Page 19 - CafeSocial-July-2021

Science learning. With the help from results of this exercise were outstanding and
educators, we made some small changes in
the classroom. One of the most significant
such change was the feedback mechanism.
Like every other class, the teachers believed
here too that a few students were really
good and others not so. The reason ascribed
to this differentiated performance, they
believed was, that some students were
brilliant and others were dumb, who can't
really learn Maths and Science.
The first change we brought in here
was to help teachers understand that the
difference in performance had nothing to do
with a brilliant or a dumb student, but clearly
about how much effort each one was
making. Trust me, it was difficult to break this
myth of individual brilliance and I won't
blame some of you for holding a similar view.
So, a careful feedback to the so called
brilliant kids was changed from a typical
“Wow, you did well because you are good at
Maths” to “I am sure you make a lot of effort
to learn Maths and that is showing in results”.
Similarly to a student who had not
performed well in a task, the feedback was
“Your effort in trying to solve the problem is
appreciated. You need to do some more
practice to be really good at it”. This would be
communicated in different ways and by the
teachers, who believed that there is no
brilliant or dumb student and it is all about
effort one puts in to learn.
The other change was done to remove
multiple grades and to change it to
something like “Achieved” and “Not Yet”. We
made necessary changes in the school
management system and used technology
to consistently measure the outcomes. The
experiment had started with just one class
and within three months, the school
management wanted us to bring the entire
school under the ambit of this program. Of
course, there were other small alterations
done in teaching methods and it needed
hours of time spent with the teaching staff to
help them achieve a positive mindset. The
we have repeated this at multiple schools
afterwards with positive impact on learning.
So, what worked. Please remember
that every word that teacher speaks sends a
message to the student. An average
educator believes that there are some
brilliant and some dumb students in the
class and therefore, the feedback is
judgmental and either praises or looks down
upon the mental capability of a child. Just by
changing the messaging and focusing on
the process of learning, we can change the
message we send to kids and therefore
affect their motivation to learn. There have
bene cases when some teachers lowered the
standards of test or started praising kids
even when there was nothing to be praised
hoping that it would result in performance
improvement. But these are false efforts and
we found many such cases that again
needed a counselling and reinforcement of
positive mindset for teachers.
This may look very simple to execute,
but it is not. It needed a lot of effort from our
team and school management and was
difficult to get all the stakeholders to agree
for these changes initially. My repeat
experiences with this have reaffirmed my
faith in the fact that positive mindset
inculcated in teachers could be a game
changer in our education system. Another
example I will quote here is from corporate, a
SME employing about 50 people. Their
performance had been sluggish for years
and despite all efforts, the sales and
marketing team had a high attrition. We
worked with them and realized quickly that
there was a mindset issue. There was a
problem in what was being encouraged and
rewarded in the team. There was no buy-in by
field sales team into the targets being
defined by sales supervisors and therefore
lack of commitment.
We worked with the organization and
helped the owners to change the incentive
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