Wipro Applying Thought In Schools has a 3 pronged strategy whereby it is working towards making a difference at all the 3 areas.
Experiment and Learn
- Teacher Program
- Education Leadership Program
- Whole School Transformation / Holistic School Engagement
The Teacher Program
The teacher plays the most crucial role in the education system – to the child, she represents the entire system. Learning is intricately linked to a teacher’s ability to teach well. It follows that there can be no change without the teacher’s active endorsement. The Teacher Programme is just that – a programme to empower the teacher with the perspective and tools necessary to initiate change.
The Teacher Program (also known as Teacher Empowerment Program or TEP) is a comprehensive development program for in-service teachers. It is our oldest engagement, and has 3 objectives:
- To help the teacher become a reflective practitioner who will care for the development of every child.
- To equip the teacher with curricular and pedagogic skills necessary for creating child-centric and experiential classrooms.
- Through the teacher, to trigger change in the entire school.
Initial success, driven by teacher feedback and school demand, encouraged us to push for program expansion. 8 partners have taken the program (in various avatars) to 6,505 teachers and 244 schools in over 25 cities.
Education Leadership Program
Initially developed with Centre for Education Management and Development (CEMD) and iDiscoveri to enable principals to lead the change in their schools, the ELP is now being developed with other partners for implementation across all cities
The Leadership Program is a comprehensive development program for school leaders, and has 3 objectives:
- To make the leader see a larger purpose for and alternative methods of education. To inspire the leader to create a worthy institution. To propel the leader to explore the power of leadership in creating a learning organisation.
- To empower the leader to feel confident in truly exploring education, and in building competence to provide academic leadership to the school.
- To equip the leader with managerial skills necessary to establish processes, and to de-centralise decision making – so that the leader stops being an administrator.
The Teacher Program highlighted the importance of supportive leadership, and this led us to the Leadership Program. We support 3 partners in the program, and have worked with 492 leaders in 277 schools from across the country.
Holistic School/System Engagement
As we engaged with schools though various efforts, it became clearer that we needed to see the school as the basic unit of change. This led us to initiate holistic school engagements with the following objectives:
- To help the project school initiate and sustain efforts to transform school philosophy, culture and competence so that all children develop into critical, creative and caring citizens.
- To help us understand what it takes for schools to change.
- To create a spectrum of mainstream schools that can act as beacons of inspiration for other schools.
- To give our partner organizations an opportunity to engage with an entire school as a system. This we believe helps them engage with an entire system and the learnings for the organization are significant.
The WST (Whole School Transformation) program is a little more than 3 years old. Here, we have engaged with 33 schools through 7 partner efforts. The program covers a spectrum of schools – from government schools to high-end private schools. It also covers a spectrum of approaches to school change.
We also engage in holistic engagements with systems of government schools like clusters, blocks within a district. The intent is to engage deeply with a well defined government system to understand the issues related to initiating change in a government system. The objective is similar to the WST program in that we want to understand what it takes for a system to change.
Build Eco-system
Educational change is a large agenda. It is beyond any organisation’s individual capacity. To be able to make any impact, a critical mass of social endeavours need to get infected by and act on this agenda. Further, these efforts will need to be synergised before we can witness any impact. This forms the basis for our choosing to work through and with a partner network rather than creating in-house capacity. Broadly, objectives for this strategy are:
- To create capacity on the ground for working on educational change, and to build mainstream acceptability and demand for such work.
- To bring together various efforts and organisations and create synergy.
Wipro’s key achievement in the last 2 years has been to bring together some of the vanguards of this movement in a common forum
These partners bring with them a kaleidoscopic perspective on education and change grounded in years of grassroots work
But this network is bound by one vision – to improve the quality of Indian education system
Today, our partner eco-system is almost 30 organisations. Most of them are social organisations – whether the business model they follow is for-profit or otherwise.
Our partners:
| Azim Premji Foundation ,Bangalore |
Eklavya, Bhopal |
Spark India, Hyderabad |
| Centre for Education Management and Development, Delhi |
EZ Vidya, Chennai |
Sparsh, Pune |
| Centre for Learning (Bangalore) |
Hippocampus, Bangalore |
Sutradhar, Bangalore |
| Digantar (Jaipur) |
iDiscoveri, Delhi |
Swanirvar, Kolkata |
| Disha India (Karnal) |
Katha, Delhi |
The Teacher Foundation, Bangalore |
| Educational Initiatives, Ahmedabad |
NEEV, Delhi |
Udaan, Ahmedabad |
| Educomp, Delhi |
Pravah, Delhi |
Vidya Bhawan Society, Udaipur |
| |
Samavesh, Bhopal |
Vikramshila, Kolkata |
Advocate
Objective: Use groundwork, partner eco-system and Wipro’s strong brand to advocate through policy and media to:
- Provide radical stimulus to influence the macro system.
- Show current system is not effective.
- Show “what can be” and “how to change”.
- Cascade desire for change.
- Provide a platform for individuals to engage with work in education reform (through the Wipro Education Fellowship)
Wipro’s role will evolve as we involve ourselves with increasing depth in this endeavor
| “The Wipro Project is a platform where all of us can work together to make the change happen. The future is not what will happen but what we make it to be.”
- Azim Premji |
|
