Design & education innovation

Client: Quest Alliance Education Innovation NGO
Role: Design Manager

Anandashala

Program information: https://www.questalliance.net/program/anandshala

Operating in Bihar and Jharkhand, the Anandshala program works to build stronger relationships between teachers, students and parents to make schools joyful learning spaces that motivate students to stay in school. It reaches out to out-of-school adolescents through local youth clubs, and attempts to create a responsive education system through advocacy and capacity-building. It uses data as a critical tool to create a more responsive education system and drives advocacy. It has resulted in higher attendance, deeper engagement, learning for life, more trust and stronger relationships between the government, its schools and the community.

A critical need in India is lowering the number of school dropouts. These can occur because of a parent’s need for the child’s help at home or work, the child’s lack of school support from home, the child skipping class to play all day, or bullying because of caste or family, among others.

A critical need in India is lowering the number of children dropping out of school every day. 

We went into the field to see how we could work with teachers to understand and cope with these problems and help to prevent additional dropouts, while bringing more youth into the fold at school. Working with teachers and (PMOs) Program Manager Officers we went out in the field to listen to case studies of students that spoke of their interest in school because of Quest Alliance’s new techniques (offering classes with arts/language and sports). They were excited to come to class because friends were there and cooperative games were played. Other stories we were challenged by included the need for students to drop out because of a family member's illness (eg. leprosy), working on the farm to support the family, taking jobs to support the family or the family’s general distrust of education.

Our job was to use this and develop curriculum and design of teacher and student workbooks to encourage more students to learn information about life skills, cooperation, and thinking outside of the box.

The team worked with Education material designers to iterate our teacher workbooks which were guided lessons of class programs teachers could use to improve attendance and critical thinking. Teachers become Change Leaders, armed with the knowledge, skills and attitudes to foster a student-friendly environment and bring in positive teacher-student relationships in schools.

Taking our learnings from qualitative field data, we focused teacher daily lessons and interactions with students. Lessons were built and designed to increase excitement and delight in the classroom with play-based education, music instilled co-operative play and game-based math and language lessons.

We gave guidelines to Teachers to build relationships with students for trust and positive connections with school, while refraining from teaching rote regurgitation, stopping behavioral infractions. Many teachers created relationships with children’s families to reiterate the need for education. These teachers were indeed Superpowers of gaining larger class adherence.

The children who used to run away from studies and classes now come to school on time and stay because they feel happy.

100% of teachers who taught with these lesson plans and interactions mind found an increase of children’s attendance. In addition, children had an increased ability to analyze information, evaluate evidence, and form reasoned judgments. Through India education tests, the students in our experiment classes received higher scores, in addition to lower behavioral violations.

Fieldwork in Bihar, India

Skills to Succeed

Most of India's youth drop out of high school by the age of 15. Families need money and once school is no longer mandatory, you are old enough to provide food for the table. The problem is the idea is short lived. Money is not invested in knowledge or education that can get well paying jobs in the future. Labor jobs or minimal retail jobs pay bills, bring home money, but do not provide in the long term. 

With as many as 4 million youngsters between the ages of 15 and 29 set to enter the workforce each year for the next two decades, there is a pressing need to direct efforts towards enabling them with skills to make them more future-ready.

Most of India's youth drop out of high school by the age of 15. Families need money and once school is no longer mandatory, you are old enough to provide food for the table.

Skills to Succeed is meant to provide a 3 month course that will help to change that gap of knowledge and learning. Accenture has funded the initiative for 5 years. The initiative is a blended learning techniques for employability. Through a mix of computer, text and english learning make sure youth have the skills, both life- and work-related, to compete for jobs, Quest pilots and transfers educational technologies. These are geared toward vulnerable, out-of-school youth who have no formal vocational training programs and are unlikely to be reintegrated into the education system.

Through my research, key stakeholder interviews and contextual interviews, we built out a system of how to reach these kids and adults that are susceptible to pressure by parents or friends to drop out.

We developed the program to make sure that the end result far exceeds the negatives and the student is excited and empowered to move forward. 

I created both a teacher and student manual that focused on needs of increased soft skill workplace behavior, social interaction and building confidence in workplace engagement. I coordinated education content experts, project managers and design to develop new tactics in the experience by creating color coded systems and illustrations that helped to define objectives and allow understanding of sometimes harder conceptual ideas. We know that humans learn by doing, so students join in conversation, work on computers and take English language courses to be able to communicate with customers and consumers at their retail jobs.

The program harnesses innovative tools – including a comprehensive blended digital self-learning material – in its experiential group activities and classroom sessions. This is designed to motivate trainers to learn new facilitation skills, as well as enable students to develop market-oriented skills while building their confidence.

We placed 70% of student’s at the job fair with first-time jobs, moving one step closer to the realization of putting our Indian Youth in jobs with secure and equitable pay now and in the future. 

The team and I organized a big job fair that aligned students with companies that were wanting to hire from our pool. We placed 70% of student’s at the job fair with first-time jobs, moving one step closer to the realization of putting our Indian Youth in jobs with secure and equitable pay now and in the future. 

YOUTHSPARK LIVE: A MICROSOFT INITIATIVE

YouthSpark has a 3 prong attack to focus on their goals. Employment, Careers and Entrepreneurship. This was a gathering of the best entrepreneurial young minds in India and the mentorship of Microsoft and their dedicated crew made this YouthSpark Live a phenomenal success. We created an inviting event that brought in India youth that hadn't touched technology before to participate in coding problems with KODU to awaken the sleeping code engineer. 

We created an inviting event that brought in India youth that hadn't touched technology before to participate in coding problems with KODU to awaken the sleeping code engineer. 

I helped facilitate the program, including organization of speakers, mentoring leadership for competing entrepreneurs and jurying a program for entrepreneurs to win money and business savvy from Microsoft.  

What an amazing program, and amazing staff and energy that was present through the whole program. We had excellent young (under 25) business ventures that were impassioned and hitting so many different appealing aspects of social impact through technology. One team won $10,000 to fund their venture in addition to mentorship and leadership knowledge from key Microsoft leaders. The runners up all received mentorship and dedicated Microsoft support. 

Quest Alumni retention Strategy

While working with Quest, I realized that one of the biggest hurdles of the organization was the lack of contact with students that had graduated out or moved out of contact from the field officers. This allowed for precious insight into our real impact to be lost. The insight could have afforded us much needed numbers to show the data of how we had changed lives, created a turn about in society in order to insure continued support from our funders and future funders.  

I saw this gap in needs and spearheaded an internal audit of data and information that would be key winners in our steps to move forward. I organized and coordinated the team for an in depth workshop where we would put our heads together in round table discussions to produce tangible steps forward that Quest could buy into and fix to their roadmap. Manager, facilitators, education experts, designers and strategists all took part in this event. Each person was tasked to come up with challenges for their specific field. This allowed for each individual to own and be the champion and expert of a challenge. However, instead of having the owner of the challenge try and solve their own problem, I created mixed groups that all had different roles and fields at the company. Each group was given indiscriminately mixed challenges that they would try and solve. This allowed fresh blood at the company to work out a colleague's problem with a different perspective and expertise. They mapped it out in a way to identify a character in the story, to build out the challenge and then brainstorm a solution that could work. As we threw challenges up on the whiteboard I made sure that every group all had a chance to read out their challenges and solutions. We made a roadmap on the whiteboard and place each of these solutions on it based off of the time it would take to actually get off the ground and into reality. We then had a long line of solutions to visualize timeframe. I had everyone take a 3 blue dots and go up to the board to pick the one that affected their workflow the best, the one that would help our students the most and then their favorite overall. 

I saw several different themes emerge that allowed me to outline these time frames and how we could tackle them by creating a this roadmap of our opportunities and priorities. The different avenues of opportunity that were opened were without a doubt inspiring to all teams. They hadn't realized their excitement about all these possibilities until now. They had a deep commitment to their students, but how to prioritize the opportunities? The Executive team and I rehashed all of these ideas in a synthesis that brought in a more refined eye for our business needs. Through these intuitive insights I aligned our opportunity services and created an outline of structure moving forwards with various scenarios for growth. For a quick read and understanding I organized a PDF in a hand drawn manner, that could easily be taped to the wall and brought into conversation as the organization worked on solutions for these various use cases.