SHUBHANGI SHIFA
Ranchi, Apr 13: The second day of the two-day National Conclave organized by the Jharkhand government, in collaboration with state partners UNICEF; CARE India and USAID saw speakers from Punjab, Haryana and Telangana. They shared their plans of action for improvement in school education, after the Covid-19 aftermath.
Along with this, officials of several organisations including Central Square Foundation, IGNUS and Pratham, shared their ideas that they have either developed or already implemented.
Speaking on the occasion as keynote speaker, JEPC State Project Director Kiran Kumari Pasi said, “We are thankful that the people from all around the nation including officials from education departments of different states shared their plans and ideas with us. The education scenario of Jharkhand is slightly different from other states because the diversity of language present here is not usually seen elsewhere. Children here live not only in urban areas or rural areas but also in forests and hills.”
“This is the reason why every solution cannot be implemented in every region. We need to understand scenarios and cases and move as per the situation. Our pupil-teacher ratio is also quite poor. However, the learning loss did not just emerge, but worsened due to Covid,” said the Director.
Further talking about future plans of the state, she added, “We have planned to connect our Anganwadi workers to provide special coaching to children. We are also thinking of focusing on peer learning, and having extended sessions for up to three months. Meanwhile, we have slightly shortened our syllabus. The idea is to not force-feed the complete syllabus but to give them inputs in small batches. Furthermore, we plan to organise a similar session with teachers for their input and observations. ”
Talking of steps taken by Haryana after Covid, SDO Pramod said, “We initially realized that around 72 percent of our students were of poor background and could not afford a smartphone. The Haryana government distributed around five lakh tabs and started educational programmes on the state’s channel on television. If children could not access phones and tabs, we provided them education through a similarly effective medium. For those who had phones, we launched an app ‘Avsar’ which we used not only for educating children but also to take their exams.”
Pramod further added, “We also trained our teachers through digital and other kinds of training programmes. Furthermore, we realized that even though private schools share the burden of education of a child with their parents, the state schools are yet to do so. Similar to private schools, we need to keep parents apprised of their children’s development and also keep them involved continuously.”
Mandeep, a state resource person of Punjab said, “We started a ‘Padho Punjab’ project to check levels of children. This helped us to evaluate and sort them into different groups called ‘Mahals’. They were then trained through the study material which helped them further their levels.”
“All of our study material was made into e-content, and with projectors in every school, we were able to work with kids in an interactive manner. Supplementary material and e-content were made available for every student. We even began LKG and UKG for children, while combining them with Anganwadi Kendra, so that the food part for children is fulfilled by Anganwadi while the education part is taken care of by the schools.”
Other speakers on the occasion included Atul Bhargawa of Central Square Foundation who shared the ‘Role of Ed-tech in Learning Recovery’, Deepti Shrivastav of IGNUS who shared ideas on ‘Learning Recovery Strategies for Primary and Secondary grade’ and Shailesh from Pratham, who talked of Pratham’s ‘Learning Recovery Model’.
