| Abstract |
The project aims at extending work done over the past few years at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, on the concept of an “educational innovations bank”—a clearing house for educational innovations (EI Bank). This “bank,” based on the work of innovative elementary school teachers working in the public system, is designed to be a hub which can become the centre of a decentralized peer-driven professional development network aimed at improving the quality of education in our public schooling systems. The EI Bank aims at building on the strengths that exist within public schooling, and augmenting these with external inputs in order to provide a complementary alternative means for improving the quality of education in public schools. The outcomes (2011) include a standardized methodology for scouting and validating innovations; case studies of more than 200 innovative teachers, including a document based on 25 outstanding teachers of Gujarat, distributed by the Gujarat Educational Innovations Commission to all schools of Gujarat; decentralized networks of government school teachers in a few places like Solapur and Kutch; and a methodology for supporting teacher-driven research. The challenges now are to scale up the concept by networking a critical mass of a few thousand teachers, shift towards an open-access electronic multimedia multilingual platform to serve as the EI Bank, disseminate innovations, and use the hub for improving educational achievement through a series of action research initiatives by district-level teacher networks. |