Don’t build again, build beyond
The Indian education ecosystem is one of the biggest and most diverse in the world. More than 100 national and state departments are responsible to make 250 million children across 1.5 million schools ready for further education and employment. 4.5 million education leaders, including administrators, pedagogical coaches, school principals and community leaders own the immense task of designing policies, programmes and functions to support 12 million teachers to ensure effective student learning.
Despite their central role, education leaders are hardly thought about in the education ecosystem. They have access to scant and merely need-based learning and capacity building avenues.
This gap may seem insignificant at first glance – after all, there are so many other actors to focus on – but it has a ripple effect. A leader who isn’t amply trained affects teachers, students and learning outcomes all at once. It is this gap that ShikshaLokam attempts to bridge by enhancing education leadership in India to build a robust education system.
Reimagining the role of school leaders
Madhavi Patel is a school principal at a government school located in Yerwada, Pune She leads an English-medium school (K-8) with a team of 21 teachers, a social worker and a counsellor. Her approach to continuously improve the learning outcomes is to build a healthy environment in classrooms, the school and in the community. She identifies the needs of teachers and facilitates regular trainings to ensure effective teaching and learning in classrooms. She encourages teachers to lead school projects and ensures that the team is appreciated for the hard-work they but in: She even works closely with the social worker to engage with parents addressing any challenges to student learning and creating spaces for parents to contribute to their children’s development. Madhavi is a part of a Leader Learning Community where she picks up ideas, tools and practices to hone her skills so as to better support her team Today, the students in her school are enrolled in illustrious junior colleges in the city and will soon graduate to enter degree colleges.
Madhavi Patel demonstrates leadership: the ability to continuously see, sense and improve. This is what ShikshaLokam wants to enable for 4.5 million leaders like her who are part of the K-12 education system in India.
What is the right way?
In ShikshaLokam’s early days, we wanted to set up a National Institute for Education Leadership – a physical institute for leadership training where school leaders would build necessary skills in workshops, peer-learning spaces and more. However, for our audacious goal in a country the sheer size and diversity of India, was this the right approach?
Piecing together our vision to enable the education leadership of the country and our initial design, we were faced with a series of challenges:
Scale
A physical institute can work with only a small group of leaders at a time, not 4.5 million of them. Building capacity to train that many would require massive resources and probably many such institutes.
Speed
Even if we offered the best capacity-development opportunities, we estimated that to create an impact at scale for 4.5 million education leaders in India, it would take us more than 5,000 years. Improving learning outcomes for 250 million students in our lifetime needed us to design an exponential solution.
Sustainably
The education ecosystem changes constantly. There are new educational tools being introduced, new methodologies being created, new policies being implemented. There are diverse and new challenges (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) that come out of the blue. Training education leaders just one time is not enough. They need ongoing and frequent learning opportunities. Thus, it became vital to design a solution which would close the gap between knowledge and action quickly and that could evolve with the needs of the hour.
To do so, we needed a new frame. We went back to the drawing board. We relooked at our conversations with school leaders and practitioners and re-examined the pre-existing solutions in the ecosystem. We unbundled education leadership programmes to reimagine what learning and improvement journeys for various stakeholders could look like. We tried to gauge what the ecosystem needs in order to become regenerative and sustainable. This is what we found:
- Leaders need regular training programmes and they need access to tools for self-learning (Learn)
- They should be able to assess their learning(s) (Sense and Make Sense)
- They should be able to connect with a community of practitioners through learning circles and discussion forums ( Mentoring)
- Just learning is not enough. They should be able to apply learnings from the workshops by working on improvement projects. (Improve)
These are the capabilities – Sense, Make Sense, Learn, Mentoring, Improve – that we had to build at ShikshaLokam.
The Platform Model
Going back to our foundational question: ‘How do we enable these capabilities in 4.5 million leaders, at scale, with speed and sustainably?’ we realised the answer lay in building a Societal Platform.
The Societal Model proposes a three-layered approach to design: Programmes, Solutions and Shared Infrastructure. While we were confident in our ability to design and implement local programs and solutions, the infrastructure layer made us pause and reflect:
- Could a relevant national open and shared infrastructure be created to serve the volume of users we were anticipating?
- If such an infrastructure existed, would others in the ecosystem join in to build diverse solutions on top of it?
- Should we partner with the government to take this infrastructure to leaders?
The resounding answer to all three questions was YES!
We were faced with two key questions: Does such an infrastructure already exist or would we have to build it? Could we pull it off with a small team or did we need to invest a lot of time and money?
As we deliberated, some things fell into place:
EkStep Foundation was already building Sunbird, a set of open source and configurable learning management infrastructure, for teacher training. It would mean easy adoption, a quick way for us to build content and courses for school leaders.
Coincidentally, the government itself had launched DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing) which leveraged Sunbird, a few months before the conception of ShikshaLokam. It was a platform that would reach millions of government school teachers and leaders. It would be a system that they would be used to, which meant more acceptance for our platform.
Sunbird had a strong technology team which could help us adapt it to our needs. This meant we didn’t need to invest in a large tech team from the get-go. We could start with a small team and rely on the Sunbird team’s expertise to help us figure out the issues we faced.
Building upon
We started working on Sunbird. We brought together a small engineering team to configure Sunbird to build training modules for school leaders and to support these modules for the government as well as nonprofits.
However, being its first adopter, we faced challenges several times in initial stages: the infrastructure was new and rudimentary, the documentation was still evolving and Sunbird was yet to mature as an open source project. Still, it offered us what other available options couldn’t: the ability to build quickly with a small team to reach scale sooner and with fewer resources.
It was a bumpy ride but we carried on working with Sunbird for many reasons. It came from a trusted ecosystem, our value systems aligned and the team was always accessible to support and co-create with us whenever we got stuck while developing the initial learning capability, called Bodh (Learn). Most importantly, it gave us agility: we were able to get the whole platform instance up and build and publish Bodh as a mobile app on Playstore in less than a month.
Building beyond, together
In 2018, the Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights (DCPCR) embarked on an ambitious project, School Development Index – an assessment-led improvement of all Delhi government schools. The Commission approached our partner Mantra4Change. At the time, ShikshaLokam was already planning to work on an assessment capability to enable leaders to sense and make sense! Keeping the Shaala Siddhi framework as the foundation, Mantra4Change co-created the SDI framework with government and civil society partners while we developed the infrastructure to host this assessment solution, ensuring ease of use, availability at scale and high quality of insights to drive improvement decisions.
This led to the development of our own building blocks Samiksha (Sense: the ability to do assessments at scale) and Dhiti (Make Sense: the capability for education leaders to be able to analyse the captured data). Over time, we built other building blocks such as Unnati (Improve: that enabled school leaders to bring about micro improvements in their schools). Each building block we built brought alive the journey that we had envisaged for school leaders to have a robust learning framework.
As we built these capabilities for ourselves, we also added them back to Sunbird. Soon, along with the capability to produce and consume courses, Sunbird offered the assessment (create and conduct variety of questionnaires), analysis (create dashboards, charts, reports, etc.) and micro-improvement capabilities to other users.
Network effects
All the capabilities we built made their way to education leaders through the network of our partners: the government and civil society organisations. The DCPCR assessment was implemented in 5,500 schools in Delhi by the government. With our partner organisation Mantra4Change, we were able to take the platform to more than 135,000 leaders in Uttar Pradesh.
We worked with the intention that the capabilities be used by the maximum possible users. Thinking about scale from the very beginning meant designing for diversity.
Today, in less than 5 years, we have impacted around 450,000 million leaders across 200,000 schools in multiple states with our capabilities. We continue to work with academic bodies, government functionaries and civil society organisations to co-create programmes and capabilities, enabling lifelong learning and improving opportunities for education leadership, all in only a fraction of the time we had anticipated when we began our journey.
Building beyond saved us a lot of time, effort and monetary investment (costs were cut to about one-third) as we built ShikshaLokam’s capabilities on top of the existing Sunbird infrastructure, co-created with the partners who brought their expertise in designing programmes and solutions for leadership development. We contributed back to Sunbird and the capabilities developed today can be used by diverse users across many contexts and creating an even bigger impact through them.
If you are working to address the challenges faced by the education leaders and would like to co-create solutions by leveraging open source technology, we would love to build beyond with you. Write to us at info@shikshalokam.org.
