Day: June 23, 2022

Room to Read India has shifted its focus from in-class programs to embracing EdTech, enabling technology to connect and scale learning outside of school walls and reach children wherever they are

COVID-19 has been an unsettling phenomenon for the education sector impacting close to 320 million [i]children by 2021 because of school closure. Mitigating this situation was crucial and this is where virtual learning was quickly adopted to counter the learning losses.While this is a one off-situation,EdTech in India remains a hugely underdeveloped area, especially regarding the school curriculum. Lack of digitalized class-wise, subject-wise, and vernacular content, and lack of teacher capacity and infrastructure are all contributing factors to this problem. Since 2020, Room to Read India has shifted its focus from in-class programs to embracing EdTech, enabling technology to connect and scale learning outside of school walls and reach children wherever they are. 

Established in India in 2003 Room to Read presently through its programs in eleven states— Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Telangana, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh— is benefitting 4.79 million children. Children and adolescent girls belonging to low resource schools and communities are the organisation’s primary stakeholders. While these students face the challenge of access to technology, their school teachers were found lacking in their knowledge and experience of technology. Most of them did not even own a computer. The transition from offline teaching practice to remote learning found them wanting. To strengthen the capacities of these teachers and ensure education continuity for children, Room to Read India stepped in as a facilitator and worked on developing resources, platforms and strategies for easy dissemination and consumption of information by these stakeholders. 

Adoption of EdTech

Literacy skills and life skill development are core to Room to Read’s programmatic interventions. To substantiate the efforts in education technology, library resources developed by the organization for early learners have been adopted into multiple channels such as 236 read-aloud story videos, and 404 flipbooks published online – in Hindi, Marathi, Telegu, and Kannada languages. 40 audio games were developed in Hindi, Marathi, and Kannada, that could engage young learners at home with minimal supervision from parents. The read-aloud stories, games and flipbooks were disseminated through WhatsApp groups and IVR (Interactive Voice Response systems) created to reach students even with minimal internet connectivity. Room to Read also tested out an innovative pilot where storybooks were made available to both students and teachers through a dial in WhatsApp number via the Nalanda@Home Chatbot in Nasik. A total of 8,239 teachers registered on the platform and 2,7765 students tuned in to listen to the stories.

To support its Girls’ Education Program (GEP) participants (adolescent girls of grades 6 to 10), digital magazine (e-Gupshup) and motivational podcasts were created to boost their emotional well-being during the lockdown. Hosted over various platforms, they are now accessed by students from all over. In-class life skills lessons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5C3Q_tlQqA) were converted into interactive animated videos and games and hosted on YouTube. These resources eased the process of teachers explaining lessons in a remote learning environment to students. The development of a mobile application for GEP’s life-skills is underway. This app is expected to make accessing content easy for Government School Teachers and Life Skills facilitators.

Room to Read’s cloud platform www.LiteracyCloud.org now hosts nearly 1,600 digitized book titles in 24 different languages. The platform’s content is available in 15 different languages and has been accessed by users from 143 countries so far. The YouTube platform was used as a resource centre so that a wide audience, especially from tier 2 cities and rural areas, where internet access was limited, could have access to information.

Capacity building of teachers to support learning outcomes was a major spur to support a larger learning ecosystem. Materials like teachers’ guide, library guide, library books, self-learning animation style videos, and interactive games, that could be easily consumed by children from grades 1 to 5, were developed and disseminated. This has resulted in a shift to hybrid pedagogy, now used increasingly in classrooms. Much of the teaching-learning material developed by Room to Read India has been hosted on Government of India’s education platforms like DIKSHA Portal and Mission Prerna, hosted by Government of Uttar Pradesh.

One of the main programmatic challenges for Room to Read has been India’s fragmented digital access with roughly 1 in 10 Indian households owning a computer. 4% of these are students above the age of 5 years, whereas the percentage for urban students in this age group stands at 23%. Lack of adequate digital infrastructure in underdeveloped regions coupled with deep rooted societal belief that having a smartphone will corrupt girls, further leads to a gendered digital divide. Only 25% of adult females owned a smartphone in 2020, compared to 41% of adult males. In this regard, Room to Read India has been consistently working to highlight the challenges that girls’ face to access technology. Through its focused sensitization campaigns using mass media like radio and television, as well as other locally relevant communication channels, Room to Read India continues to reach a wide stakeholder base in most underserved areas of the country.

Linkages with SDGs

Room to Read’s Literacy Program focuses on strengthening foundational literacy among early grade learners to ensure that children get access to quality education (SDG-4), which leads to effective learning outcomes. While the non-profit’s Girls’ Education Program aims to equip girls with crucial life skills education, it also intends to achieve gender equality (SDG-5) and empower all women and girls for their bright future.

Indirectly, Room to Read’s has a strong connect with SDG 1(No Poverty). Room to Read believes the world’s biggest problems like—poverty, conflict, disease, intolerance, inequality, exploitation, and economic disparity can be fought with education, and that only education is capable of breaking the cycle of illiteracy and poverty within a single generation.

“The human brain is not designed for reading; rather, it is an acquired set of skills that have to be learned. Each one of us has to create a new circuit in our brain in order to learn to read. Reading though is not enough, making meaning is critical. Deeper engagement with text propels comprehension and higher-order processes like inferential and deductive reasoning, critical thinking, reflection, insight.

An expert reader needs milliseconds to execute these processes, however a young brain needs years to develop them. Room to Read primary focus has always been to create an environment for children that supports them to engage with the text in a meaningful way, irrespective of the platform.

Simmi Sikka
Associate Director
Quality Reading Material

Room to Read India

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[i]Covid-19 impact: Schools’ closure hit 320 million kids : The Tribune India accessed on 18^th April 2022.

In ALfA—Accelerating learning for all, is a research-driven, ground-breaking pedagogy that ensures FLN levels are reached within weeks and months, and not years

The Government has its hands full. Challenging the status quo is a daunting task for anyone sitting in the Ministry of Education. It is kudos to the government that the last few years have been the most proactive for the education sector in India. For the first time in 34 years, there is a forward-looking agenda, and a new, progressive education policy, with no mingling of words. It is clear in its direction for education, and comprehensive in the coverage. It has led to new vocabulary and implementation modalities such as flip learning, and project-based learning. It has led to debates and discussions across the nation that have never occurred in the past, for as long as we know. These discourses have been re-invigorating, and reflect a genuine interest by the education community to embrace change.

The new education policy 2020 is all-inclusive and touches upon the crucial aspects of education, including the back-end to which every educator plays the tune – assessments. Making assessments holistic presents the possibility of a far broader education than we have conceptualised in the past. 

Yet, many new policy reforms go to waste when not followed by implementation. The question remains how can education go from its current state of inflexibility, tardiness, lack of motivation, past precedence, and old practices to a swift, fresh and creative approach.

Critical Issues

There are two critical issues at hand: (a) Bridging the gap in primary education, and (b) Rethinking learning. In the aftermath of COVID, many children have left school, some permanently. Girls, especially adolescent girls, are most affected. These children are unlikely to return to school unless something is done immediately. Before the COVID, too, we had a learning problem. Now the problem is even bigger. In low- and middle-income countries, UNICEF reports “learning losses due to school closures have left up to 70 per cent of 10-year-olds unable to read or understand a simple text, up from 53 per cent pre-pandemic.”¹

Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) is the Sustainable Development Goal 4 of the United Nations. India’s NEP states: “The highest priority of the education system will be to achieve universal foundational literacy and numeracy in primary school by 2025. The rest of this Policy will become relevant for our students only if this most basic learning requirement (i.e., reading, writing, and arithmetic at the foundational level) is first achieved.” Additionally, the NIPUN Bharat Mission launched in July 2021 aims to provide universal proficiency in foundational literacy and numeracy for every child by 2026-27. These are candid and clear goals. 

The need for disruptive solutions, NOW!

The need is now. One more year can add to the disaster facing education post-Covid. If typical systems of pre-COVID could not deliver on the promise of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy in three years of schooling pre-Covid for a vast number of children, how can we expect a miraculous outcome within this year without transformational practice post-Covid.

Many of the children sitting in Grade 3 and attending school for the first time, or those attending Grades 4 and 5 after nearly two years of school closures, cannot read or write, or do basic arithmetic. One more year without filling of the gaps can mean the 5^th grader dropping out of school in Grade 6.

Transformational ALfA – Accelerating Learning for All

We invite the introspection and immediate trial by all potential partners.

ALfA—Accelerating learning for all, is a research-driven, ground-breaking pedagogy that ensures FLN levels are reached within weeks and months, and not years. Most children can go from ground zero to Grade 3 level proficiency in a language and numeracy within 90 days, followed by further practice of reading fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, and mathematics for the rest of the academic year. The lessons can begin any time of the year and for children of all ages, and adults.

ALfA mainstreams paired learning, a process that is joyful, engaging and effective. ALfA mainstreams 21^st century skills of collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking, character, and citizenship in the very fabric of the teaching-learning process itself. The teachers do not need extensive training in ALfA methods since the processes are clearly spelled out through ALfA prompts.

The teacher’s roles change dramatically. As enablers, their job is to pair up children, read out the prompts, and motivate every child. ALfA prompts are the learning-by-doing empowerment that teachers never had. Implementing ALfA changes beliefs and practice, the most important transformation that education needs.

Transformation versus incremental change

Where is the paradigm shift in education?

ALfA is not to be taken as incremental change to an existing system of education. Rather, it is transformative change, much like the smart phone is to the landline phone (anyone remember those?). No matter how much we keep fixing the old landline phone, it can never become the smart phone. Even the first bulky versions of these mobiles were distinct technology that represented a paradigm shift to the old landline phone. The smart phone technology required different thinking and design. It required new guiding principles, and vastly newways of thinking – same with ALfA. It renders the old mobile technology of education redundant.

ALfA is a leap of faith. Just like the old grandmother who refuses to accept the mobile phone, as she is quite satisfied with her landline phone. It is hard to shed the past, partly because we survived using it. It served us good, and we understand it so well. We keep improving the old landline phone with incremental changes, just like we do in education, but the old landline phone will never transform into the new smart phone. We need completely new guiding principles as the two technologies are vastly different, and often opposed.

Give new a try

The only way to change precedence is to give new a try, like the old grandmother who finally was coaxed into trying out the smart mobile. Now she is the one to explain its benefits better than we could have ever done with all our logic and might before she gave the new a try.

Implementing ALfA changes our beliefs dramatically about children’s capacity to learn quickly. It puts us in a new plane of thinking about education. Once the paradigm shift takes place, we begin to see reality from a new vantage point. With each implementation of the new, we begin to think of deeper ways to engage with it, and we begin to improve it, year after year, just like new versions of the smart phone each year. Incremental change always follows transformational change.

There are no halfway houses between the old and the new. Paradigm shift is not a series of incremental changes. Improvement to the established ways is like adding a dash of cooperative learning to a system that is designed for competition. It produces only incremental change at best. It does not lead to the profound change we are now seeking from an education in the 21st century.

We need change at the core, not at the margins of education. This is possible only when we go back to the drawing board and think afresh around new guiding principles such as collaboration over competition. What will an education based on collaboration look like? What does competing with self over competing with others look and feel like in a classroom? How can this be mainstreamed?

How we came to ALfA

Change comes from dissatisfaction. The program creator, Dr.Sunita Gandhi says: I have been very circumspect about education, as many of us are. Education from the past is not bringing out the best in all our children. We expect the normal distribution curve in every class with some children excelling, and some lagging behind. Everybody is stressed from teachers to the children, to us managers. It is a race to nowhere.

In 2001, I got a perfect laboratory in Iceland when I won the bid to run Iceland’s first two charter schools. I was free to do whatever I wanted. My first research question was: Can every child sitting in a classroom maximize their learning potential and excel, or is this an oxymoron?

We gave every child a half-yearly test at the beginning of the year. This led to two major insights: 

1. Children already know just over 50% of what they need to learn before we begin to teach them. Some children could solve almost everything, and did not need to study anything at all for that grade. 
2. The year-on-year learning was very low, so by the end of grade 8, children did not know much more than grade 7.
3. When I implemented the same idea in India by giving the same exact test in English to the children of Grades 5, 6, 7 and 8. Guess what you might expect to be the results? Many children of grade 5 did better than children of grade 8, and the results were not at all what we expected, a natural progression of performance from grade to grade! This led to the conclusion that class-wise sitting of children is insane. The research in Iceland, India and the UK got published in 2017 in the UK: Ipsative Assessment and Personal Learning Gain – available for download on the net by Springer, UK.

After coming back to India, I took up new research work, this time on the literacy of children and adults. The slums provided the best insights. Given that the children and adults already knew their language, I wondered why it takes 3 years to teach them to read with matras in schools, and 6 months or more for an adult to learn to read. My research question was: Can a completely illiterate person learn to read a newspaper in just one month, or is this an oxymoron?

I converted my office into a literacy laboratory.This led to the creation of Global Dream Literacy Toolkits with two thin booklets in Hindi and one for numeracy. These incorporate a reverse methodology and the ALfA process of learning. We do not teach the letters. Children go straight to decoding and blending complete words from the first lesson. In fifteen days of just 15-20 minute sessions per day, they finish learning the letters of the alphabet in their languages, which is typically a year-long process in most schools.

Multiplying Impact

The Global Dream Toolkits are available in 15 Indian languages and in another 14 international languages. They are easy to replicate in any language within a month.

ALfA has been taken up by some of the Indian States and Aspirational Districts recently, and has signed up the Republic of Maldives for a nationwide implementation at its 215 government schools. In many countries, ALfA is at various levels of implementation, for example, at Literacy Chicago and two districts of California, USA, and in schools in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Guyana, Liberia, and Afghanistan.

Results from ALfA 

Children of ages 5 to 7 are learning to read newspapers in three months. Don’t believe us till you watch the evidence and news media coverage.²

We invite your participation because learning cannot wait for another year. Disrupting the status quo is required now, and this is not possible by making changes to an existing system. ALfA is the smart phone of education every child deserves.

1. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/covid19-scale-education-loss-nearly-insurmountable-warns-unicef
2. www.dignityeducation.org

DEVI Sansthan (Dignity Education Vision International) is a non-profit organisation founded in Lucknow, India. DEVI’s vision is to achieve universal Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) for all children and adults.