teach for india essay 3

Building a movement of leaders

The teach for india fellowship is an opportunity for india’s brightest and most promising talent, stemming from the nation’s best institutions and firms, to serve as full-time teachers to children from low-income communities in under-resourced schools. , contact us at [email protected] if interested in learning more., *please note only indian citizens or individuals with an oci are eligible for the fellowship., teach for india's fellowship is a powerful two-year grassroots immersion program. having worked with students, and forged first-hand critical relationships with principals, parents, and public institutions, fellows emerge as informed, invigorated, and empathetic future leaders in the social sector.  tfi fellows then graduate and become a part of our alumni. 77% of the alumni stay in the education and social sectors, creating a movement of leaders and leveraging the multiplier effect to collectively build a vibrant continuum towards educational equity..

the Fellows’ impact on our students is real, and measurable.

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Teach for india’s alumni are impacting 1 in 10 children in india in our quest to erase educational inequity..

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Creating Educational Equity: The Teach for India Fellowship

The Teach for India Fellowship is a 2-year teaching program for recent graduates who are Indian citizens or of Indian origin. Fellows work as full-time teachers in under-resourced and low-income schools. Through teaching in classrooms and working with key education stakeholders like students, principals, and parents, Teach for India fellows get hands-on experience in the grassroot realities of the Indian education systems. They also acquire the knowledge, skills, and mindset necessary to become positive changemakers for educational equity throughout India.

We talked to Trisha Sharma, a 2019-2021 Teach for India Fellow, to learn more about the program and get some application tips.  

1. What inspired you to apply for the Teach for India Fellowship?

Being a military kid, I accompanied my father to most of his postings, translating to experiencing changing topographies, cultures, and races. By the time I was 17, I had already moved 14 times. However, while changing all these places and experiencing the diversity, one theme I found that remained prevalent throughout the length and breadth of India I had covered was the inequitable distribution of resources. 

My own education bore the brunt of the inequitably distributed resources. As I changed places, I had the opportunity to study in convents equipped with the best teachers to schools literally made out of Soldiers’ barracks having a make-shift arrangement for teachers. This occurrence brought me face to face with the issue of lack of infrastructure, human resources, and consistency. 

My internship experience in one of the poorest and backward states of India, Bihar, convinced me that education could be a powerful tool to bring in sustainable and scalable social impact. Teach For India seemed like a place that offered to do more than that, such as tackling educational crises, and encouraging finding solutions to complex problems a child, a mother, and a family goes through. Their vision and mission of providing excellent education to underserved children resonated with me. By being part of the fellowship, I hoped to gain grassroots experience of existing crises and gain credible leadership experience to think about innovative solutions to complex issues that would help us as a community to grow and glow.

2. What have been some of the most eye-opening moments during your fellowship?

One of the most eye-opening things in my first year of fellowship was my understanding of poverty vs. what it was in reality. Before joining the fellowship, I had an idea that poor households may not eat in food chains like Mcdonald’s, KFC, and Subway that often. However, I believed that they would have had their food at least once in a while. I would often quote McDonald’s, KFC, and Subway examples until I found my student’s faces blank. They had absolutely no idea what these entities were, and that made me realise the divide between the privileged urban class and the community that occupies the same urban spaces but are left. They become part of parallel realities consequential to the broken promises of advancement made by the economic system, ultimately leading to worsened living conditions resulting from capitalism’s continual expansion. The fellowship brought me face to face with the unapologetic and unequal consequences of capitalism. This eventually inspired me to advocate for inclusive capitalism because this affects too many people in this world.

In the second year of fellowship, when the pandemic hit us, it further pushed our efforts backward to bridge the inequity as now the digital divide become a profound obstacle to overcome. In a country where even proper food is not available to the poor, how was digital infrastructure to be provided to them then? What helped me operate in this situation and refine was the sense of possibility. Our lessons were conducted on community phones; the photocopier shop in the community provided significant assistance in printing and delivering asynchronous learning packets to the children helping them to keep learning. Optimizing donor funds helped in providing digital devices to many who needed them to continue learning. One of the profound realizations that hit me was the community network of sharing resources in underserved societies is very strong and effective, something we should all follow. 

3. What tips would you give others applying to the Teach for India Fellowship?

I’d like to tell the candidates is to apply as early as possible. The first round of applications usually opens around August. What Teach For India looks at in the candidate is their passion and commitment to bringing in change and their leadership potential. 

The first round of fellowship selection would entail an application and an online test. The application would ask you to provide answers to their essay-type questions. This is your moment to shine and write powerful stories and inspirations that motivated you to work for the community. The online test will give you some situations regarding which you will have to make some judgments and basic English skills like solving the comprehension and filling in the gaps in sentences. 

If you make the cut for both you will advance to the telephone interview. In this interview, they will dwell on some things you would have mentioned in your application so be sure to save your answers somewhere to constantly look them up to build a robust explanation for the same. While you give the telephone interview, have clarity in your head regarding your own vision and how it aligns with the mission of Teach For India. 

Post the telephone interview, if you advance, you’ll be called the assessment center. This will be a full-day affair, so don’t forget to carry water, food, and lots of energy bars (you will need them!). To be better prepared for the assessment, try, learn, or youtube how to make lesson plans, execute classes, and handle minor breakdowns. If the assessors introduce minor breakdowns in your flow of the lesson, don’t shake but handle it with grace and poise. This is what they want to see how do you handle the unexpected twists and turn that you would face in your fellowship journey too. On the same day, you would also have a group discussion and personal interview.

The direction you should choose in group discussion should be to display collaboration and move/push towards finding a solution to whatever situation is presented. For the personal interview, have a mental map of your sources of motivation and the skills you can deliver on the table, as this will help you align your answers with everything you have to offer. 

Candidates interested in applying for the fellowship must think it through and be consistent in their efforts through the two years. It’s a significant commitment of your time for those two years.

Trisha graduated with a triple major in Journalism, Psychology, and English and has a deep understanding of Interdisciplinary humanities, she is also highly people-oriented. Being an Army kid, Trisha changed 10 schools in the span of 12 years. Her experience in different topographies made her face the inequitable distribution of resources prevailing through the length and breadth of India. 

In college at Christ University Bangalore, she got deeply involved with volunteering work to uplift the underserved communities that made her realize education can be an effective tool to change the inequity in the world and thus soon after joined the Teach For India fellowship. She is now a full-time organizational development professional with a non-profit and a part-time advocate for inclusive capitalism. In her spare time, she likes to indulge in trekking and spending time with nature. 

Interested in applying? Bookmark the Teach for India Fellowship to your ProFellow account.

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How Teach For India is helping millions realise one dream at a time

Thursday December 14, 2017 , 7 min Read

For nearly a decade now Teach For India is helping children from under resourced schools to realise their potential through a leadership oriented fellowship programme. 

From the stage of the broadway musical where she performs, Priyanka’s life has been much like the theatre and arts she love.

A girl from a broken home, with her father in jail on account of murder it seems surreal that in the face of such challenges, she is managed to spread her wings and follow her passion for theatre with the Maya Musical journey.

This Teach For India (TFI) initiated broadway was her first interaction with formal education. This experience paved her way to the global stage. From Italy to study at the United World College of Adriatic, and is currently on her way to Franklin and Marshall on a full scholarship.

Priyanka is just one of the many kids whose dreams all have realised all thanks to an organisation like Teach For India. This organisation with one vision is working across seven cities, with 6,000 fellows changing the way education works in India. The organisation has impacted 39,587 kids . Conceived in 2007 and first executed in 2009, today Teach For India (TFI) has become a successful model for a youth movement.

Heralding the change Shaheen Mistry, the CEO of Teach For India says that the dream is incomplete; education continues to remains inaccessible to a majority of children. She adds,

“We need to reach out to 320 million kids. How do you scale a programme that requires depth? It’s not like franchising a McDonald's, but, it is saying that education is a long term— 10 to 12 years— process.”

The leadership model 

The TFI-works on two part model with an aim to empower the children beyond classroom.

In the short-term through the Fellowship program TFI invites students and young professionals to serve as full-time teachers to children from low-income communities in some of India’s most under-resourced schools .

The fellows work directly at the grass-root level, interacting with students, principals, and parents.

An in-depth classroom engagement spanning across two years also provides them with a window to get acquainted with the realities of India’s education system— 76 percent of students do not make it to a higher education system; 52 percent of standard 5 students cannot read a standard 2 text-book; 52 percent, approximately 9 lakh teacher vacancies exist across primary and upper primary schools.

The Fellow is assigned a classroom in one of Teach For India’s placement cities, and is expected to not only teach academics and values but they aim to give their students the access and exposure they need to reach their personal, long-term visions.

We know that the kids are learning. The beautiful part is that it is not just academic learning but holistic learning. So how do kids grow values— though their ability to raise their voice and how empowered they feel, Shaheen explains.

Priyanuj Choudhury, from the 2012-14 TFI batch, says that he customised the NCERT prescribed curriculum according to the needs of his students. Be it sanitation, hygiene, pollution or even gender issues— he embedded these topics as a part of their daily study. He says,

The students even went on a door-to-door campaign within their community to teach everyone, including the elderly senior citizens, the importance of hygiene. They became leaders in their own rights; learned to speak on issues which mattered to them.

In the long-term, TFI aims to advocate for change beyond their classrooms through their Alumni network.

The journey, so far

Education for children has been a cause closely followed by Shaheen, for decades now. Earlier in 1990 she founded ‘The Akanksha Foundation’, a non-profit organisation which provided education opportunities to children from low-income communities across Mumbai and Pune through our after-school centres, and since 2007, through the Akanksha Schools.

To address the issue of educational inequity at scale she met with Wendy Kopp, the Founder of Teach For America, and decided to bring this model to India. She says,

In terms of the ten year journey— I think what’s worked really well is seeing that idea play out in reality. When we started we were very unsure about everything. Would people join the program? It’s a two year commitment which can possibly put them on a different life path in future.

Things have, however, fallen in place. From an initial cohort of 87 “niners” (freshers) to over 1200 plus fellows in the current year, the young people are working relentlessly in the short-term to change the lives of students in their classrooms and become leaders for change themselves. Further 70 percent of the alumni continue to stay full-time in education.

However this journey has been a challenging process for the fellows— irrespective of their previous career—are placed in difficult emotional situations when they come to a classroom.

You have 40-50 kids in each classroom and they have a range of different issues. You are fully responsible for them and you are just 23-24 years old. So it is a huge responsibility and it is a difficult work, Shaheen adds.

She recalls in incident from the first year of TFI’s functioning. In the first year of the fellowship she recalls how her first set of fellows called her to a coffee shop in Pune, just to complain. With a 17-page typed document , they “complained about everything”— from how dysfunctional the finance team was; to putting them in un-fair and hostile environments.

Initially Shaheen was teary-eyed, hurt and angry for she tried to do “everything possibly humanly” to make this a holistic experience for all. Yet, after a thought she could feel that their journey, their model to make quality education a reality for all taking shape.

These are first year teachers, they are so overwhelmed, they are so busy, and in the middle of all of that they cared enough to type 17 pages of complaints.

Empowerment beyond classroom

The 1500 plus alumni are currently engaged in various education related work with an aim to work towards educational equity through long term systemic change. They are working in education, in corporate CSRs focused on education, working as school leaders, teacher trainers, curriculum developers, and teachers.

Anurag Kundu , from the 2013-15 batch, is working in commission for child rights in Delhi. He, along with Indus Action — a TFI-alumni founded organisation— is on a mission to ensure that the legal mandate, to provide 25 percent reservation in private schools to children from disadvantages backgrounds, is schools operated by North, South, and East Delhi Municipal Corporations (MCD).

When he was in the fellowship he was responsible for 30 odd kids in his class. But now as an alumni he has jurisdiction over the whole of Delhi and over the gamut of child rights, Shaheen says proudly.

Soumya Jain , a fellow in Pune, realised that post class 7 the English medium government school kids did not have a school to continue with. Lack of secondary education government schools led to two options— either the children dropped out of the system or they had to pay for private school.

Hence, in partnership with the government schools and the state government , he is now committed to build enough schools in Pune. He already has five schools running and he is starting 3 next year.

Instead of fighting the system in the policy level right away, our alumni is trying to get the existing policies to work. My hope is that the bulk of our alumni become the foot soldiers on the ground. Lets not work in conflict with the government but in collaboration, Shaheen adds.

Picture Credits: Teach For India Facebook page

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Teach For India: Bridging the Large Education Divide

It is well known that there exists a large gap in the education system in India, with affordability playing the key role. Children with resources are able to receive top-class

It is well known that there exists a large gap in the education system in India, with affordability playing the key role. Children with resources are able to receive top-class education, whereas the under privileged are left to cope with the ineffectual government mechanism. It is no surprise thus that on an average more than one in three students drop out of primary school before the fifth standard.

It is a nationwide movement of outstanding college graduates and young professionals who will commit two years to teach full-time in under-resourced schools and who will become lifelong leaders working from within various sectors toward the pursuit of equity in education. It currently has 214 Fellows impacting 6500 children.

What is Teach For India’s model?

Teach For India provides resources, training, and support to the young leaders recruited to the Fellowship so they can employ innovative teaching strategies and maximize their effectiveness in the classroom. During the two-years, Fellows gain important knowledge and experience of India’s educational system and its challenges, which enables them to provide solutions to problems faced within their classrooms and school communities.

The Fellows of the movement

Teach For India Fellows are a diverse set- some coming after years of experience in industries ranging from investment banking to mining while others enthusiastic and fresh out of college. All of them share 2 basic qualities- a proven ability to lead and to overcome challenging and resource-constrained environments. To add to this is a common vision they believe in- that every child deserves an excellent education.

Training to build teachers and leaders

A 5-week Training Institute is organized to prepare the Fellows for teaching in school. It is innovative, rigorous and tries to push every Fellow far beyond his comfort zone. On the first day of training, Fellows are dropped off into a community for 2 hours and told to connect with a child. Fellows undergo 4 weeks on-the-job training by teaching in summer school. By the time Institute is over, they are ready for school.

Post-Fellowship

Post the Teach For India Fellowship, Teach For India Fellows will work from within and across different sectors to advocate equity in education. This may be through involvement in corporate foundations to encourage funding, through working in the government to influence policies towards education equity or through working in other social organizations involved in getting better education for the underprivileged.

Through their efforts, they will ensure that one day, every child in India attains an excellent education.

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Thinking about Teach For India

Jennifer Thomas

Do we call this a silent revolution, this transformation that is taking place in the field of education in modern India? Going by what the mainstream media says and observes, it does seem so. One part of young India is spearheading these changes, bringing about educational reforms and trying to level the playing field, as it were.

Adapted or modeled on the highly popular Teach for America program, and headed by Shaheen Mistri, Teach for India strives to narrow the educational divide between the haves and the have-nots with the help of outstanding college graduates and young professionals.

Now into its second year, and operating out of two cities in Maharashtra, this currently modest intervention in the public education system, promises to get bigger. However, there is an urgent need to look at the program in a more informed and critical way.

While the first article in our cover story raises a few pertinent questions and concerns, the interview with Shaheen Mistri, CEO of the program, highlights the challenges the program faces. A brief tete-a-tete with Ms. Anu Aga, who heads Thermax, gives an insight into why and how corporates decide to engage with education.

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I Keep six honest serving-men: – (They taught me all I knew) Their names are What and Where and When – And How and Why and Who. – Rudyard Kipling , The Elephant’s Child

A lot has been written lately in the media about the Teach for India (TFI) program. Most reports recount individual success stories of bright, young professionals who work out of dingy government school classrooms to make learning a worthwhile experience for children. Now in its second year, the Teach for India program is being touted as a ‘nation-wide movement’ which aspires to work towards eliminating educational inequity by creating life-long leaders. As I try to sift through all the media attention that the Teach for India Fellows and the program have received over the last few months, the lines from Kipling’s verse come to my mind with a renewed vigor. In this frenzy for adulation are we forgetting to pause and ask some simple, but pertinent questions about the program? Reflecting critically on some aspects of the program might provide a context to start a dialogue between the different stakeholders and perhaps even enrich it in coming years.

The context As the Indian scene of elementary education is on the brink of new changes, it would be meaningful to see Teach for India within a wider context of educational reforms sweeping through the country. The Right to Education (RtE) 2009 comes in after ten years of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) which was the Government of India’s flagship project for universalization of elementary education, focusing on quality and life-skills. 1 The State has been consistently moving towards definite goals and the RtE 2009 is a realization of the same. The RtE 2009 promises to ensure that elementary education will be an inalienable right (free and compulsory) for all children from 6 to 14 years. However, it is not an Act merely on schooling. Like the mandate of the SSA, the RtE too attempts to address issues of ‘quality’ by laying down stipulations for teacher qualification, teacher training norms and desirable teacher-pupil ratio in the classroom. The RtE then is trying to create a professional cadre of teachers through such reforms. In order to successfully implement the RtE, the various systems and processes created by the District Primary Education Program (DPEP) and the SSA urgently need to be further consolidated at multiple levels – centre, state, district, schools and not just the classroom.

What: The program It is against such a backdrop that TFI sends in its ‘Fellows’, often fresh graduates or young professionals, from non teaching backgrounds, to work towards ‘eliminating inequity in education.’ Through a two year Fellowship, TFI hopes to create ‘lifelong leaders working from within various sectors towards the pursuit of equity in education.’ 2 Clearly, the TFI Fellows may not remain teachers within the public system for long; they will use their experience within this sector as a springboard to move across sectors. The question of long-term sustainability of impact not just within individual classrooms but also within the larger system is dubious. What is the nature of change that TFI hopes to bring about within the public education system given the context of the RtE?

Who: The fellows TFI claims to have an intensive selection and recruitment process. The advantage, probably, is that more motivated and dynamic individuals enter the classrooms as teachers. But are these qualities sufficient to make one a ‘good’ teacher? After merely five weeks of training, the Fellows are put into classrooms as full time teachers. How far does this help to qualify them as good teachers? With minimal understanding of theoretical perspectives and absolutely no internship, as classroom teachers, a lot of their pedagogy tends to be experimental. Often, there is also a vast socio-cultural gap between these young teachers and their students. While most of them are sympathetic to the needs of the learner, sensitivity towards diverse socio-cultural backgrounds often develops only with time. As a result classroom management issues and other problems end up being dealt with in intuitive ways. While experimentation may not necessarily be a bad thing, there could be adverse effects of frequent over-use. Experience, they say, is the best teacher. Unfortunately, in the case of these Fellows, their ‘teaching experience’ will be time bound – two years. Will this time frame allow the Fellows to learn adequately from their mistakes and improve their teaching methods? What is the impact of this teaching (especially in the first year) where the teacher and learner learn at the same time?

Where: The reach TFI currently operates out of two cities in Maharashtra, Mumbai and Pune. In 2009, TFI placed 44 Fellows across 15 municipal and private English medium schools in Mumbai and 19 Fellows in Pune, across 19 schools. 3 When we compare these numbers with statistics that the municipal corporation manages, they seem like drops in the ocean. According to the 2007-’08 District Report Cards (DISE) the district of Mumbai alone has a total of 1372 schools with the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) accounting for 59% of the schools. True, that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but ‘where’ the program is headed is a crucial question even at this stage.

Where exactly does TFI aim to make an impact? How will individual success stories within classrooms translate into a bigger positive change within the system of public schooling? What we need now is neither a quick fix solution nor a long drawn conclusion to problems of access, pedagogy, and assessment. What we need are sustainable, practical, economic, and working solutions. Restricting good work to four walls of the classroom will only set up a parallel stream within the larger system. TFI can be evaluated as an invaluable program only if it succeeds to make inroads into the existing system of public education and affect systemic changes therein.

How: The processes Independent of media hype, it must be admitted that good work is being done by Fellows in some classrooms. But are interesting innovations merely languishing within the dingy classroom? How is the government teacher within the same school as the TFI fellow benefiting? Are such innovations passed on to other classrooms in the same school? Can these innovations rise above the din created by tabloids and be made available to people who may actually be able to use it purposefully? Compiling their learning into an easily accessible document could go one step towards helping and supporting quality teaching practices across the country.

Pedagogy apart, TFI believes in ‘measurable impact’ and stresses on definite achievement goals for students. Students are made to perform on various tests for Language and Math throughout the year. Is the program too achievement-driven? Does this sometimes result in Fellows losing sight of the fact that education must not be only about teaching a skill(s) that will ensure employability in the future? More importantly is this aiding student learning? While the differentiated support the Fellows make available in the classroom is a good practice it is necessary to think about how such a practice can be changed into a sustainable feature within the public system of education.

Comparisons between TFI Fellows and the achievement of their children versus government teachers and students are probably inevitable. But it must be noted that certain factors are not constant; the most important being time and resources. The Fellows have the willingness and time to spend extra hours with students within and outside the classroom. TFI strongly endorses remedial teaching after school hours to help children achieve their goals. Is this something that can be expected of all teachers in all contexts in our country? These issues are forgotten when we draw easy and often misleading comparisons between TFI Fellows and government teachers.

The TFI promises to get bigger and reach more schools in its next phase. In light of such a project for expansion there are some questions we must think about,

• What does the Fellow ultimately leave behind?
• Where does the TFI aim to make the most impact? Do we understand impact as a two year period of dynamic teaching practice which ends with the fellow’s contract? Are we looking for more concrete, long-term solutions?
• By when does TFI hope to see a cumulative effect of its efforts?
• How will dynamic changes proposed by TFI reach the public education system? Can realistic goals be set to achieve this?
• Who is this program really making a difference to? Does the Fellow take away with him more than he gives?
• Why is there renewed interest in the Education sector? What is it that makes this Public Good institution lucrative to the Private?

If the designers and implementers of TFI ask these questions of themselves and of the stakeholders they are attempting to influence, they are more likely to initiate a meaningful change within the field.

________________________________________________________________________________________ References 1. http://ssa.nic.in/ 2. http://www.teachforindia.org/history.php 3. http://www.teachforindia.org/placement-regions.php

The writer works with a Mumbai based organization, Muktangan, which works with municipal corporation schools in Mumbai. She holds a Masters in Education (Elementary) from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She can be reached at [email protected] .

Training teachers to be leaders

As told to Somika Basu

Shaheen is also the founder of the Akanksha Foundation, a non-profit organization with a mission to impact the lives of less privileged children, enabling them to maximise their potential and change their lives. Akanksha works primarily in the field of education, addressing non formal education through the Akanksha centre model and also formal education by initiating school reform.

Mistri is an Ashoka Fellow (2001), a Global Leader for Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum (2002), an Asia Society 21 Leader (2006) and serves on the boards of Ummeed, The Thermax Social Initiatives Foundation and is an advisor to the Latika Roy Foundation.

Can you give us a brief background on the Teach For India movement? Teach For India is a nationwide movement of outstanding college graduates and young professionals who commit two-years to teach full-time in under resourced schools and who will become lifelong leaders working from within various sectors toward equity in education. The idea was developed in 2006 when I and a group of people working to reform education in India came together to seek an innovative solution to end educational inequity in the country. During this time, we met with Wendy Kopp, CEO and Founder of Teach For America (TFA), to discuss the feasibility of Teach For America’s Theory of Change working in India. Seeking to adapt that model to the Indian context, we engaged with various stakeholders within the government, at academic institutions and at corporations and were encouraged by the favorable response we received. A few months later, a twelve week study was launched by McKinsey & Company to determine the feasibility of implementing this model in India. The study concluded favorably and at the end of the process, a plan to place the first cohort of Fellows as well as a plan to grow the movement to scale for the next five years was put in motion.

The program has been very successful in America as well as in the UK. What makes you sure it will see the same success in India? I believe the basic concept of recruiting outstanding and motivated young leaders to drive change in the education sector through working at the grassroots level is bound to make an impact in any country.

I am confident that the Teach For India program will achieve the same success in India because of the five-pronged model we follow to ensure effectiveness and impact. The elements of the model are:

Talent Sourcing : Teach For India recruits the most outstanding college graduates and young professionals to teach in low-income schools for two years. Fellows go through a rigorous selection process where they are evaluated for academic excellence, demonstrated leadership, a commitment to the community, critical thinking and perseverance, amongst other qualities. We believe that these core competencies are required to drive student achievement and to become life-long leaders who effect systemic change.

Talent Development : Prior to and during the two-year Fellowship, Teach For India provides Fellows with the training needed to make them successful teachers in the classroom and to drive positive and significant student achievement. Fellows are also given adequate leadership training to ensure that they are successful leaders in any field once they complete the Fellowship.

Talent Placement : Teach For India places Fellows for a minimum of two years in full-time teaching positions in under-resourced schools where impact on student achievement can be maximized. Fellows have clear accountability for their classrooms, and are responsible for ensuring that their students reach their ambitious academic goals.

Alumni Support : Teach For India builds partnerships in all sectors to ensure that participants have a clear path to leadership after the two year commitment. Through the alumni network, alumni of the Fellowship, stay connected to each other as they work hard towards Teach For India´s mission.

Measurable Impact : Teach For India has set up systems to drive and measure our short-term impact on student achievement, as well as our long-term impact in the development of our Fellows into life-long leaders who can eliminate inequity in education.

Teach For India aims to expose Fellows to information about potential career tracks and provide professional enrichment opportunities to aid their career decision-making and bolster the strength of their job and graduate degree program applications. To further these objectives, Teach For India has an Action Curriculum laid out and a Community Project to be undertaken by Fellows in their Second year. The Action Curriculum consists of 5 optional courses which Fellows pursue in the second year, to learn about how to effect change from within any given sector of interest. These sectors include Social enterprise, CSR, Government, Education and Advocacy. Each substantive course includes theoretical and practical elements and consists of monthly gatherings supplemented by independent work. Over an 8-month period, each course is designed to help guide career decisions and prepare Fellows to succeed in the field of their choosing.

Additionally, the Community Leadership Project is undertaken by Fellows in their second year, through which Fellows choose to tackle one primary challenge to students’ achievement (after discussions with school communities and leaders) and create innovative and sustainable solutions to this problem. By designing, implementing and managing a small-scale project within the school community, Fellows build upon their leadership and project management skills, and develop an understanding of the barriers to student achievement and educational equity.

One of the other differences in the Teach For India program involves the teaching responsibilities of the Fellows. Teach For India Fellows teach all subjects and serve as class teachers in the school they are placed in while their Teach For America counterparts teach a particular subject in different classes.

What is the status of education in India? How is Teach For India tackling it? India is currently facing one of the worst educational crises in the world. Today, 6 million primary school age Indian children are not even enrolled in school and of those in school, 50% drop out before getting a primary education. Children in low income schools test 2-3 grade levels below their counterparts in richer schools. At Teach For India, we believe that in order for all children to achieve an excellent education, we need a movement of leaders, across sectors, who are committed to and will work towards achieving this vision.

In the short run, Teach For India Fellows work as dedicated teachers to expand the educational opportunities available to India’s underprivileged children. In the long run, regardless of the career path they choose after their Fellowship, the Fellows will work toward fighting educational inequity in India, with their willingness and capacity to create change.

What is the current strength and status of Teach for India? Where do you see Teach For India in the next 5 years? Teach For India currently has 214 Fellows teaching in 63 schools across Mumbai and Pune. They impact a total of 6500 children across 150 classrooms. Their impact is not confined to the classroom alone. All 2 nd year Fellows have to implement a community project whose aim is to identify barriers to student achievement and conceiving solutions to remove these barriers. As a part of their community project, Fellows have teacher-training programs in their school, launched adult-literacy drives near their community and started ventures involving women entrepreneurs in the community.

In the next 5 years, we aim to place 1500 Fellows in 10 cities impacting 65000 students, teachers in their school and the community at large.

How has the government reacted to the program? Are you working with the system? How? The Government in Mumbai and Pune, our two placement sites, have been very supportive. In both cities we’ve been fortunate enough to place fellows as full-time class teachers within municipal schools. Additionally, we’ve been very closely involved with the MCGM’s initiatives to improve its schools.

What are the challenges that the program faces? As Teach For India expands to more cities and recruits a large number of Fellows, funding becomes a challenge. While Teach For America corps members receive their compensation directly from the schools they are placed in, Teach For India Fellows are paid by Teach For India. The Funding required for Teach For India when it places 2000 Fellows in schools will be over Rs. 100 crores a year.

The second challenge is to maintain a balance between scaling the movement quickly and continuing to maintain the highest levels of quality and impact

Teach For India recruits graduates and young professionals who are not qualified teachers to teach in low income public and private schools. What makes you confident that they have the skill set and knowledge to be teachers? We recruit Fellows who have demonstrated excellence and leadership skills in different arenas. At Teach For India, we believe that excellent teaching starts with excellent leadership. Teachers whose students achieve remarkable results employ the same tactics as leaders in any field. When Fellows join Teach For India, they undergo a gruelling 5-week training where they learn the theoretical aspects of being an excellent teacher and the practical aspect through teaching for four weeks in summer school. Throughout the Fellowship, the Fellows constantly meet their Program Manager who support and train the Fellows on a continuous basis. This training is with regard to classroom management, teaching methodologies and planning effectively for lessons.

More importantly, I believe the passion of the Fellows leads them to transcend their initial limitations. They work longer and harder, constantly learning and re-learning teaching methodologies and implementing them in their classroom.

The program is for two years. What do you expect a fellow to achieve in these two years? Teach For India uses a rubric called Teaching As Leadership, linking leadership theory to teaching practice. This ensures an emphasis on excellent teaching, enabling Fellows to see concrete ways to build significant leadership skills. Our Fellows work relentlessly to bring their students up to grade level and are trained in the most innovative best practices in teaching, led by our Training staff who have deep expertise on the matter.

The community projects, planned through extensive research, undertaken by the Fellows help them get a grassroots understanding of the challenges they would face, not only in a classroom, but of the barriers of learning which exist in the slum communities where the low income students live. By designing, implementing and managing a small-scale, sustainable project within the school community, Fellows build upon their leadership and project management skills. The Fellows join summer internships that include an array of high impact projects like developing a company’s CSR strategy or creating an impact strategy for a social investment company.

The Leadership Forums at Teach For India provide an opportunity for Fellows and alumni to engage with prominent corporate, government, social, and education leaders who will share their insights and their experiences with leadership. At the end of these two years, the Fellows would have significantly increased the academic proficiency of their class, worked to solve problems in the school community, become more socially aware, and invested in the movement to eliminate educational inequity.

One of the biggest problems in the education system is the lack of well-trained teachers. Why did you not consider providing support to existing teachers? Would that not be more impactful? The idea behind TFI is to build the movement of leaders who as alumni will do a range of things to eliminate inequity in education – teacher training being one of them. While still in the Fellowship, Fellows do reach out to other teachers in their schools, sharing effective practices and struggles with them, and doing informal training. In the long-term, however, our hope is that alumni will take on a range of issues within and outside education which directly impact educational equity. And teacher training will be among the most important of these.

What next? For starters, we are expanding to Delhi and aim to have 300 new Fellows join Teach For India in 2011! In addition, we aim to place 1500 fellows in 10 cities impacting 65,000 students by 2016.

Several corporates, educational institutions, foundations, media houses, organizations and individuals like Hillary Clinton, Dr. Abdul Kalam, Geet Sethi, Sachin Tendulkar and Aamir Khan have supported the Teach For India movement in a variety of ways.

We are an ambitious, nationwide movement and we are working relentlessly towards our vision that “one day all children will attain an excellent education”.

Somika Basu has joined Teach For India’s Media and Communications team after working extensively at the grassroots and policy level for social development in rural India. She holds an MSc from the London School of Economics. She can be reached at [email protected] .

“Hope springs up again”

“The number of illiterate people in India is equal to the population of the United States,” she says, the indignation clear in her voice. “We have the largest number of malnourished children in the world…so, yes, we need to feed them, but after that, we need to equip them…education is one of the best ways to bridge the inequities in our society.”

She is, by her own admission, “not a person to invest in infrastructure,” as there are others who can do that better and in larger measure. Her focus is on the human element in education. “Teachers play a crucial role in education….the input that has the maximum impact on the child is the teacher.”

Thermax’s engagement in education is through the NGO Akanksha, which spearheads the Teach for India program, which, as detailed elsewhere, brings young people into contact with classrooms – and more importantly, with relatively disadvantaged children. “While it’s important to invest in the existing teachers, it is also important to find people who are passionate about education and bring them into this field,” says Aga. “Much of what is wrong with teaching in India is because many people join this profession for all the wrong reasons. They have neither the skills nor the values required.”

The answer, she feels, is “to invest in a group of people who are passionate about this, who are willing to look at it beyond a 9 to 5 routine, and work relentlessly to change things.” The TFI program in her view has succeeded in bringing in this passion, which she sees in the youngsters who have been selected as fellows. While she admits that the two years they put in is a limited engagement, she notes, “I am sure that somewhere, they will keep thinking about this puzzle even after they leave, and our job is to keep them engaged.” More that 60% of those who have completed their first year as TFI fellows have indicated a desire to stay involved in education. She is careful to emphasize that TFI is “not something that will show immediate gains”. It’s a “bonus” that will accrue only years from now. “The real impact of the fellowship will only be apparent perhaps ten years from now, when these young people are in positions of influence, and bring their interest in education to try to effect change at a systemic level.”

“Gosh, their dedication and caring is amazing – each one of them is a showpiece for the program,” she says, the pride evident in her voice. She recounts an incident where one of the fellows, teaching in a small school, was in a class where a student had a sudden epileptic fit. “This young man just picked up the child and rushed him to the hospital, no questions asked…you can see they really care about the children.”

“Of course, any such intervention is bound to create some resentment in the system, but there are many who feel that there is much to be learnt, and that is enough to keep us going,” she says, when asked whether the system feels threatened by what could be seen as “interference” by outsiders. “It’s clear, one hundred percent, that the education system needs to be revamped, that teachers need to be the focus of the change,” she emphasizes, calling attention to the fact that our established training systems are clearly not working. “It’s a pity that the Right to Education Act will force out those teachers who do not have formal qualifications,” she says. “We can see that many people who are excellent teachers have no paper qualifications – they are just individuals with the skills, values and the right attitude.” And, according to her, this is where TFI comes in, bringing in people with the right mix of these attributes, plus a generous dose of humility.

Anu Aga dislikes the term “CSR”, preferring instead to just talk about the cause as something she personally believes is crucial to the country’s development. “There is so much corruption around, and at the same time, so much corporate success…I had become somewhat disenchanted with things,” she says. “But now, with this program, I can say hope springs up again.”

A promise fulfilled

“Please pray that I become an excellent teacher,” is what I told one of my friends, about two days before I began my stint with Teach For India (TFI). A person who overheard this conversation replied that a teacher’s excellence is known by her students’. I instinctively knew what I wanted my two years in the classroom to yield — student excellence. That was the promise I made to myself.

I learnt about Teach For India when I was working at a corporate organization. Although, we were funding a lot of ‘good’ work, I somehow felt that nobody was doing the work right.

What the country’s most pressing problem of collapsing education, especially for the underprivileged, required was good people on the ground, rather than in the classrooms. TFI proposed to do exactly this- place college graduates and young professionals who have been exemplary in their chosen area of work, in some of the most under- resourced schools and classrooms in the cities of Mumbai and Pune. The outcomes in the short run would be that students would get quality teachers, and after spending considerable amount of time by being a part of the system, TFI fellows would gain an understanding of what systemic changes have to take place for excellent education to be a reality for every child.

After a gruelling five weeks of sessions in classroom management, curriculum development, and student motivation among other things, I entered my classroom. No amount of training, statistical data and pictures of deprived children staring at me with pleading eyes from a flyer could prepare me for the reality that resided in this low income private school. We were told that the problem is huge and no matter how much we work, there will still be more to do.

People wonder how we return to our classrooms every single day even when we face so many problems like lack of space, hygiene, ventilation and even chairs. Although nobody says the answer, we all feel it in the core of our beings, “How can we not?”

Sometimes the problem is so huge that I feel like maybe really, a solution does not exist. And at that very instance, a child will come to school with completed homework despite trouble at home, or another will look at a fancy school with a swimming pool and ask just one question, “Ma’am, don’t they have a library?” or someone will say she loved meeting foreigners because she realized that “they are not very different from us.”

Or a little boy on the first bench will look up at me and ask, “Ma’am, how do we say this in perfect English?”

So have I kept my promise now that I am nearing the end of my fellowship? In my heart, I believe I have.

The author is a TFI Fellow and she can be reached at [email protected] .

Happy new day!

Veena Verma

Every day is a new story. My only grouse is that I can’t capture every moment of it. But I can see the signs of change so clearly. There’s my Sneha, who couldn’t read a single word four months ago and didn’t know the meaning of subtraction. Today she can read at the rate of 45 words per minute and is one of the first 5 to finish a speed math worksheet. And there’s Amir who wouldn’t sit in one place for more than a minute, today he listens and picks up information and applies it in life. The violence in my class has reduced considerably and my children and their parents too have started looking out for each other. And then there’s me – I have started falling down more often but have also been picking myself up more and more quickly each time.

It’s my 38 children and the stories we become a part of together that keeps us going. It is the huge hope and confidence in their bright future, riding on my instruction that makes me wake up each day with the idea of a ‘Happy new day’. It is their struggles that make me struggle to detail out lesson plans, make assessments, correct them, and celebrate achievements day in and day out. It is like celebrating life every new day.

The author is a TFI Fellow and can be reached at [email protected] .

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TEACH FOR INDIA LDJ2.0

The Leadership Development Journey for Fellows

At Teach for India, Fellows will work towards the three commitments of leading self, leading others and leading India. Their goals through the Fellowship will be linked to these commintments. Fellow Assessments at the end of each year will measure Fellow progress to goals and give them opportunities to showcase their learning and growth. A Fellow Portfolio will enable Fellows to house monthly/quarterly reflections & artefacts in one place along with notes from their leadership development conversations with their Program Managers

Fellow Goals and Assessment

Fellow Goals: Leading Self

:: Graduate at AP on prioritized LIT strands

:: Get 80% Mastery on the Content & Pedagogy Fellow Assessments

Fellow Goals : Leading Others

:: All Students Graduate from 10th standard and get into college of their choice

:: 90% Students grow by 1.5 levels in Literacy & Math to make progress towards their grade level

:: 90% Students master content assessments

:: Parents : Increase Parent investment in TFI and an excellent education for all kids

:: Stakeholders : Invest HM & School Staff in TFI and an excellent education for all kids

Fellow Goals : Leading India

:: Create a theory of change document and upload it in the Fellow portfolio

:: Successfully complete the Be The Change Project & Internships and upload reflections in the Fellow portfolio

Fellows will will have a clearly articulated two-year Journey and will learn through a Fellow Curriculum. The Fellow Curriculum is a scope and sequence of learning that is broken into three modules:  Leading Self, Leading Others and Leading India.  This scope and sequence is divided across 5 stages in the Fellowship. These are Institute,   Y1 Part 1 & 2,  Y2 Part 1 & 2. 

The Leadership in Teaching rubric is a tool that brings the 8 C's alive through actions that teachers and leaders repeatedly do. Excellent teachers and leaders build environments that foster learning and growth.

The five pillars and 25 strands of the Leadership in Teaching rubric are connected to each topic in the Fellow scope and sequence as outcomes of spaces and experiences. This sets them up to contribute in the most effective manner towards an India free of poverty, filled with love, and the "one day" that we envision for all children.

Fellow Curriculum  and LIT Rubric

They connect deeply with themselves, their context, and the communities that they serve.

They immerse themselves in the lived experiences of their people and together envision bold possibilities.

They plan effectively to meet this vision.

They build a culture that promotes safety and love, and execute in ways that drive for outcomes.

They consistently reflect on their outcomes as well as the leadership they display every day.

The Fellow Curriculum and the Leadership in Teaching rubric are built through our Fellow Ecosystem of Support. This consists of a variety of opportunities and experiences to grow Fellows as strong teachers and leaders. Our Fellow Ecosystem of Support will include:

Fellow Ecosystem of Support

About Teach For India

Teach For India was founded in 2008. Inspired by Teach For America’s journey, we worked with McKinsey & Company to craft a blueprint around the belief that all children must attain an excellent education.

• | Theory of Change
• | Innovations

2009-2013: Building Momentum

2009 Mumbai and Pune sites launch. 2011 Delhi site launches, Alumni movement starts. 2012  Chennai and Hyderabad sites launch, InspirED Conference sparks dialogue in education. Our Students move from elementary to secondary school, and our first Students graduate. ‍

2013-2017: Deepening Impact

2013 Broadway-inspired Maya Musical sets a new bar. 2014 Redrawing India, the first book about us, published. 2014 Ahmedabad site launches. 2015 Bengaluru site launches. 2016 InnovatEd launches to support early-stage Alumni education entrepreneurs, Firki, our teacher education platform, launches. ‍

2017-2022: Balancing Depth, Scale And Innovation

2017 TFIx launches to support education entrepreneurs across India who serve children in need. 2018 The Kids Education Revolution launches to reimagine education in partnership with children. 2019 Grey Sunshine, the second book about us, published, The Greatest Show on Earth - a musical on the status of India's education staged. 2020 Community support through Covid including ration and device distributions.  2021 Kolkata site launches, Campaign to re-open schools, Our Students return to schools.

Today, we are a movement of 900 Fellows teaching 33,000 children and 4,500+ Alumni who are collectively reaching 50 million children across India.

Teach For India is a Teach To Lead project governed by a committed Board of Trustees.

Teach To Lead Trustees

Nisaba Godrej Executive Chairperson, Godrej Consumer Products Limited

Chairperson, Board of Trustees, Teach For India

Board Member Godrej Agrovet

Board Member, Bharti Airtel

Board Member, Mahindra and Mahindra

Board Member, VIP Industries

‍ Arnavaz Aga Director and ex-Chairperson, Thermax Limited

Nominated Member of Rajya Sabha (2012-18)

Board Member, Akanksha Foundation 

Meher Pudumjee Chairperson, Thermax Limited

Board Member, Pidilite Industries

Board Member, Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation

Chairperson, Akanksha Foundation

Nandita Dugar Board Member, Akanksha Foundation

Board Member, The Circle

Neel Shahani Ex-Banker, JP Morgan, Barclays

Ex-Head of Equity Sales Trading, CLSA and IIFL

Board Member, Akanksha Foundation

Pramath Raj Sinha Founder and MD, Harappa Education

Founder and Chairperson, Board of Trustees, Ashoka University

Founder and MD, 9.9 Group

Founding Dean, Indian School of Business

Ramesh Srinivasan Senior Partner, McKinsey & Company, Inc. United States

Global Dean, Bower Forum, McKinsey  & Company, Inc.

Member, McKinsey's Global Social Responsibility Council

Shaheen Mistri CEO, Teach For India

Founder and Board Member, The Akanksha Foundation

Advisory Board Member, Museum of Solutions and The Circle

Tara Singh Vachani Executive Chairperson, Antara Senior Living

Vice-Chairperson, Max India Limited

Managing Trustee, Max India Foundation

National Advisory Board

Abhishek Patil Student, Flame University

Teach For India Student Alumnus 

Deepak Satwalekar Ex-MD & CEO, HDFC Life Insurance Company Limited

Muskan Tanwani Student, Ashoka University

Teach For India Student Alumnus

Prateek Kanwal Director, Deloitte, Co-Founder, Kautilya School of Public Policy

Teach For India Alumnus

Sandeep Rai

Founder, The Circle and Senior Advisor, Teach For India

Soumya Jain Founder and CEO, iTeach Schools

Wendy Kopp CEO, Teach For All Founder, Teach For America

Our Leadership Team

Shaheen Mistri CEO & Founder Trustee

Alpana Mallick Senior Director, Regions

Ankit Agrawal City Director, Hyderabad

Anuradha Rao Senior Director, Impact & Operations

Apoorv Shah City Director, Ahmedabad

Ashwath Bharath Senior Director, Movement Building

Caroline Paul City Director, Mumbai

‍ Deepika Guleria Director, Careers

Francis Vidhayathil Chief Financial Officer

Gaurav Dutt City Director, Kolkata

Hitesh Rawtani Director, Technology

Keshar Mokha City Director, Pune

Kritika Rawat Director, Kids Education Revolution

Manasi Jain Chief Of Staff

Nalika Braganza Director, Training & Impact

Rahat Lokhandwala City Director, Bengaluru

Ramabhadran Sundaram Director, National Alumni Impact

Revathi Ramanan Senior Director, Regions

Sara Khan Director, Development

Shreyas Vatsa Director, Selection

Shivani Agrawal Director, Strategy & Impact

Shruti Parikh Director, Human Resources

Sitara Menon Director, Brand & Communications

Swetha Balakrishnan Director, Recruitment

Tanya Arora Senior Director, People

Vidya Rajaram City Director, Chennai

Regional Advisory Board Delhi

Amitav Virmani(Chair) Founder & CEO, The Education Alliance

Aakanksha Gulati Director, ACT Grants

Anu Prasad Founder-Leader, India Leaders for Social Sector

James Abraham Founder & Chairman, Mynzo Carbon

Mansi Joshi Global Lead, Learning Experiences, Teach For All

Radhika Bharat Ram Joint Vice Chairperson, The Shri Ram Schools

Founder, KARM Fellowship for Young Indian Women

Tara Singh Vachani Executive Chairman, Antara Senior Living  Non – Executive Director, Max India Limited

Regional Advisory Board Bengaluru

Arnavaz Aga (Chair) Ex-Chairperson, Thermax Limited Director on Board, Thermax Limited 

Aditi Premji Advisor and Board Member, Dasra

K. Vaijayanti Head, Resource & Research, Akshara Foundation

Pavithra K.L. Associate Director, Dream a Dream

Shashi Nair Director, Viridus Social Impact Solutions Programme Director, NILE, Advaith Foundation 

Vinita Bali Ex-MD, Britannia

V Ravichandar Chairman, Feedback Consulting

Regional Advisory Board Pune

Meher Pudumjee (Chair) Chairperson, Thermax Limited.

Anshoo Gaur Co-Founder & Group CEO, Ideas to Impacts

Joseph Cubas Head of School, Avasara Academy

Keshar Mokha City Director, Pune, Teach For India

Pradeep Bhargava Ex-Managing Director, Cummins Generator Technologies India Ltd. 

Raj Gilda Co-Founder and VP, Lend-A-Hand India

Rati Forbes Director, Forbes Marshall Limited

Teach For India is a part of the Teach For All Network, a growing group of independent organisations working on expanding educational opportunities in their nations. The 60 countries in the network today share a common vision of an excellent education for all children.

Theory of Change

Meaningful change happens when we cultivate a collective force of leaders. Driven by the vision of an India free of poverty and filled with love, our leaders choose education as the path to get there. Over the next decade, we aspire to build a movement of 50,000 leaders. They will work collectively, with love, to transform the lives of 1 in 10 children from low-income communities in and beyond our regions.

We Build Leaders

We find committed people for our two-year Fellowship. We place them in low-income or government schools where they work relentlessly to transform the lives of their students. We support them as they find careers within and beyond the education sector.

We Nurture A Movement Of Leaders

After the Fellowship, our Fellows have lifelong access to our Alumni movement. This close-knit, supportive community learns and acts together for educational equity.

Within Education

Our Alumni work to transform schools and communities, join or start organisations to support education and work within government.

Beyond Education

Our Alumni work in careers in research, law, media, government and business and find ways to continue to advocate for educational equity.

Transformational Schools: They choose to be teachers, teacher trainers and leaders in schools or community centres.

Enablers of Transformational Schools : They support schools through curriculum, assessment reform, large-scale teacher training, and ed tech.

Policy and Governance: They work on policy and governance issues, supporting governments directly on large-scale systemic reforms in education.

Innovations

While Teach For India's Flagship programme is the two-year Teach For India Fellowship, we also run other programmes to build leadership.

If you are a Pre-service educator, a Teacher, a Teacher Coach or a School Leader:

Firki is an online teacher development portal which has courses aligned to content and pedagogy and carefully curated resources. Firki runs online learning programs for pre-service educators, teachers, school leaders and coaches in partnership with organisations and educational institutions.

If you have completed your Teach For India Fellowship and An Early-Stage Entrepreneur:

InnovatED is a platform for training and supporting entrepreneurs looking to build impactful organisations in education. It helps early-stage education entrepreneurs navigate the complexities of establishing and sustaining a new organisation, enabling them to create an impact.

If you are a Student:

The Kids Education Revolution is a platform for students and educators to reimagine education by building student voice, partnership and leadership.

If you are an Education Entrepreneur:

TFIx is an incubator for education entrepreneurs across India who aspire to launch their own contextualised versions of Teach For India's Fellowship to serve vulnerable children in their region.

If you are a Government Official:

Our Government Relations vertical looks for opportunities to place Alumni within the government to work on education projects. We offer a range of Student and teacher resources that can be used at scale to reimagine education. We thought-partner with the government on educational leadership and Student voice.

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