Quality Improvement in Government Schools and Balwadis

Improving Infrastructure in Government Schools and Balwadis: Our focus in Government School and Balwadi infrastructure is on teaching and learning materials. Most other groups are focusing on rebuilding broken schools, supplying furniture, etc.  With our works and experience in primary and science education, we felt that our best contribution would be to improve the teaching-learning infrastructure in these schools and to focus on improving the quality of teaching in these schools. We are hoping to work with Akansha on these programs and we will be setting up the following:

• Primary Resource Centers – With a library kit, primary math activity kit, primary reading activity kit and a primary science kit – in each government primary school

• Pre-primary Resource Centers – Activity kits for stimulation for pre-reading, pre-writing and communication and confidence building – skills to prepare the child for school.  These will be provided in each government Balwadi.

• Science Resource Centers – A low cost science lab in middle and high schools with which teachers and students can do about 300 fun experiments. These labs will demonstrate the concepts the students are learning in their science course and will make this learning much more concrete and real.

Apart from the initial supply of materials, our team will also be supplying the centers periodically with additional materials.  All of these materials and ideas will be new to the teachers – they will therefore need continuous training and plan to work with the teachers for 2-3 years till they can use these resource centers effectively.  To do the training effectively, a fulltime resource team will visit each school every week and work directly with the teachers and the students, apart from organizing monthly teacher training programs.

Teacher Training:  Every month we will organize training for the teachers on activity based learning methods in reading, mathematics, science and social science and also provide them with additional teaching aids. This will also be used to network the teachers and help them share positive experiences.

Primary and Science Demo Classes: These are classes that are done by local volunteers who are trained by our resource team and who go to the schools every week and take special classes – with activities, demonstrations and discussions.  Through these classes we will also organize science clubs in the schools and organize exhibitions and melas in the school. 

Pre-primary and Science Vans: These vans go from school to school and demonstrate experiments and also organize video screenings, games and activity sessions, etc. Basically the van program adds to the Demo class program and has many more activities that cannot be covered with just the demo classes. 

The above four components – infrastructure improvement, teacher training, demo classes and van programs – together form the crux of the school and balwadi quality improvement plan.