SEPTEMBER 2020

ShikshaLokam, a Shibulal Family Philanthropic Initiative, is a societal platform designed to transform the education leadership by enabling various stakeholders engaged in the K-12 education system through collaboration and co-creation.

In Focus
A step towards enabling Learning Environment at Home

Leveraging Virtual Parents Teachers Meeting | Punjab

With schools being closed for over 6 months due to the pandemic, there has been a huge impact on children and their learning. While there has always been a need to improve parent engagement in student learning, it has become even more important in the current covid-19 situation for parents to be able to support their children's learning.

There are a lot of parents who are not aware of different initiatives run by the State and the efforts being put by the teachers and schools. Most importantly, their role in this humongous task of teaching their children is also getting overlooked.

To ensure this, the Education Department of Punjab launched Virtual PTM, an initiative for interacting with parents of government school children. The objective of this initiative was to inform, appreciate and listen to the parents.

The six-day program saw a participation of over 16000 government schools. The schools also received constant support from the panchayat, SMC Members and religious institutions to reach out to as many students possible.

"The teachers regularly call us and inform us of the progress of my child. They also ask if we are facing any challenges, and help us find ways to make sure we are able to help our children better" said Mr. Nirmal Singh, parent of a class 8th students from GHS Shafipur, Amritsar.

Maape Adhyapak Milni Hafta also gave the teachers and the department the opportunity to appreciate the parents and the community for their support to the school, especially during the lockdown. Mrs Anu Pathania, Principal of GHS Shafipur in Amritsar expressed how as a result of PTM, parents of students in other schools have been reaching out to them and asking for support.

Therefore, the Virtual PTM has paved the way for strengthening ties between the community and the school and leveraged the opportunity to bring in the education system and parents to work together as one unit to ensure the well being of the children. courses.

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Spotlight
Understanding End-to-End Solutions

For any improvement/innovation, a school leader needs to have multiple elements, a clear action plan, learning how to do and the ability to assess/observe in order to evaluate the need for improvement.

Shikshalokam's imagination of an end-to-end solution plays an important role towards this idea of improvement.

An end-to-end solution can be described as a collection of resources that enables a leader to follow action oriented plans (through Unnati - Improvement capability) supported by related learning materials (through Bodh - Learning capability) and observation/assessment tools (through Samiksha - Assessment and observation capability).

Building Capacity of Leaders As A Coach

Kaivalya Education Foundation, in their focussed work on building capacity of education leaders has designed a Coach Competency Tool that allows Block-level education officers to conduct a self-assessment for competencies that are crucial towards their capacity building as a coach.

The tool is a framework driven individual assessment that focuses on skills such as working with teams, managing self and facilitating sessions among others. Once the coaches answer the questionnaire, they are able to see the rubric level at which they currently are at, hence guiding their improvement journey.

The tool is available on the ShikshaLokam Platform and can be reused by anyone interested.

Platform Update
What's new at ShikshaLokam

ShikshaLokam has come up with some amazing new features. A new feature for creating polls and sharing through links has come up in our Samiksha app. Users can create a poll on the app itself. FAQs are available for the Unnati app and users can also attach resources at task and the project level.

For the portal, PDFs on Bodh can be easily downloaded as the download button is more legible now. A separate tab for course assessment has also been added to the workspace. Moreover, the platform editor can now embed videos from the local drive-to the content. Apart from that, one can also set course enrolment date in open batches of the courses.

Explore Here For More New Features on Samiksha
Grey Matter
Invoking The Ability To Solve

We often face situations where our ability to sense helps us to understand and act on problems quicker and more effectively. Similarly, at a community level, for example, meaningful information about weight and micronutrient status can help the individuals to sense malnourishment of children in their community. When information is available in a contextual and understandable manner, the ability to sense and understand the problems dramatically improves.

When we address a societal challenge at scale, the ability of individuals and institutions to sense and respond to local realities becomes all the more critical, so that the impact created is contextual, shared and sustainable. Thus, it becomes important to share the ability to sense and solve with local actors, to enable local action and thereby accelerate the social impact. But, how can we invoke the ability to see and solve? Tap below to read how the Societal Platform team expands on the idea.

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Announcement
ShikshaLokam Is Now In Pudducerry

We are happy to announce our partnership with the Department of School Education, Puducherry to ensure quality education in all schools in the Union Territory. This initiative is a collective effort by Shikshalokam, Mantra4Change and Vidhya Vidhai in collaboration with the Department.

Through this collaboration, we will support all stakeholders of the Puducherry school system including teachers, Head Masters, SMC members and other officials. The Samiksha capability of ShikshaLokam has been contextualised to the needs of the UT and has been named as Palli-Thalam and will be extensively used for different assessment needs along with the other Capabilities.

The Unbundle Series - Demystify The Deep Nuances Of NEP

The new National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is the focus of discussions across the country. It is a significant milestone in India’s journey to educational reforms and brings focus on important areas such as ECCE, foundational learning etc. However, with any forward-looking policy, the biggest concern is always around effective implementation. Hence the time is ripe for the education ecosystem to come together and prepare for effective implementation.

To catalyse this process of coming together, ideating and solving, ShikshaLokam has conceptualised and curated a unique experience called ‘The Unbundle Series’. In this 5-part series, we are covering aspects of Early Childhood Care and Education, Foundational Literacy and Numeracy, Teachers as leaders, School governance, Structures and Leadership, and Dropouts, Access and Inclusion. The initiative aims to build a shared understanding of the NEP recommendations and to drive constructive solution-driven conversations on its different aspects in collaboration with domain experts and CSOs.

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