Site Visit Report - Digantar

Digantar - Site Visit Report

I visited Digantar on November 30th, 2001 and spent about 5 hours with Mr. Abdul and Ms. Rina. I had such a wonderful learning experience that even after three months it feels as if I was there yesterday. Getting to the Digantar campus was a whole different experience. This report is an addendum to the one written by Siva Athreya in August/September of 2001. For yearly budget and details on the school operations, please refer to that report.

Mr. Abdul Gaffar and Ms. Rina greeted me to the Digantar campus at Todi. I briefly spoke to them about Digantar’s teaching principles and had some tea. Following that I visited the schools in Todi, Ratwali and Bhandyali. Visit to all the three schools was very refreshing because the kids were enjoying the learning and were working in groups to complete class assignments (please refer to the end of this report for pictures)

One of the most interesting things about Digantar that I wanted to learn was that they do not organize students in grades. What I noticed and learnt was that the children are organized in groups depending on where they are in their development. For example, the school in Ratwali was divided into three groups (beginner, intermediate and advanced). Each group has about 15 students (I would need to confirm this number). Ratwali school is up to fifth standard learning level. Based on the development plan of a child, when the child reaches fourth standard learning level the teacher provides the fifth standard books and lets the student study on their own. The teacher guides the child and when the child feels confident he/she takes the board exam (Rajasthan has a board exam in fifth grade; so I understood).

Dividing children based on their learning level requires the teacher to carefully observe individual child. At the end of the school (i.e. at 3:00pm), the teacher has to document each child’s learning against plan, and prepare an action plan (i.e. materials needed, teaching techniques, etc.) for next day (this takes the teacher about 2 hours). Documenting this requires a lot of thinking and planning on the teacher’s part. This makes it challenging to retain high quality teachers in the long run.

In my understanding, Digantar operates under the following three principles:

  1. Every child has the potential to learn as long as the child is respected and understood
  2. Children do not need to be segregated into grades to learn effectively
  3. Teachers need to be trained in developing, implementing and adjusting development plans for each child

During conversations with teachers I realized that they go through a rigorous 4 months training in the Digantar ways of making learning fun for kids. Teachers are inculcated the behavior that they have to be very thoughtful in using words when critiquing a child’s development. For example it is not enough to say “great job” or “good work”. The teacher has to quantify the adjectives “great” or “good” as it relates to the child’s development plan.

Overall I am very impressed with the effort of the management and the teachers as it relates to child development. I spoke to few children after the school and asked them if they like coming to school. They overwhelmingly said yes and added that they enjoy learning. It seems that the management (Rina, Abdul and Rohit) has put the tools in place to make learning fun. Rina indicated that given the uncertain funding situation, they even have to think twice about taking children on field trips.

In my view, we should not only support Digantar financially, but we should leverage their experience and expertise to open schools in the urban centers. These schools could fund Digantar and propagate Digantar’s learning principles.

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