Thinking Strategically

This is a note I wrote for the 2014-15 Annual Report of Centre for Learning Resources as its Director. I hope you will find it interesting. (To see the full Annual Report, please click here).

In May, 2010, I met the CEO of a district panchayat in India. He asked me if we could help improve the teaching of mathematics in the schools of his district.

Delighted at the possibilities, I quickly outlined how the several thousand teachers involved could be provided effective training, coaching and teaching-learning materials to deepen their understanding of the subject as well as pedagogy, what organizational commitments and structures would be necessary and how we would assess whether the programme was progressing as desired. I suggested a five-year time frame, with capacities being built at various levels within the department and resource groups being formed in several geographies.

He was not impressed. He said he wanted the teachers to begin teaching the new programme in classrooms in June (this was already May), and wanted the entire intervention to be completed within one year. He said he couldn’t wait that long for the quality of Maths teaching to improve.

I politely declined. We didn’t have the capacity to create that miracle, I admitted.

Five years later, the district has had ad hoc trainings now and then for maths teachers. No improvement in student learning seems visible, and anecdotal evidence suggests that teachers have not developed any new skills in teaching Maths.

The five-year strategy we had outlined would have been fully implemented by now. While its impact on student learning and teacher capacity can only be hypothesized, it would have been based on a strategic vision of how change happens and what resources are necessary to foster it.

The public education system in India is in a crisis of capacity. Teachers, supervisors and officials at practically every level need better understanding of pedagogy, better teaching-learning tools and better assessment guide-posts for delivering desired outcomes. They are not getting them because of a pervasive lack of attention to systemic strategy.

Strategic thinking for improving educational outcomes is not a rocket-science, but it does require discipline. Even back-of-the-envelope strategising would require attention to the following:

·        A credible, well-established theory of change. 

    What is the basis for imagining that a particular initiative will lead to desired results? Far too often, projects are initiated merely on a whim, anecdotal evidence or incomplete analysis. Desired outcomes are poorly articulated, if at all, and their desirability often based on little more than some individual preferences. Grounded in little reality, they fail to deliver and are quietly abandoned after the initiator has moved on.

·         A grounded understanding of needs and context. 

     A particular theory might have worked well elsewhere, but what leads us to believe that it will work well for us? Adults and children will learn new ideas when they build on what they have already learnt, what they need to learn, what they want to learn and what they feel equipped to learn. Moreover, the actual organizational context will provide powerful cues for learners to either incorporate new learning into their lives or reject it as unprofitable. Unfortunately new initiatives are rarely designed based on such understanding. As a result, most learners, whether adults or children, simply learn by rote if they must, and discard the training if they safely can.

·         Coalition-building.

     We might design an effective-looking plan, but how will we know whether everyone who is going to be affected is in agreement? Ideal plans thought up by someone, no matter how brilliant, are rarely ideal for all the stake-holders.  Meaningful and effective interventions are almost always co-created. Unions, parents, communities, civil society organisations all have legitimate interests to protect and objectives to advance. Far too many well-meaning initiatives have been wrecked by either silent saboteurs or vociferous objectors or both, simply because not enough attention was paid to building coalitions. It is messy, it takes time, but something eventually gets done, rather than nothing.

·         A detailed process-map. 

    A programme might be well-designed and co-created, but what attention have we paid to ensuring effective implementation? Identifying motivational drivers of learners rarely figures on the radar of planners. They seem to trust the power of official orders despite personally-experienced evidence to the contrary. Physical conditions play a great role in determining how much new learning will take place. Monitoring, when it is not explicitly supportive, is most often experienced as punitive, dramatically reducing new learning among learners. On-going coaching is practically indispensable for ensuring that new learning is welcomed by learners into their lives. Integrating these concerns into implementation design makes the difference between success and failure.

·         Programme Assessment. 

   How will we know whether our assumptions about what causes improvement were right or not? Educational projects deliver outcomes over much longer time periods than, say, building a road. This mean that it is both more complex and more important to have a coherent set of criteria by which to judge the success or failure of a particular initiative over a long period of time. Not only does this enable mid-course corrections for the particular programme, it generates valuable knowledge that can be used in other initiatives.

A huge proportion of our population is at and below school-going age, making us one of the youngest countries in the world. This means that in as little as 40 years, we are likely to be one of the oldest countries. The much-touted demographic dividend that the young population promises us can only be realised if our young today receive meaningful, high quality education. For us to have a prosperous and happy country in 2050, we need to think strategically about education. Now.