An unbelievable classroom experiment to transform children
The Bhavishya Vidyalayam - From an online content experiment to a pilot project at a school to a support program for under performing kids
NOTE - This post can really help a parent whose child is not performing well. Read the full post.
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I once had a LinkedIn account with more than 10,000 connections/followers
I used to teach people how to grow on LinkedIn
I did a lot of experimentation on LinkedIn
But then one day, I deleted it.
Why I deleted it, is a story for another day
but right now my focus is to share my learning from one of my experiment
Stay tuned to explore it with me
By the way, now I have again opened a new LinkedIn account and soon I am planning to start writing on it.
The name of the experiment aka the LinkedIn Newsletter was ‘The VUCA School
The Pre Story - How I reached to this experiment?
So in my early career, I was selling engineering products in national and international markets.
But then one day, I was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug
as I started building an open source tech company to build a credit card size device (Box0) that can help science explorers.
It even reached in the top 10 list of Hackaday Prize in 2016
But again, this is also a story for another day.
Right now I wanted to talk about the fact that I was building an education product and I was not having any experience in education
So I decided to learn about education.
As I knew that joining a community is the fastest way to learn about a thing, I wanted to join a community on futuristic education.
And since I could not find one, I launched my own community in fag end of 2014 and by the end 2016, it was a 3000 people strong community that hosted the who is who of education as speakers.
But yet again, making of this community is also a story of another day.
I want to focus about the thing that I developed due to this community and which later gave me a reason to do this experiment in 2024.
What is the Fad?
So the fad for me, was ‘The Education for The Future’.
We were hosting small events almost every month in this community
and since we had almost 3000 people in the community, we were able to invite the best of speakers
The talks in the community led me to develop a curiosity about how our next generation will actually be able to prepare for the VUCA future.
And by then I knew, schools are not the answer, as a matter of fact, they are the bottle neck and we need to identify a new way to prepare our children for the future of work.
Some sorts of Bhavishya Vidyalayam or The VUCA School
The Experiment
Fast forward to 2024, I decided to check If it was just a fad
or do I really have serious possibilities
I decided to write a daily newsletter for the next 100 days
where every day I will write one full newsletter on LinkedIn, almost a 1000 words, about one topic that the schools of future must teach
I wanted to write this letter daily to check do I really have enough number of topics that we need to teach to our children that we are not offering at current school, but are indispensable to prepare for the future of work.
Earlier I wrote a Learning Needs Framework for the future of work and this came handy to keep writing this newsletter daily for straight 100 days.
Let me share a few topics here to give you a glimpse
For example, there is enough data on the internet to tell that the conventional jobs are depleting and the work is shifting towards the gig economy.
But the set of skills are very different to find work in gig economy.
Similar is the story on Ethical Hacking
There is a lot of hue and cry about Cyber Security and Safety, but how many people are really working in this space, the start has to happen in early times, school should be a place to get started.
Likewise, despite the huge demand in job markets for Analytics, you will not find many in schools who would be able to tell you the difference in Analysis and Analytics
And I think these are the topics that should be our subjects and not the conventional and very generic Computer Science, I mean you go and check the curriculum of computers and you will still find that they are teaching applications that are already outdated.
Why we are not teaching Computational Thinking instead?
So after writing such a newsletter for 100 days, which reached to more than 3000 subscribers and got international fans from 3 different continents
What was my biggest learning
Yes, the biggest learning I was able to gather was that most parents do not know about how the work and the workplace is changing.
So I could see that the subscribers to this newsletter were overwhelmed and thankful for this content
Some were even responding daily
The biggest learning was this only
that we should have programs to teach parents first else they will keep buying the wrong stuff for their children and will keep ignoring the right stuff.
I still see a lot of schools trying to teach
Robotics & Coding
Entrepreneurship
Personal Finance
and other similar types of subjects.
Now they really need to learn, these are not the right subjects.
You cannot teach them coding without teaching them Computational Thinking aka Pattern Recognition, Abstraction and Algorithms
You cannot teach entrepreneurship without teaching them gap identification, critical thinking, persistence, grit, design, negotiation and 20 other such topics
You cannot teach them personal finance without teaching them the value of money. If they can buy anything, if they can eat whatever they want to eat, why would they be willing to listen to your lessons on savings when they are living in abundance.
They will not.
But can you teach them negotiation, can you teach them Rhetoric, can you teach them control.
Yes you can,
but then each one of them has an inbuilt negative connotation.
The Pilot Project in a classroom
So I realised, there was a clear gap that neither parents not education system is willing to solve.
From international reports to the local ones, every report was telling us that the average reading levels are in shambles, children do not know the simple arithmatic at their grade level
And I was thinking, can we really do something about it
and then towards the end of 2024, in November, we did a pilot project at a school
So we took one section of grade 6 of that school.
and we distributed the whole class at 4 levels
Greens - Absolutely top performers (around 8)
Yellows - Not the top performers but the next league
Reds - Absolutely low academic performance
Oranges - A little above Reds but below Yellows
Now they were just 2 weeks in the pilot and the smog hit made a compulsory Government pushed holidays of more than a week,
and now it was the last week of November and these children took the 3rd periodic test
and Voila!!
When the result came, the teachers came running to us, telling that we have not done anything but the performance of Reds has sort of sky rocketed.
Out of 6 Reds, one remained in Reds, 2 moved to Oranges, and a whopping 3 moved to Yellows.
Yes, children who were not getting even 10s out of 20s, they were now getting marks in the range of 17, 18, and 19s.
The girl who were already in Yellow level, were now complaining, how can this girl from Reds was now dominating their space.
I can still recall, when I invited their parents to speak about this experience, how all of them had tears in their eyes and one of them said, “We never thought, that we would be invited to a stage to talk about the performance of our child”
There were many learning that now we wanted to share with schools
and we decided to do it in the following 3 ways
We hosted a School Innovation Pentagon Framework Workshop (a very economic one) in Ambala that was joined by 30 school leaders and we shared everything about that pilot and much more in that workshop.
and we now want to host such workshops in other cities as well and are looking for partners.
A lot of school leaders who were far from Ambala asked us for an online telecast, but we were not having arrangement for that. So now we are planning to develop an online course to deliver School Innovation Pentagon Framework
But you see, this is not enough, we wanted to also directly work with students
And we want to do it with those who have not been to perform in the current education system. The Reds and The Oranges
In case you know some students at middle school level, who looks good on their brains but still do not perform well, guide their parents to try this one year online pilot project with us.
We plan to take 8 such students in a group.
And we believe, we will transform the performance of these children in a year (as if they were never in the reds).
A school can also contact us to help some of their students participate in this cohort. We are sure that we will not disappoint you.
One more thing
The above mentioned thing is just supportive and not futuristic and we also wish to run a pilot with a set of 8 children of progressive parents where we want to run a Bhavishya Vidyalayam aka The VUCA School theme.
These students must be from any of the colour levels, here the criteria would be the willingness of parents to let the child try an alternative education.
In this program, we will not teach contemporary schoo, education and we do not want to enroll those children who want it as an add on to school education, we want those who dare to think beyond conventional.
Although, we do not have high hopes in finding such students, but will be delighted, if we could find some.
Very inspiring read !
Very inspiring results.