The Educator: A Designer, Innovator, and Thinker

The educator plays one of the most important roles in determining how young people experience learning. We at Quest have worked with children from diverse age groups and backgrounds for over 12 years, and we have observed that the educator’s role is a constant and highly important factor in young peoples’ learning. How students experience their learning environment has a significant impact on their attitude toward learning as a whole. It is the educator who cultivates this environment and determines how young learners interact with various forms of knowledge and with each other.

At Quest 2 Learn 2018, we had the opportunity to interview David Jul, who is a learning designer at Kaospilot. We discussed how Kaospilot designs learning experiences for its students and how educators use a variety to tools and methodologies to design education environments. In the conversation, David outlined five questions that an educator must ask himself or herself when designing learning experiences.

Building Trust, Strengthening Education

In the development of a school, the local community has a crucial role to play. Teachers and community members both see the development of students as a priority, but the challenge lies in channelling this shared desire in a productive way. A lack of trust between the school and the community lies at the heart of the matter – school personnel generally seem to believe parents are not interested in their child’s education, and parents similarly seem to believe teachers are not productive.

Education & Skills Sector Reading List, March 2018

EMPLOYABILITY

An analysis of corporate data suggests that while corporations have been creating new jobs, the pace of job creation has been lacklustre in recent years. Read more in Live Mint here.

The ministry of labour and employment has issued a notification extending full-benefit, fixed-term jobs to all sectors of the economy, reports the Financial Express here.

Coalition Building & Corporate Philanthropy

Over the past decade, I have watched the admirable, at times controversial, but ceaseless march of corporations and philanthropic foundations to ‘do good’ in India, and to do it well. It’s been accelerated by changes to the Indian Companies Act, which mandated that 2% of the average profits of a company be invested in CSR.

Ten Tricks for Effective Facilitation

Facilitation is an art which adds value to the traditional teaching and lecturing process, like adding sugar to milk. Effective facilitation can bring a very positive vibe to the learning ecosystem, which can enhance cooperation and collaboration, and thus bringing synergy to the entire teaching-learning process. Facilitation brings a deeper meaning in this 21st Century classroom framework which is driven by emotions, technology, peer learning and the internet of things. But how can you master this much-needed skill to harness the maximum potential of teaching?

Developed through nine years of my teaching/facilitation career and a further six months working as a MasterCoach Training Coordinator at Quest Alliance, here are some tricks of the trade:

By students, for students

“The PM has a budget for the nation. Why don’t we have a budget for the school?” – Bal Sansad Student, MS Dalsinghsarai, Samastipur District, Bihar

With non-cognitive skills such as critical reasoning and the ability to engage in meaningful debates becoming ever-more important in a fast changing job market, enabling young people to articulate questions such as these is crucial.

The idea of Bal Sansad (or ‘Child Parliaments’) within government elementary schools is not new. A model United Nations program has been running internationally since the mid twentieth century, while the Indian government first proposed the idea of Child Parliaments almost twenty years ago. In practice, its implementation has been sporadic and inconsistent. In Bihar, where Quest Alliance run the Anandshala program in the Samastipur district, interventions to enliven the Bal Sansad Child Parliaments date back to 2012.

Gender Representation at Work

Quest Alliance is an organization which practices what it preaches to the world. One of the core areas of focus for the organization over the last year was to improve our work on gender. To make it a more meaningful focus, we started with the creation of a gender strategy for the organization. This focused on gender not just in the programs we deliver, but also how we practice gender equity as a whole organization.

When this process began in June 2016 we had a ratio of fewer than 30% of female staff to male across the entire organization. Most of these women were based out of our head office in Bangalore, while the field locations showed a much more skewed gender ratio – some of our field locations had 12 staff members, only one of whom was a women.