Systems

One of my favourite reads of the past few years was The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. Gawande is a surgeon, but has written a lot about systems, how we get better, and efficiency, especially within the health care sector.

On Wednesdays, we have a half-day of school and spend the second half on professional development. Yesterday, we watched this TED talk by Gawande, and talked and came up with a pre-school checklist.

So now, as we enter school, we have four items on our checklist.
1. Enter the hall and pick up photocopies for the day.
2. Write and prepare the blackboard for the day (agenda, date, attendance)
3. Prep materials required for the three slots
4. Prep tech for the day

As Gawande mentions, one of the most important functions checklists is to include some of the simpler things that are easily forgotten. Tech is a good example for our class. Every day we use laptops and speakers for songs and videos. It’s usually a short period of time, but on more than a few occasions, we’ve been running speakers during class between rooms, in a slightly haphazard and inefficient manner. Today, there was none of that.

A checklist is in essence a system. We need systems to help reduce decision fatigue and stress, so that we can be more successful and efficient. Today’s checklist was great because it forced me to develop even more systems.

As I was preparing my materials for the day, I organized my materials by the time slots (Math, Co-curricular, then English), and BAM, another system created.

I’ve always struggled with organization, but once you get started, it’s amazing how efficient you can really become. And the level of stress reduction is amazing. Every day for the first six months of my TFI fellowship, the last 10 minutes were a struggle because I hadn’t planned a way for my kids to leave class. One day, I drew a line and that became the system. Every day, students would sit in SMART position then leave on the line as they were called. One decision less to make, one system down, and a 10-15 minute exit procedure every day went down to just 3 minutes. 12 minutes of extra learning time for my kids!

That’s why we need systems.

Just a short note to close – It’s wonderful to be a small startup, to test and tweak and refine these systems easily, something I’m going to talk about more in the next few posts.

Tradeoffs

Today was a day that made me think about the tradeoffs we often have to make working in development, or in a startup.

Today, for the first time since we started, I taught my class alone. We have three 1.5 hour blocks in the day, and for the first two, I taught my class alone.

It was wonderful. I co-taught with another teacher for the first half-year of my fellowship, and it was pretty disastrous. I had soured on the whole idea of co-teaching, and the final year and a half of my fellowship with Teach for India was definitely more successful as a result of having an independent class.

It was nice to do things just my way today, to manage, be me, etc. I missed it a bit. Then I reflected a bit, on how lucky I am to have wonderful teachers, Rohita Kilachand, Nikhat Aga, Lara Velho, and Aditi Agarwal to teach with. It eases a lot of pressure, it’s less tiring. While teaching independently was nice today, when I consider the progress we’ve made co-teaching  versus what I achieved independently, I’m quite lucky to be teaching in the system we are.

So I’ve traded some independence, some comfort, but gotten a lot less stress, and much better results.

We had an interesting conversation about tradeoffs after school, when talking about how we plan to use data going forward to inform our instruction. Our principal, Gaurav, queried over the past year or two, how much of our time using student data went into inputting, and how much into analysis. I answered that by the end of my last year, I was spending about 20% inputting, and 80% analyzing. Then the others answered, and I was amazed to hear that it was the complete opposite for them, including two who spent 100% inputting and 0% analyzing.

These are all teachers who are totally invested in the idea of data-driven instruction. But the level of data they needed to collect and input was so high and minute, that by the end, they had burnt out and just couldn’t spend the time to analyze it.

We came to a decision that we would be better off gathering less intensive data, so that we could actually analyze it. Another tradeoff. Surely, our data might not be quite as specific and granular as it was previously, but the fact that we’ll actually analyze it and use it to inform instruction will put us in a much stronger place.
So we have to make tradeoffs. One reason this work can be so hard is the absence of perfect solutions. But that’s another reason why it’s so rewarding to succeed.

Today was another great day.

A Nearly Perfect Day

Sorry for my prolonged absence! Fell ill a few weeks ago, so it was difficult to blog, but I’m back and hopefully this’ll be a good one.

Today was a great day. Sometimes, you need something to lift your spirits a bit, and today was one of those days. The kind of day that it takes some time to process, but when it hits you, you realize that progress is possible.

After some phenomenal work planning from my wonderful, dependable, and enigmatic team, we started to teach our most rigorous content yet today. We began to use a curriculum, Investigations, that we’ve taken from North Star Academy in Newark, one of the most successful charter schools in the world.

Today was a modest start, one routine where we counted attendance, and some time exploring manipulatives. But it’s the hope of what’s to come that’s really positive. They did so well with today’s start, that I can’t wait to see how things progress in the future. When you see low-income students engage with rigorous content, it makes you realize why teaching and trying to close the achievement gap can be so rewarding. Why we do what we do.

The day went on after math, our literacy block was really successful too. My highlight was certainly doing a read-aloud of a wonderful book aimed to teach children how to read books without destroying them. I wished I had had it for my kids the previous two years!

Then our co-curricular block included two fun activities, one for identifying the colour red, and the other to teach kids to start to understand themselves and use sentences like “I have eyes” and “I have a nose.”

The highlight of the last block though, was the visit of Ishaan and Navisha, two of my high-school aged volunteers from last year. They were with me for the first three months of last year, and without them, I don’t think I would’ve achieved much success with my students. What’s better, is that they plan to join Teach for India (in about 5 years when they graduate from college). And after that I’m sure they’ll join as teachers at 321, though they don’t know that plan yet.

Right now I’m just finishing a really delicious meal of quinoa taboulleh, salad, and yogurt and fruits, feeling pretty excited about pushing these kids even further.

Why is it a nearly perfect day? I’m not sure if any day can be perfect, in school, or in life. Something’s always missing, something that could make it even better. But for now I’ll take nearly perfect and hope to improve tomorrow.