Education is the process of enculturation of the young to be meaningful to self and to the layers of community roles. Expectedly, education has countless dimensions and education is too omnipotent and omnipresent to be the sole responsibility of a single social institution. Education of children is shared among a number of social units and influences – family, kinship, neighbourhood, government, school, constitutional values, technological levels, books, games, cinema and the likes.
School is just a cog in the wheel of education. However, schools stand out as the only specialised institution for education and bear special responsibility. The role of schools in education can be compared to the conductor of a musical orchestra; schools are the conductors of educational orchestra for students. Schools are expected to define and defend the educational context of students and enlighten and empower other social units and influencers to best play their role in the education of every child.
Schools must (innovatively) catalyse best of class educational opportunities for all enrolled students and ensure that all students are emotionally, socially and personally equipped to ‘equally’ gain from the opportunities, at all times. It is this context that helps us distil the specific policies, processes and activities which must be an integral part of good schools. Over the years, we have developed a list of ten ‘must have’ policies, processes and activities that help schools assure quality. Assess the quality of education in your child’s school by evaluating how well the school lives up to the following Ten Commandments of quality assurance’:
- Equal set of educational resources to all students: A child’s socio-economic background and personal predispositions should not be an impediment for access to all the resources in the school; for instance, no ‘extra payments’ must be demanded for access to a particular learning resource in school
- Focus on every student: Each child is unique and must be individually monitored and mentored. Currently, an average curriculum (watered down inclusive curriculum) is taught to ‘assumed average’ students who are put through ‘common (average) assessments’ and evaluated in broad bands (A, B, C …) which end up ‘averaging performance.’ Dehumanisation of education must end; for instance, homework content, revision content and progress reports must be unique for every student. Personalisation of education is indeed impossible in a manual system but it is not too difficult in a digital school.
- Special focus on weaker students: Schools often marginalise the weaker students. Every child enters schools as equally talented and schools mint the ‘slow learners’ out of the (almost) ‘equal learners’ entering the schools’ primary sections. The school must not be using the phrase ‘slow learner’ for any student, because no child is any less endowed. Your child’s school must be working on comprehensively redrawing the remedial processes and resources with respect to reading, language of instruction and math.
- Due focus on talented students: Ironically, talented students are also grossly marginalised in schools; schools do not make any exception with respect to the class-driven boundaries. Enriched and accelerated learning opportunities must be ensured for them. Time tabling and ‘social fit’ constraints are no reason for not supporting talented students.
- Compensate for the weaker educational context outside schools: The school must not adopt an ostrich-like attitude towards the environment faced by the student at home. Schools must redefine homework and projects for home and significantly empower parents with actionable, micro and ‘daily’ inputs on the study tasks for home. Of course, any degree of success in enlisting parent’s active support will be transformational and worth all that it takes.
- A limited set of values are assertively reinforced: A well-chosen ‘aspirational set of values’ must be actualised in the school; personal hygiene, personal grooming, social acceptance, team play, creative expression, new-age-career drills, safe cyber activities are representatives of such values. We feel compelled to mention that the best of schools, unfortunately, have limited vision and capability to role model these values.
Schools must not bite more than what they can chew and stay away from ‘educating’ personal and social values which are witnessing extreme plurality and teachers cannot be role models; schools should focus on more neutral values where teachers could be developed for some level of role modelling (enough to play mentor to students’ collective initiatives and pledges.) Aspirational values fit well in this respect. - Focus on academics as the primary delivery: Schools are the only social institution for academic nurturance. The focus on overall development is at the next level for schools. Your child’s school must ensure no exception to the cardinal rule for academics in schools – ‘No child left behind’ and it must also actively stymie supplementary education (a major source of divergent and declining academic performance among students.)
- Creating and enabling structure and resources to best galvanise the role of all other stakeholders: The school should leave no stones unturned to ensure exchanges with all stakeholders such as parents, educators, community, alumni, corporates, NGOs, specific collaborations with schools across the world and government resources to enrich and supplement its resources.
- Research and leading edge of educational thought and practices: The school should explicitly draw and contribute to research and innovation in educational practices on an ongoing basis. The following is a listing of the important research agenda for schools in India:
- Achieving academic-level reading skills in all students (broadly, it means an ability to read nearly 200 pages in 5 hours before Class VIII) and securing academic-level language competence in the language of instruction
- Concept-based teaching, assessment, reporting, remedial and self-learning by students
- Cumulative achievement reporting system
- Flipped-classroom led self-learning practice
- Nurturance of all talented and gifted students
- Effective integration of career counselling and career exam preparatory into the routine of the school and conducted by schools’ teachers.
- Prepare for higher education in different domains as per nature and nurture: The school should expose and equip every student for multiple career possibilities through a well-planned overall development plan for every student. For instance, it is against ‘nature and nurture’ to take pride in ‘sending all the students to IITs and the likes’ after 14 years of ‘whole person development’.
The time tabling ‘capability’ (mostly manually done in schools) is the biggest culprit in the poor show schools present on the commandments presented above. Indeed, and happily, technology holds the key to educational revolution by helping schools generate personalised time table, on a daily basis, for every student, teacher and resource (such as classrooms, labs, library, play field). Of course, there is ‘little technology, per se’ in such a time table; creating such a time table is more a matter of espousing and much less about time-tabling software ‘new-age teaching and learning’ processes and resources.
To be real, one important reason of the impasse in school education is that school leaders and technology ‘vendors’ have not had a common language as yet and technological solutions for school continue to be ‘hi-tech’ but ‘educationally ancient’.
We, the authors, have had the privilege of putting technology and pedagogy through the same heads and create among the most innovative student-centred, comprehensive virtual school systems. Technology is fast converting educational vision into transformational capability on the ground.
Prod your child’s school to actualise these Ten Commandments as the touchstone for harnessing ICT in the school; technology must be used for creating the dream student-centric education system.
The existence of student centricity of the educational system is the measure of quality.
