TVS Schools Project

Educational Initiatives (EI), Ahmedabad and TVS group of schools, Madurai have come together on a project which aims at improving the quality of learning for the students.

As part of the TVS project, the EI team helped the teachers redesign the curriculum of class 6 into a skill-based one in TVS Lakshmi Matriculation Higher Secondary School, in the subjects of English, Maths, Science and Social Studies. The process involved identification of skills in each subject, development of worksheets, activities to be used in class, and skill based evaluation. The lesson planning was done within the framework of ‘Understanding by Design’, a concept that aims to develop ‘real understanding’ as opposed to ‘apparent understanding’.

The EI team of subject experts visited the school every two months and helped the teachers iron out any difficulties. They also held workshops on topics like time management, graphic organisers, rubrics, classroom management, based on the identified difficulties. With all these, the classes became highly interactive and more student centred. There was a clear move from ‘teaching’ to ‘learning’. Parents also felt the difference - the children learning on their own, referring to resources, looking up items in the encyclopaedia, relating what they learnt to their surroundings, and even asking questions the parents could not answer.

Second Year
With the success of the projects, the same was extended in the second year to classes 4 and 5 for the English subject. To provide an element of self learning and skill development to the higher classes which had not yet converted to the Skill Based Curriculum (SBC), EI provided the students a set of 10 integrated projects for classes 7 to 9, which the students did on their own and presented to a panel of judges.

Third Year
It is now the third year of the project, and the SBC is now being extended to more classes and schools - the Tamil medium and English medium classes 4 - 6 of TVS Primary and Secondary School is now implementing it in their classrooms. The team finds it comfortable working with the Tamil medium teachers and have even done demo classes for them.

Benefits of the Programme
The benefits of the programme, as the teachers and project team at TVS Schools see it: The EI team has been working on various research projects like Learning Standards, Test Development, Teacher Training, etc. and they are able to bring their learnings from these into the TVS classrooms. In fact, it gives them satisfaction to see their ideas being implemented effectively and children learning with joy and enthusiasm. The students are much more interactive than when the project began and are keen to ask questions and do projects which give them a taste of the real world. The projects they do range from finding out the average amount of water a person uses per day to preparing a diet for a heart patient based on nutritional information gathered from items at a supermarket, to understanding the impact of colonialism on India.