Minutes of Meeting on 18th July 2018

A meeting of the AASHA team members was arranged on 18th July 2018 to review the progress of the program, discuss issues/suggestions and thereby consider modifications to the program in the future.

The attendance for the meeting was low, with 10 members attending it.

The meeting started off by discussing the effectiveness of the program in general.

The recently made change to assign fixed teachers for every grade was agreed upon as a good move since it added a personal touch and offered a comfort level to both the students and the teachers alike.

The badges and leader boards, though initially considered a good way to group kids, were damaged/missing after just a week of school and it was decided that they were to be discontinued.

Assigning a leader to a group and making it known to all other teachers assigned to the class is important as not doing this resulted in commotion and unhappiness among students. It was discussed that it might be a good idea to change the leaders every semester instead of every month, as planned initially.

The students have not been taking care of the pouches (with pencils, sharpeners, erasers, colors) and most of these were missing. It was agreed that the students should be asked to use their own pencils/erasers as they already use their own during regular periods. The other option would be to hand over pencils to the group leaders by the AASHA teachers at the start of every session and to collect it back at the end of the session.

It was then decided to go through the entire lesson plan for a session step-by-step and review it.

It was unanimously agreed that the introduction of the pledge was a good step as it brought an order before starting the class. The next print of the pledge would need to be marked with pauses to be taken at appropriate intervals when saying the pledge, in order to maintain consistency in all sessions.

The Warm-Up Exercise would be an optional activity. The teacher can decide to include/exclude this based on the environment in the class on a particular day.

It was unanimously agreed that storyboards are very important and play a crucial role in the lesson plan.

There were a few suggestions/corrections in storyboards. In such cases, these should be directly conveyed to Anurita/Parvathy for correction in future prints.

Any mistakes/suggestions in the Teacher’s Handbook and the workbook would be brought to the attention of Parvathy to be reviewed further.

Story-telling depends a lot on the teacher’s aptitude and comfort. For teachers who are not very comfortable with this, the option to conduct story-telling workshops will be reviewed.

A glossary will be included in the teacher’s Handbook in the future which would have the Kannada and Hindi translations of primary words of the story. This would help the teachers to better explain the story to the students.

Sounding and Blending, though a little difficult for the students, is an essential activity and should be effectively included by the teachers in every session.

For the Assessment sessions, the students should be using the My Progress page in their workbook and not the four-line book. The ‘My Progress’ page will be used to keep track of the progress of the student, identify his/her weakness, and provide them special attention if needed.

It was discussed and understood that every class had slow-learners – new students or kids with special needs. It was agreed that these students needed extra attention to bring them up to speed with others. A concrete plan for this is to be formalized.

It was emphasized that along with the students being happy with each session, equally important was to ensure that the teachers feel stress-free. To this end, the use of microphones in the future was discussed. Also, it was decided that it would be the teacher’s imperative to forgo a lesson plan in the class on a particular day. The teacher can spend time with the students doing revision or interacting with the kids. It is just expected that the teacher would convey this in the group, which would help the teachers taking the next session to prepare for the class accordingly.

Also, last-minute cancellations and changes from teachers have been causing a lot of scheduling issues. It was decided that separate Whatsapp groups are created for each grade and the teachers in the group would try to adjust the days among themselves in order to make the process easier.

The meeting ended on a very positive note and with enthusiasm among all the members to continue the program with the hope to build a better tomorrow.

– Report by Ms. Anita Varkey