V R Prasanna was one of the panellists at the “Enabling a
culture change” session at the Next
Gear
workshop on innovation leadership I facilitated in July. Prasanna is the CEO of
Sikshana
Foundation which was rated among the top three in India in
education intervention by Times
Social Impact Awards (Sept 2011). Prasanna moved back from
the US to India in 2007 to help scale up the organization. In this interview
Prasanna shares his experience in enabling a culture change in the context of
rural government schools.
The interview explores following questions:
- Can you please share a culture change story from Sikshana?
- Why is change difficult?
- How do you sustain ownership in change initiatives?
- What role rewards play in change initiatives?
- What happens to the change when Sikshana stops support?
- How does Sikshana get teachers to experiment?
A sample question & answer is given below. You can
find the complete interview here
Q: What roles rewards play in change
initiatives?
Prasanna: In our case, we
found that the easiest way to motivate a teacher is a pat on the back. They
work in a system where nobody cares about them. One of our initial experiences
was with a teacher in a remote school –
with 12+ years of service. When we asked him , “Sir, how are you doing?”
The teacher almost had tears in his eyes. When we asked, “Did we say something
wrong?” He said, “First time in 12 years in this school, somebody has asked me
how I am doing” That is the simplest form of reward. On the other end, we send
teachers to the US. Someone who might not have seen Bangalore goes to the US
and spends four weeks there.
We find rewards play a similar role for a child to
change. In rural setting, when children go back from school, they dump their
bag and immediately run out. Because there is nobody at home to share their
school experience. To sustain the change, something needs to happen outside the
school environment. How do we do this? We can’t become the parents. But the child
has to be rewarded at some basic level. So we introduced something called a
“spot prize” in classrooms.
Every teacher is equipped with nominal amount with which
they buy something and give it away. This is one of our most successful
programs. We don’t spend more than Rs. 30 per child in the whole year. We have
introduced stars which they can wear on their uniform. And once they collect
ten stars they redeem it for something – crayons or pencil set or they can hold
on till the next ten stars and get a geometry box.
This idea (of stars) came from a teacher. I had gone to a
school near Hubli. We had given spot prizes to be awarded in the school. This
teacher had written some names and some numbers next to it. I asked, “What are
these numbers?” The teacher said, “I liked your idea. But I run out of prizes very
quickly. Attendance is a huge issue. So I have to give them more. So whenever a
student asks a good question or a correct answer I start writing points. This
becomes more like a game and it is getting everyone to participate actively in
the class.” The next question was, “How can we do this at a systemic level?” and
the star system evolved.
Related articles:
“Showing the way:
Sikshana is helping children stay in school and better their performance by
developing all-round skills”, a cover story in Business Outlook, Sep 1,
2012
Good to see how simple changes can make a difference. But these would never appeal to administrators who want to make "big" changes.
ReplyDeleteGreat effort and very good interview.
ReplyDelete