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Stories of Indian Classrooms

Collaborative Teaching: Story from Uttar Pradesh

The sudden shift from offline teaching to online classrooms put the teachers in an unpredictable situation where they had to quickly adapt to the changing teaching pattern and also explore potential solutions to the upcoming challenges. Shruti Srivastava's story is a story of such possibilities. She is a teacher in Basic Education Department in Uttar Pradesh. She teaches Mathematics and Science to class 1 to 8. She believes in collaborating with students’ parents and other community members to ensure a smooth learning process.

Let's get to know her and how she tried to overcome the challenges faced during teaching remotely.

What were the challenges you were facing while teaching remotely?

In some of the rural districts of India, students do not have network availability or access to smartphones to get the study material. In my district, the condition was quite similar where required content was not reaching to some students during the lockdown.

What steps did you take to overcome these challenges?

To cater to the issue of limited access of study material to students, I participated in a programme started by the Uttar Pradesh government called Trainer Saathi where educated members of a community or the ones having devices were assigned a set of students. These trainers, called Prerna Saathi, were expected to help the students in attending classes and guiding them wherever required.

Parents of students in rural areas were unavailable to visit schools to get worksheets as they use to go to work during morning hours. This started leading to learning gaps amongst students. To ensure that all the students are getting the worksheets, we suggested that multiple worksheets can be given to one set of parents of the same neighbourhood who are able to come to school during required hours.. These parents can then distribute the worksheets to the specific students.

The Way Forward
Shruti says, ‘It is crucial that a sense of trust is built amongst the community members so that collaborative efforts can be made to contribute to a child’s learning.’ Such efforts allow parents to believe that a collective effort by teachers and parents can make a huge difference to students’ learning levels.

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