Into clouds, feet on ground

CHALLENGE OF EDUCATION

Sandhya Iyengar writes about Meghshala, a unique venture in Bengaluru to empower teachers and make classroom instruction lively, energetic and dynamic

Imagine is a song that John Lennon wrote decades ago where the world was visualised in a different way. If those lyrics had to be tweaked a bit today, and you were nudged into imagining a government school classroom replete with computers, Internet and smart teaching, walls that are plastered with bright and informative projects and chart work by students, teachers who were trailblazers in the realm of education and finally, students themselves who were open and eager to be forever kept challenged in the right spirit of curiosity and enquiry.

But why should this scenario be relegated only to a dream? Why can’t government school children enjoy the same opportunities and privileges that the so-called elite schools provide? Surely there must be a way to flatten the system and ensure that an education of quality and merit remains accessible to all? These were questions that kept popping into Jyothi Thyagarajan’s head with alarming frequency, specially as she had been on the other side of the fence and witnessed first-hand, the far-reaching effects of quality teaching and quality teachers.

Of the 9.1 million teachers across government schools in India, barely 12 per cent cleared the Teacher Eligibility Test and yet, by barely delivering the goods so to say, they continued to be unleashed on students. The urgency to act fast was sown in Jyothi’s mind even as she envisaged a time when very soon the chasm between the privileged and disadvantaged schools would become impossible to gulf.

Thus, Meghshala was born out of this commitment, and though barely a year old, it has already come to grips with narrowing the divide in the slowly growing number of government schools that it currently services. In a nutshell, Meghshala weaves innovative and interesting ideas and plans around texts and lessons to empower the teacher and make classroom instruction lively, energetic and dynamic.

Master teachers

A common scene in a government school is invariably children sitting listless and mechanically, reciting texts by heart while the teacher hovers around with a threatening stick in hand. But now, all that is a thing of the past, with Meghshala’s lessons interspersed with audio visual inputs, multimedia learning, model lessons that have questions leading beyond the fixed texts, teaching aids that make subjects spring alive and teacher initiated processes that make the child think, imagine, question, create and resolve. Meghshala’s innate strength is the team of 15 or more youngsters called ‘Master Teachers’ who are deeply immersed in developing and evolving teaching techniques that go beyond the syllabus.

There is no object, element or detail that is not relied upon to give a lesson that extra edge. Even the mobile phone, a great draw with these children, is used to demonstrate lessons and once stripped of all apps to its bare minimum, the phone becomes a tool to test water purity, much to the children's delight. Boring scholastic material is turned into riveting learning tool with a shake of Meghshala’s wand and the young students are kept in thrall even as they absorb and disseminate knowledge.

The Master Teachers, highly qualified individuals from reputed colleges in India and abroad, work on the prescribed text books and syllabus to impart their skills to the teacher who then helps the students learn, understand, process, analyse and evaluate lessons. This also opens up lateral thinking in the teacher herself and serves as encouragement for her to later customise and create new lessons herself.

Trained in graphic arts, digital media production, content writing and also holding degrees in education, the Master Teachers focus on empowering the fountainhead in the school — the teacher herself. Customised instructions to the teacher will help her enliven and broaden classroom instruction and help develop critical thinking skills amongst the students.

Ullas Kumar, who spearheads the operations and has had an interesting career path from Teach for India to Infosys, is the indefatigable taskmaster at Meghshala. Whether it is spreading Meghshala’s ideas to other states or just cracking the whip in the office to ensure that a steady rate of lesson plans per day is executed by each Master Teacher, the wheels of this ambitious venture are kept well oiled.

John Lennon would have liked the idea of Meghshala or better still what the word means. A school in the skies would have kept him dreaming and imagining on and on. But it is a word that is today rooted in reality and technology parlance.

Meghshala represents a teaching platform on iCloud for digital learning and aims to catapult government school students into a promising future. Meghshala can be contacted on [e-mail].