How my educational ideas developed

S Sundaram

Recently I shared with a friend, the case study written by Prof. Rajeev Sharma for IIM Ahmedabad on the “deep academic” change that was implemented in Reliance School in Jamnagar during 2008-2012 when I was the principal. My friend was intrigued as to how a corporate executive had “transformed” into a school principal and we had a long discussion. That interaction convinced me to write down my transformation experience as honestly as I could.

The pull of school education
My early notions about education were idealistic and emerged from two sources – my own school experiences and my readings.

As a student, I was studious and obedient and I had mostly very pleasant memories of my years in school. My habit of reading a wide variety of books on history, culture and the gurukul system developed into idealistic notions of education and of the sacred relationship between a teacher and a student.

The push towards school education
Halfway through my engineering education, I realized that I had no interest in engineering and technology issues. I enjoyed my management education because it challenged my intellect. A few years in my various jobs convinced me that I had no interest in commercial issues either.

By this time, I had developed a full-blown passion for Carnatic music. I started learning vocal Carnatic music from a guru and was attending at least five to six music concerts in a month. I began wondering whether a career in management would allow me to pursue my passion for music and reading. The tipping point was a suggestion from my boss that I should consider joining a club for business executives that would allow me to liaison and network!

I began seriously thinking of shifting to a career in schools which slowly developed into an emotional push.

I am a patient, long-term planner. So my move to work in Nigeria was actually to save enough to make my shift to schools, financially easy. After a nine-year stint in Nigeria, I landed in Rishi Valley School, as its Bursar, in November 1989, with Lalitha and my daughters Anu and Aruna.

School leadership, not teaching
Along with my work as the Bursar, I started teaching computer science to students of class 11. After a year of this, I realized that my interest really lay in issues related to heading a school and not in teaching a class of students.

So I started looking for opportunities to head a school. The first school that I headed was a primary school in an industrial suburb in north Chennai.

What makes children learn?
One of the earliest questions that I started grappling with was the above one. Most children in this school were from lower-middle class background with very little support from their parents in educational matters. They were studying in an English-medium primary school but never spoke a word of English outside the classroom.

My search for books on this issue in the British Council library only led me to books on motivating adults and the theory of carrots and sticks.

I realized that schools were actually using these techniques with students by replacing carrots with marks and medals and sticks with punishments, suspensions, detention and rustications. School authorities did not realize that this strategy did not and would never work.

Rishi Valley School tried to follow Krishnamurti’s philosophy of education without competition. Though this made the students happy, most parents and even teachers were not sure how this would help children learn.

Alfie Kohn’s book Punished By Rewards gave me convincing answers. Kohn talked of two kinds of motivation – intrinsic and extrinsic. Children do not really value marks and medals. Parents and society brainwash them to value these. We need to create conditions that motivate children intrinsically to value learning.

All humans are tuned by evolution to learn continuously. That is why at home, children learn a lot of things on their own without any pressure. But in schools, the learning processes are totally alien to the emotional needs of the children. They learn but not necessarily what their teacher wants them to learn.

Children will learn if the learning is relevant to their needs, if the learning processes are appropriate and enjoyable and the environment is caring and non-threatening.

What makes teachers work effectively?
Alfie Kohn talks about motivation at three levels – family, school and work – emphasizing the relevance of intrinsic motivation at each level. His ideas are equally applicable to teachers to motivate them to work effectively.

Each child learns differently in different classes and even on different days. Teaching and learning processes cannot be caught in a framework of rigid rules and procedures. Teachers need a lot of flexibility and autonomy in the classroom. Standard Operating Procedures would result in compliance but never in effectiveness and creativity.

Teachers need to be respected and trusted. They need to be supported and facilitated to give their best. In my personal experience with teachers from many schools, their performance has always exceeded my expectations when I trusted them and gave them autonomy with support.

In most schools, teacher observations and performance assessments are used mostly in a negative sense. No one likes to be compared. It takes a lot of tact and trust for managements to openly discuss with a teacher, her areas of strengths and weaknesses and offer necessary professional development opportunities.

Kohn’s ideas on motivating students and teachers convinced me so completely that they became the bible for my educational efforts.

Decentralizing and documenting school processes
I was convinced that the key to building an effective school was to decentralize authority and responsibilities.

This would involve running a large school as if it is a federation of several smaller schools, each with its own leadership, philosophy and policies with the centre (management and principal) being more of a facilitator and trainer.

One of the natural ways of dividing a school was into pre-school, primary, middle and high school. This is in sync with the emotional and cognitive development of a child. Since co-curricular activities are an important aspect of education and cut across all grades in school, they should also be treated as a separate unit on par with the academic school stages.

Decentralization would necessitate the documentation of policies and processes. Some of these would be common to the entire school and some of them would change from one school stage to the other.

The idea of preparing a manual of policies and procedures for the entire school was an outcome of such thinking. Computers make this process much easier to share the responsibility of preparing, sharing and updating such a manual.

Decentralization would also require a regular multi-way communication channel in terms of meetings and periodic reports. All meetings should be scheduled in advance so that all the staff concerned can plan their activities around them.

Reports need to be short and well-structured so that they are easy to read and locate important issues.

Understanding the nature of subjects
Most principals in the Indian school system are typically teachers who have many years of experience teaching a narrow range of subjects at the high school level. When they become heads of schools, they find it difficult to understand even the rudiments of other subjects and make sense of the curriculum and pedagogy.

That math was qualitatively a different kind of subject was revealed to me by Shri P K Srinivasan (PKS) when I was re-learning my primary school math from him at the age of 42!

With this initial understanding and through my readings, I became familiar with a very useful framework for classifying all knowledge in terms of factual, procedural, conceptual and values. Of these, values cannot really be taught. They have to be inculcated by observing the actions of others.

The five major subject groups taught in schools – language, math, science, social science and co-curriculars – are made of different proportions of the three kinds of knowledge.

For example, language is mostly factual (vocabulary) and procedural (the LSRW skills) and has very little conceptual (grammar and pronunciation) knowledge. In contrast, math is mostly conceptual and procedural with very little factual knowledge.

Effective pedagogy for each of these knowledges is different. Concepts need to be understood through discussions, role-modelling and introspection. Procedures need to be mastered by practice with understanding of underlying concepts. Facts need to be remembered through frequent usage.

Hence, mathematics cannot be taught like language. But our schools use a standard pedagogy – textbook, chalk and board, classwork, homework and examinations. This is at the root of the weakness of our school education.

Criticality of the primary school
I was lucky to start my career as head of school with a primary school. This forced me to think deeply about issues of teaching and learning. I realized that primary school lays the foundation for all future learning. Primary school experience decides whether children love learning.

It is a tragedy that, at least in Indian schools, primary school has become secondary in importance and secondary school has become primary!

Understanding school leadership
School leadership can be broadly divided into instructional and organizational. Organizational leadership is the management of a school as an organization made of people and processes. It is very similar to the way any organization is managed.

Instructional leadership is more important in schools and involves understanding the following aspects

1. Being the lead-learner and role model in school.
2. The objectives of studying various subjects in schools.
3. The difference between the various subjects, their curriculum, pedagogy and assessment methods.
4. Developmental psychology of the cognitive and emotional processes in children and how they affect their learning.
5. Child psychology, adolescence and how they affect behaviour and learning of children at various stages of growth.
6. Motivation and team-building among teachers.

Collaborating with parents
Research has proved that, for children, the major part of motivation for learning comes from home. Parents do not realize their own importance in the education of their children. Schools should reach out to parents, engage them, educate them and provide an easy access for them to interact with teachers and the senior staff including the principal.

Educating the school management
Here by the term school management I mean the Trust or organization that is managing the school. It is likely that members of the management may not be acquainted with educational issues. The principal should take every opportunity to familiarize them with the educational perspective.

This can be done through the monthly reports. It can also be done by explaining the educational logic for many of the decisions that may need to be taken by the management.

One of the important ideas that need to be conveyed to school managements is that the “vision and mission” of the school needs to be owned by them. While recruiting a principal they need to look for a person who believes in the vision and carries it forward. It is a very common experience that an incoming principal turns the school vision by 180 degrees!

Responsibilities of a school leader
We can summarize most of these ideas in terms of the following responsibilities

1. Providing leadership – both instructional and organizational. Being the “external face” of the school for parents and the society and an “educational advisor” to the school management.
2. Academics – policies and procedures for issues related to teaching and learning – curriculum, syllabus, textbooks, co-curriculars, etc.
3. Academic administration – policies and procedures for day-to-day implementation of the academics – timetables, calendars, lesson plans, examinations, report cards, etc.
4. General administration – policies and procedures for organizational administration – maintenance of records, correspondence, salary and benefits, banking, accounting, etc.

Except the first responsibility, the others need to be delegated to people and followed up through regular reports and/or meetings.

Freedom vs power
I wanted to use power to create more freedom for myself. I never wanted to use my power to control others. I feel that this attitude helped me trust people easily and delegate authority and responsibility to others. Without trust and delegation, the change in the Reliance Jamnagar school may never have been possible.

Conclusion
The IIMA case study was a vindication of the efficacy and authenticity of the educational thought processes which resulted in that change.

I must also confess that without Lalitha’s unstinted faith in my ideas and emotional support, I would never have been able to make any of these moves.

The author has worked as a principal, teacher trainer and educational consultant in several schools in different parts of India. He retired as the principal of Reliance Foundation School in Jamnagar in 2013 and has settled down in Chennai. His areas of interest are primary mathematics, school leadership, quality in education and technology in education. His book “Understanding Primary Math” can be accessed at https://primarymath.miraheze.org/wiki/. He also has a facebook page “Primary Math Is Easy By S Sundaram”. He can be reached at sundaram021148@gmail.com.