School / University: DPS Rohini School

GH4/57 Paschim Vihar Paschim Vihar - Delhi - (India)

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Retention, low attendance affect education at Indias schoolsNew Delhi: Even as India is under a constitutional obligation to provide universal, free and compulsory primary education for all, the main hindrance to the obligation has turned out to be retention more than the problems of access and enrollment.Achieving enrollment in school is not a problem, the real problem lies in keeping students in school and making sure they attend class regularly, Vijaya Sherry Chand, professor, IIM-Ahmedabad and head of the Education Innovation Bank (EIB) project told Firstpost in an interview.Chands project on Tuesday won the Helwett Packard Education Innovation Fund for India (EIFI) and Rs 1 crore as prize money. The project which is designed to improve the quality of education in the public school system was based on the work of innovative school teachers.In the interview, Chand explained why he thought the problem with Indias education is not about quality, but how assumptions were made ignoring ground realities.Below are edited excerpts from the interview.A coconut for attendance. Image courtesy Vijaya Sherry Chand.What are the kind of things have you found being done in government schools by teachers to ensure educational goals even in the face of challenging socio-economic environments and cultural constraints?A teacher in Rajasthan noticed that while students would enroll for class, not many would attend regularly. To stem this problem he came up with an innovative solution: He announced that he would give a coconut to the student who had the best attendance every month. The incentive worked.Another teacher devised something called the swinging library where students were given comics and other books to read and in the next class, the teacher used to take a test about what the book entailed. The children would then exchange books and this exercise would continue.I would call these methods of teaching, an innovation they are entirely new methods that teachers apply to incentivise school, they solve problems for which traditional ways have not worked and they are cost effectiveness.These innovations cannot be taught. They have to come from within, teachers have to think of how they can solve problems which are beyond what is traditionally and customarily taught to them in their training.Information gathered from Internet from Click Here