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:
- Every child has the potential to learn as long as the child is respected and understood
- Children do not need to be segregated into grades to learn effectively
- 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.
Click here
for Photos