For Employee

Charles Handy, one of the world’s foremost management gurus, speaks of the ‘sigmoid curve’. He says that the great organizations of the world are the ones who make astounding changes when they apparently least need to. TGES already has an enviable reputation for fostering and supporting teacher growth in almost unparalleled ways. An outside expert, auditing our efforts in this area, would have commented that no changes were necessary and that we are already doing plenty. But taking a leaf out of Handy’s book, TGES embarked on an upward sigmoid curve of its own in 2011!

In previous years, we subsidized the purchase of laptops and computers, smart phones and broadband internet service. We subsidized attending training and conferences across the world. However, since 2011, we have taken our investment in this area to unprecedented levels.

Recognizing that education is in a stage in which, more than ever, the future of humanity and the world is dependent on how well institutions perform their tasks, TGES has taken bold steps to make it quite literally a great place to work.

At this seminal moment in the history of education, when critical change is a survival necessity, TGES through its TTC initiative had armed all its teachers with the ‘weapons’ necessary for them to blast those twin terrors, ignorance and pessimism, to smithereens!!

We’ve been using integrated educational models in our classrooms based on Harvard University’s path breaking “Teaching For Understanding (TFU)” for several years now. Integration and ‘flipping classrooms’ was a mammoth task to achieve this for every one of our more than 300 classes to become part of a small group of schools across the world, but then we’ve never shied away from having the courage of our convictions!

Web 2.0 technologies are enabling teaching and learning in hitherto unimagined ways. And Andy Grove’s law about the exponential increase of processing power is fuelling innovation at a pace unheralded in human history. Schools that are aware, and have access to resources, are leading the movement for developing a different breed of citizens. These global inhabitants of a future world that boggles the imagination will need to balance the use of technology, with the need to remain rooted to their own unique cultural traditions going back thousands of years, as in the case of India.

Even as we welcomed iPads into our schools in a big way and every student in Std 1 and above was armed with a device to school, that is almost 4500 of them. We will more than ever need to balance the use of technology and the teaching of values and principles. Even as we embrace tech, we will need to guard against schools becoming less ‘human’.

Project-Based Learning (PBL) manages to balance both in ways that are shaking the foundations of all that we’ve believed about education. An abundance of human collaboration characterized PBL, even as students immerse themselves in tech-fuelled learning. TGES has incorporated these models of teaching and learning in its classrooms from some of the leading schools in the world that use PBL.

One of our challenges is also to discover how the textbook centric Indian examinations can be challenged and defeated using study methods that reflect new knowledge about how the brain learns. Students will no longer face ‘irrelevant’ and thereby de-motivating content driven activity in school. TGES has been adaptable and flexible in this scheme of 21st Century things! There is the exciting prospect of teaching and learning entering a new dimension altogether, but only if we figure out all the pieces; analyze them all, evaluate and then synthesize them to form a new whole!

Q One What will the world be like twenty or so years from now when your child has left school and college and is out in the world?

Q Two What skills your child will need to be successful in this world you have imagined twenty years from now?

Q Three Now think about your own life and the times when you were really learning, so much and so deeply, that you would call these the ‘peak learning experiences’ of your life. What were the conditions that made your high Performance learning experiences so powerful?

Q Four Before answering question four, think over your answers to the first three questions and think about how most students currently spend their time each day in school. Then consider the final question: What would learning be like if it were designed around your answer to the first three questions?

Still important – The 3Rs
Reading | Riting | Rithmetic

Now as critical – The new additional 3Rs
Relationship | Rigour | Relevance

The Magic Education Formula
6Rs x 7Cs = 21st Century Learning