Teaching at the Right Level is the name given to Pratham’s Read India programs when implemented in a government partnership set up. I was part of the implementation of Teaching at the Right Level in the district of Ananthapur in Andhra Pradesh, where, coincidentally, my Great Grandfather served and retired as the District’s Collector (A government position in the revenue department).
My first trip to Ananthapur as part of this program would, strangely, be to meet my Great Grandfather’s successor by several decades – the present District Collector – and convince him of the merits of TaRL. I waited four days to meet him and when we finally did, he warmed up to news that my Great grandfather paced around the exact same office that we were in – but on the subject of the program’s implementation – he was on the back-foot. “It’s not your program but our people that I distrust.” – and perhaps for good reason. Teachers in the district had undergone innumerable training programs and despite such efforts, the state consistently ranked poorly. The fact of the matter, however, was that something had to be done – and we managed, over the course of the next day, to organize a demo and show him exactly what our program was about – to which he approved the file – setting the stage for training and implementation.
4,000 teachers in 1,600 schools and close to 60,000 children would be part of the intervention.
Pratham’s work in Teaching at the Right Level can be defined as its raison d’etre. Post independence education policy had focused so much around enrollment whereas the actual substance of the curriculum takes little account of the fact that many children come from families with parents either engaged in migratory casual labour (many of whom are also illiterate) and do not adequately take advantage of the prime conditions of early developmental years (it is estimated that in the first few years of a child’s life – 700 new neural connections are formed every second). Malnourished, under-stimulated and with little guidance in the system, these children spend their first few years in school simply getting used to the idea of school.
One colleague of mine scoffed at teaching grade 2 students in a remote part of Chennai. ‘You can’t teach them anything and those kids need to be potty trained,’ she said. Yet, looking at measures of India’s rigorous syllabus for grades 1 and 2 – someone in touch with the reality of the situation quickly comes to understand that the expectations are quite unrealistic for this mass of enrolled children – many of whom will simply drop out of school or struggle through their journey.
There is a body that is tasked with maternal and child well-being – responsible for the case and well-being of child up to the age of 6. The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) is one of the world’s largest integrated early childhood programs – with more than 40,000 centers across India. I have visited only a handful of ICDS centers but my general understanding and the evidence before me was the centers (with the exception of the few that I visited) were no more than feeding centers. Many of the pre-school teachers complain of parent’s general unwillingness to send their kids to ICDS centres – usually focusing on school preparedness – a few months before the child’s enrollment into school – but missing out on the wide range of services that are being offered (Bangladesh appears to have some interesting pre and antenatal programs).
And so – Teaching at the Right Level – is an attempt to remedy this issue and bring about at least some degree of mastery of basic concepts so that children can at least have a chance at succeeding. By grouping children based on their learning level – students can focus on pushing forward and mastering their most immediate (but manageable) learning level. The fact that work is required of them and that this work eventually leads to their success (the correct answer, for example) is something that motivates and engages them. What this means is that a child in grade 5 that can only read words and struggles to read complete sentences is in the same group as a child that do likewise from grade 3 or 4 – and together – they work for two hours each day (there is a learning level for language and a learning level for mathematics – spending an hour for each) – focused on mastering their present level so that they can move on to short paragraphs, then short stories and beyond.
In 54 days of intervention, our assessments showed that 10,000 children that couldn’t read (word level or below) were leveling as ‘readers’ – with similar improvements in mathematics. The success of this program resulted in our scaling it to 300,000 children and likely further across the state.
During a visit with our CEO, Dr. Rukmini Banerji (who is perhaps the most inspiring individual in the planet) we noticed something interesting. Something, that to me, was a revelation and confirmed what I had always heard and believed. India’s educational problems are many folds and the situation explained above might be a simplification of what’s wrong with the system – but we had always known of the issues of multi-level classrooms (where a teacher has to teach children that are not at the same learning level) or as we saw in R&D’s case, multi-classroom teachers (where a teacher has to teach many classes at once due to a shortage of teachers). How then, can such an education system be child-centric, particularly given the demands of the syllabus which is difficult to complete even for children that are ideally leveled.
Our program was designed to have ‘monitors’ – mostly because we wanted to see if results were attributed to the program design in itself or because the program was being poorly implemented. Monitor visits were reported back to the program office frequently and overseen by the government, but in a strange way – this liberated teachers. They tossed out the pressures of finishing the syllabus (after all – they now had a reason for why they couldn’t finish it) and pushed to focus on re-levelling. They understood the concepts so well that many of them took the liberty of creating their own Teaching Learning Material (TLM) which were provided as supplements. Other teachers had connected our program with other training programs they had received in the past and saw the usefulness of the concepts – which were also brought in. In some schools where students were at much higher levels, teachers engaged them to assist other children in other groups – something that was particularly crucial in some schools where there had 3 classes but only one teacher, for example.
In a perfect reply to the collector – the problem wasn’t the people but the system they were working under.
A teacher sits with a student and a Barakhadi - working through an exercise where the student identifies letters - an exercise that builds the foundations of word construction. Pratham's programs split students based on their learning levels - pushing them to focus on mastering lower levels (such as letter recognition) before moving to higher levels such as word construction or reading a short paragraph or story. A Barakhadi is a chart with letters as well as their extensions (where vowel additions to consonants take different character variations).
When I met the District Collector - he asked me a simple question - which was that teachers had gone through so many training sessions with little results to show for them - so why would our program be effective? When finally approved the process he left with the words 'It's not your program or methodology that I distrust but our people...'
While these are hard things to explain and counter, I found the evidence in this picture during one of my visits. It's a teacher that has found material from previous training that he thought was useful and relevant for the group and so took them out. One of the keys about the program is that it offers teachers some discretion and flexibility - particularly once they have a good understanding of the program. The important thing, as I would discover, was not so much about sending teachers to state of the art training, but assigning time each day to execute the lessons from these training - a reality that is often not so because of the pressures to finish a heavy syllabus.
While these are hard things to explain and counter, I found the evidence in this picture during one of my visits. It's a teacher that has found material from previous training that he thought was useful and relevant for the group and so took them out. One of the keys about the program is that it offers teachers some discretion and flexibility - particularly once they have a good understanding of the program. The important thing, as I would discover, was not so much about sending teachers to state of the art training, but assigning time each day to execute the lessons from these training - a reality that is often not so because of the pressures to finish a heavy syllabus.
Here is yet another example of a teacher that decided to find interesting articles in the newspaper and create little cut-outs for students to read. It was yet another example to the contrary of the general belief that teachers in the public school structures lacked initiative and didn't care about their students. As an educator myself, I would learn that it's not so much about the teachers as it is about the structures that they are made to work under.
In one of my visits, I happened upon this young lad what was excitedly introduced by his teacher as someone that has really seen the fruits of the program. At the start of the program, he could barely read properly but only 2 months in - he took to prolifically writing and expressing himself. It was evidence that guidance, encouragement and focus could really transform the lives and paths of our children.
