The Quest Alliance round-up of what we’ve been reading in the education and skills sector this month.
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.
Continue reading “Education & Skills Sector Reading List, March 2018”
Funder and nonprofit perspectives come together to tackle an issue at the heart of the development sector. What needs to be done to amplify the impact of CSR funds?
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.
Continue reading “Coalition Building & Corporate Philanthropy”
Meaningful teaching boils down to keeping it simple and harnessing your passion, shares Training Coordinator and former facilitator, Rohan J
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:
How Bal Sansad, or child parliaments, enable students to find their voices
“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.
How Quest Alliance moved from 33% female staff to 50% female staff in just one year
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.
The Quest Alliance round-up of must-reads across the education and skills sector this month.
EMPLOYABILITYIn good news for graduates, a recent survey has shown both that the employability of Indian graduates is rising, and that more companies are showing higher hiring intent in 2018. Read more in Live Mint here.
It’s not all about tech skills – Google has found that non-cognitive skills (and not STEM skills!) are the most important when it comes to the success of its employees. Read more in the Washington Post here.
Continue reading “Education & Skills Sector Reading List, February 2018”
What does it take to be an impactful facilitator? Nuneseno Chase writes about being an an instructor, counsellor, friend, mentor, administrator … but always a learner.
Over the years as a facilitator, I’ve discovered that learners have different characteristics, different learning capabilities, different reaction times, different attitudes, values, interests, motivations and personalities. I need to be aware of these differences and adjust my pedagogy and learning environment accordingly.
