on some of the learnings from the work in VB schools we have now started work with govt. and private schools in the bastis of Udaipur.