By Amit Singh, ISF School Principal

The academic year 2009-2010, which ended on May 15^th, was a good session in my opinion, as I was able to better understand the conditions here, and also get to know my team members much better, which in turn will help me better plan our work with the ground realities in mind.  Now is the holiday season for students, and my colleagues and I are taking the opportunity to visit the renowned Rishi Valley in southern India, together with members of the ISF Board of Directors. Our goal is to continue to learn best practices from this highly successful organization, and adapt them to the culture and environment of rural Uttar Pradesh.  So far, our visit to Rishi Valley proves to be a very productive and enlightening experience on many fronts, especially regarding teachers’ training, classroom teaching and community involvement. We will soon integrate all those valuable learnings into our educational method.

My day-to-day activities during the school year My typical schedule during school year involves a 5-minute meeting with the teachers at the Rajugela School, after the morning assembly.  Afterwards, one of the senior staff goes to the Linklaters School in Samarua to maintain and check the records, monitor the classes to ensure effective teaching and bring material and stationary if needed. The person on duty then holds a post-school meeting with the teachers to discuss the daily updates and problems and to give teachers necessary inputs so they can improve themselves. As far as the Rajugela School is concerned, we hold a daily meeting with the teachers after students return home, to discuss the daily issues and decide on the next day’s agenda. This meeting is then followed by a 30 minute class on spoken English.

Coordination between the ISF hub and the satellite school The learning cards specifically used for different classes are kept at each school independently. As a principle, we maintain a minimum level of stock of stationery and materials in our satellite school; but if there is any damage to the study material, we do supply new versions from the Resource Centre in Rajugela. We introduced books for the first time a few months ago and this step has had a positive impact on the student enrollment, although some poor families still advocate for the cards. We are now seizing the opportunity of the holidays to renew the display boards, study and teaching materials, and prepare new sets of study cards for grades 3 and 4.  One thing we want to reinforce in the near future is the students’ contribution to the EVS curriculum development, by having students make village surveys before a topic is discussed in class.

Daily quality control We closely follow the monitoring tools and charts which are updated by teachers on a daily basis to analyze the progress of students and the performance of the teacher. This not only ensures that we are able to categorize the students in different groups (fast learner, average learner, or slow learner), but it also helps us take necessary steps if there is any unreasonable delay in the progress of a student. It is so because we have a standard time allotted to each milestone and level for a student. If the time taken during any milestone deviates too much from the standards, it is automatically revealed by these charts. These charts are maintained in every class at both schools to monitor the progress against our standards for appropriate speed and quality learning. We are happy that some students got admitted to higher grades by other schools after leaving the ISF school!

Establishing a strong brand We started a campaign to understand the aspirations and expectations of local community members, and interviewed many parents of current and former students. Our findings will help us understand how our educational system is perceived by our community and what we could do to improve it. In particular, we discovered that:

• The aim, teaching method and benefits of the ISF system are not sufficiently well-known.
• Private schools with better uniforms and furniture, and pick-up vehicles are favored by many; while government schools with mid-day meals, scholarships and uniforms that are paid for by the government, are favored by others over the ISF schools.
• The lack of pick-up vehicles at ISF to transport students deters some families.
• Caste mixing at ISF schools still poses a problem for many families.

Our goal is to project a more professional picture of our ISF schools, by engaging the community in a more active way, by for example offering vocational fee-based training course to villagers at the school premises (during afternoon hours) to promote employment in the region and to bring financial independence to our project, or by providing a reading room facility to the villagers during the late afternoon hours, or by making the internet facility available to the villagers to make them aware of the latest advancements in agriculture, or finally by collaborating with the government to introduce government educational schemes.

My focus and upcoming challenges in the next months:

• Improving the infrastructure of our two schools by adding furniture in the classroom, installing solar panels at the Resource Centre to address the recurrent problem of power, taking care of the gardens and the lawns, ensuring proper internet connectivity, and hopefully, installing swings for the students.
• Continuing to upgrade our curriculum for higher levels and improve teachers’ training at both schools, based on what we have learned during our visit to Rishi Valley.
• Establishing an affiliation with the State board or CBSE.
• Expanding our school systems by promoting our educational method to more families and explore opportunities to start new schools in the nearby villages.
• And last but not least: working more closely with the community to establish a strong brand name and reduce drop-outs.