Q&A with Dinu Raheja, Program Director at tGELF

by Danny Mucinskas

The Global Education & Leadership Foundation (tGELF) is a not-for-profit organization that seeks to foster young leaders from around the world with strong ethical and altruistic values to face the challenges of tomorrow in a network of schools in India and 13 other countries. Over the past several years, the Good Project and tGELF have partnered in an effort to incorporate Good Work ideas and practices into schools and teacher development.

In April 2015, we spoke with Dinu Raheja, Program Director, about recent events at tGELF, including how Good Work continues to be present in school communities, the rationale behind a new prize for teachers, and how tGELF is fostering the next generation of trailblazers.

Q: What motivated tGELF to create The Education Prize 2015 (an award for teachers who have made an innovative contribution to improve practice and inspire students)?

Dinu: We believe that the best way to impact student learning on a daily basis is to honor how teachers teach. Our goal with the instatement of The Education Prize is to recognize an educator who excites learning and a hunger for knowledge in his or her students. We want to find the next Socrates: someone who is able to connect with students and who uses innovative techniques to create new methodologies that can improve the educational landscape.

Q: Were there any connections to Good Work themes in the development of the prize?

Dinu: There may not have been overt connections, but unconsciously or subconsciously, there are definitely connections to the Good Project. tGELF has exposed students and teachers to ideas from the Good Project, and in the back of our minds, in whatever projects we undertake, our philosophy is to forge a better world by taking steps in a positive direction. We want to reward the Good Work that happens in our world, and in doing so, we are trying to do Good Work ourselves.

Q: What are the biggest challenges facing teachers who would like to do Good Work?

Dinu: In a sense, there are no substantial challenges if you are focused as a teacher in your vision of doing Good Work and imparting that ideal to students by ensuring that they do the best that they can. It is important to constantly encourage students to do better over time. A teacher can become accustomed to thinking about education in this way.

On the other hand, if an educator is constantly raising the bar, that is a challenge in itself. By raising the bar too high, it may end up demotivating the teacher and/or the students. There is a risk in always striving for improvement because you can forget how to have a more tolerant understanding of expectations and therefore not achieve all that you hope. Yet another challenge can occur when the difficulties posed by teaching and Good Work cause an educator to become depressed and capitulate.

Therefore, whereas there may not be challenges for particular teachers, there may be several challenges in place for others attempting to do Good Work. A lot depends on the attitude with which a teacher comes to the task at hand, asking “Am I willing to accept challenges and not regard them as challenges, or am I going to get bogged down by them and end by giving up?”

Q: How or in what ways is Good Work integrated into the tGELF school network?

Dinu: When we talk about leadership at our schools in our leadership curricula, we discuss the Good Work Project’s 3 Es: Excellence, Ethics, and Engagement. Leadership means excellence in what you do, and in tGELF’s own philosophy, we try to foster value-based, ethical leadership. Furthermore, there can never be leadership in isolation, so by extension, being a leader necessarily involves teamwork and engagement with others. I think our two organizations interconnect on a lot of frameworks, including that of the meaning of leadership.

Q: What changes or observations have you noted in schools using Good Work?

Dinu: We have seen a positive change in how teachers work in schools and in the attitudes of students towards their work. We believe there has  been an attitudinal shift due to the introduction of Good Work ideas in our school communities.

Q: You mentioned that you are working on a leadership program that will integrate the 3 Es of Good Work (Excellence, Ethics, and Engagement) into a curriculum for students. Where are you in this process?

Dinu: We are currently holding training sessions with teachers to prepare them to use the leadership curriculum in their classrooms. Depending on the number of participants, this is either a 1 or 2 day training process in which teachers are completely familiarized with the philosophy, objectives, and learning outcomes of our leadership curriculum. The teachers then deliver the modules directly to their students. We have found that teachers really look forward to and enjoy the training workshops, and we hope that they then convey this enthusiasm to the students.

The curriculum is age-appropriate and is used from grades 6-12, consisting of activity-based 35-40 minute lessons. We are also considering eventually bringing the modules to the primary level. We view the program on leadership as intertwined with the academic curriculum in these schools; it is not something that we consider separate.

Q: Are there any other updates from tGELF that you would like to share?

Dinu: Right now, tGELF is getting ready for “Harmony,” our annual youth festival. This is an international school-level series of events in which we bring students and teachers together on a common platform in a series of competitions.

For example, we facilitate a six-month youth leader competition that recognizes and initiates volunteerism. Students in this competition design specific service projects in their communities in order to tackle a problem or concern. Once a project design is accepted by our judges, students implement their plan and put their leadership training into practice, reporting back to us with the results. (One recent outstanding student project involved the construction of over 70 toilets in a rural area of India without regular public bathroom access.) Finalists are invited to make presentations about their projects at the “Harmony” National Final Event in November. The Final includes Leaders Club members and winners drawn from a spate of other competitions that are held at the regional level throughout our network. Last year, we hosted about 500 children from three countries, allowing attendees to make connections with one another and further develop their leadership skills.

Finally, in August every year, we organize a residential conference called LIFE (Leadership Initiative For Excellence) for our Leaders Forum members. Leaders Forum members are undergraduates, graduate students, or young professionals selected through a rigorous admissions process based on our four pillars of Leadership, Ethics, Altruism, and Action. The purpose of the program is to mentor and guide young people to make ethical choices in their chosen career paths. In a typical year, tGELF welcomes about 300 people from all over the world to the LIFE conference. This year, we will also be holding a LIFE-USA conference in September in New York City.

More information about tGELF’s programs is available on our website at www.tgelf.org.

Finding Purpose through Meaningful Experiences

a guest post by Maya Shaughnessy

Maya is a freshman at Brookline High School who recently participated in a panel discussion sponsored by her school’s 21st Century Fund on “Taking care of yourself, your community, and the broader world in the digital age.” This forum brought together local thinkers in a provocative discussion moderated by reporter Carey Goldberg of WBUR. In this guest blog drawn from her remarks that evening, Maya reflects on the impact of personally meaningful experiences and explains how her outlook about her academics, life, and future has been positively altered.

Last May I had the opportunity to travel with my family to a remote village in Honduras as part of a medical and dental team. I worked in a “makeshift” pharmacy, handing out vitamins and medications to patients treated at the clinic we were operating.

Almost immediately, I started getting frequent visits by a group of children from the village. I suspect that they were motivated, in part, by the stickers that I had with me. After a few days of these visits, Diadi, a seven-year-old boy, and his siblings took me by the hand and brought me down a dirt path to their home. There, I was greeted by their mother, two older sisters, and baby brother. They took me outside to their backyard where two small mango trees stood. I looked on as Diadi picked several mangos, sat on the ground and began cutting them on a large leaf. The other children appeared with a handful of salt and sprinkled it all over the mangos. They told me, “Es para ti es una merienda,” meaning the mangoes were a snack just for me to enjoy.

I was taken by both their hospitality and generosity but quickly realized that I was empty-handed and had nothing to give in return. So, I returned to the clinic, grabbed a stack of paper, and quickly ran back to Diadi’s house. Completely out of breath, I started folding the paper as all of the children stood by watching. To their amazement, I made an airplane for each one of them. We began flying the airplanes around the house, and I was smiling as they shrieked with laughter.

As the sun began to set, I realized my family was probably wondering where I was. I knew that it was time to go back to my team. Just as I was about to leave, Diadi’s mother brought me into her kitchen and sat me down at a small wooden table, insisting that I eat some lychee. She proudly shared that this fruit was a delicacy. I knew very well that she had probably traveled hours by foot to a town called Mancala to acquire this precious fruit.

This exchange made a lasting impact on me. At that moment, I felt an incredible sense of connection and mutual respect. It didn’t matter that we came from two different countries, different cultures, and spoke a different language; there we were, celebrating our common humanity.

Fast-forward five months to the start of my first year of high school. I, like many freshmen, was obsessed with getting good grades and finding my place among my peers. I had officially joined the race to get into a “good” college. I focused on what I needed to know for tests: becoming familiar with the caste system in social studies, whether to use the preterite or imperfect tense in Spanish, and memorizing “SOH-CAH-TOA” in math. By winter, I felt like I was just going through the motions. I was overwhelmed and unhappy, and the weather certainly wasn’t cooperating. I thought to myself, “I’m only a freshman, and I already feel burned out.” My fond memories of Honduras, the excitement I felt about the work we were doing there, the connection I made with the people I met, and the sense of purpose and meaning… felt worlds away.

It was around this time that a teacher said to me, “Look at the big picture, Maya; find your passion, and the grades will follow.” I thought about his comment and was reminded again of my experience in Honduras. A few weeks later I went with a group of Brookline students to the UN for a day-long conference looking at maternal health issues in developing countries. After the conference, I started to feel more engaged and more present in my day-to-day learning. I saw how several organizations, like the UN Populations Fund and the HeForShe Campaign, were using social media to raise awareness about human rights and gender equality.  I began to connect to topics that were important to me and experienced a strong desire to learn more about those issues. I saw how social media could be utilized to exchange ideas and collaborate with others globally, becoming a tool to accomplish good in the world. The following week I went on a visit to Lesley University, where my classmates and I worked with students from other schools to explore and find potential solutions to a range of complex problems facing a number of developing countries all over the world.

These pivotal experiences have led to a shift in the way I now think about my education. I’m beginning to see that education is not solely about personal achievement, such as acceptance to a college of my choice. Rather, I’ve come to realize that education is really about figuring out who I am and what my place is in the larger world, a process that requires exposure to meaningful experiences both in and out of the classroom. Learning opportunities like the work in Honduras and my participation in the conference at the UN have helped me grow while providing me with the inspiration for further learning and the desire to make a meaningful contribution to society in my life. These experiences have required me to take a risk and to step out of my comfort zone—a process that has helped me to define what learning and personal achievement really mean.

Doing Good Research on Good Research in Academics

A guest post by Wout Scholten MSc., Junior researcher at Tilburg University and Rathenau Institute

The Good Project has partnered in The Netherlands with the Good Work Hub (Goed Werk Hub), an extension of the Professional Honor Foundation, which seeks to promote Good Work ideas and reflective practices in Dutch professional life. In the first of two blogs, Wout Scholten describes the motivations behind and challenges associated with a currently ongoing research project investigating how professionals achieve Good Work in academia, a topic that is explored through targeted focus groups with workers in higher education. This post discusses the project from the researcher’s perspective. A second forthcoming blog will present key findings uncovered from the project.

For a long time in The Netherlands, the fields of research and higher education seemed to be perfectly functioning systems. In the last few years, this has changed due to a growing resentment for imposed rules, limitations on professional autonomy, and growing worries about the quality of academic work. Hence, we have embarked on a new research project on Good Work in The Netherlands asking two questions: How do academic professionals think about good work in their own discipline, and what are the main obstacles that academics encounter to achieving good work?

As researchers, we have also encountered our own reflective questions: what does it mean for us to do good work when carrying out this research, and what are the main challenges we face to living up to our own standards of good work? Thus far, we have encountered three challenges that, in our view, are specific to the fields of research and higher education: 1) a constantly changing social reality that affects participants; 2) the congested schedules of academic professionals; and 3) the critical attitude of the participants.

Constant flux

The field of research and higher education is in flux in The Netherlands. Expressions of discontent and protest against national policies, the current academic culture, and efficiency-oriented university management have increased tremendously in the last few years. This discontent has evolved into a fundamental and widespread cry from an increasingly large group of students and academics. Concepts like ‘the commodification of science’ and ‘publish or perish’ attitudes have recently been recognized nationally as important matters of debate. In February 2015, a group of student activists even occupied a building at the University of Amsterdam in protests that have lasted for over a month.

Policy makers have taken note of the unrest. Reactions from leadership include a revision of the Standard Evaluation Protocol that governs assessment of the research conducted at Dutch universities (productivity is no longer a separate evaluation criterion). The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) was also signed by the Association of Universities in the Netherlands, which lays out recommendations for improvement of “the ways in which the output of scientific research is evaluated.”

These calls for change and resultant actions have reached their climax in the middle of our research, and during conversations with participants, we notice them taking time to reflect on recent events. We hope to make sense of the fundamental flux in Dutch higher education helping others think about what it means to do good work.

The overactive academic

Via our focus groups, we also want to get a picture of the daily experiences of academic professionals. Unfortunately, we have noticed that it is very challenging to gather a group of senior academics from the same discipline on the same day around the same table. Despite recognition of the importance of our study, the congested agendas of the senior academic professionals prove to be a large hurdle to overcome. Most academics have so many competing responsibilities that they cannot substantially contribute to something they recognize as significant.

A typical decline to our invitation is a response such as, “I think this is an extraordinarily good initiative because the academic notion of good work is increasingly measured by management by successes in the struggle for funding, which eventually leads to a decline in good work because of high pressure. However, because of timing, I won’t be able to attend a focus group.”

A real challenge is therefore how we can involve academics in our research in a substantial way in light of time constrictions. This also means that there is a possible bias in the participants that eventually attend a focus meeting: participants are either so concerned about the quality of their work that they made an effort to contribute to our research, or they simply have enough time to participate. We believe that these two potential biases will cancel each other out.

Constant peer review

Academic professionals are used to judging the work of others, and, as one would expect in an academic environment, our focus group participants have been critical towards our study and our methods.

The criticism we encounter from participants is met with mixed emotions. On the one hand, feedback from participants amounts to a continuous peer review of our research, which has improved our methods. It has been inspiring to see the permanence of academic willfulness and the continual striving for good work. For example, during one session with a group of philosophers, the first 30 minutes of the focus session were spent on an analysis of our methods. This resulted in a rich discussion about what counts as good work in the discipline of philosophy and how one should approach the topic. On the other hand, the moderator of the focus group discussions has generally had a difficult time staying on track, even though our protocol is already loosely formulated. We felt we encountered another serious challenge to studying senior academic professionals: how do we overcome participants’ critical attitudes toward procedures and methods and facilitate an in-depth discussion on good work in academia?

Working toward good conclusions

Our research is still in progress. We continue to try to show participants that reflecting on good work is important, especially in the changing landscape of higher education, and that we as researchers also reflect on good work. We want participants to feel that the focus groups are valuable and that they can tell their story, and we hope that our data will give us a better understanding of the three challenges we have mentioned.

Please look forward to a forthcoming contribution to the Good Blog in which we share the outcomes of our research and elaborate on the notion of good work and the main obstacles to its achievement.

Reflections on “Good” Teaching

by Victoria Nichols

As reluctant as I am to admit it, I enrolled at the Boston University School of Education (SED) approximately seven months ago with, at least in part, the naïve Freedom Writers, Dead Poets Society ideation of what makes a “good” teacher. I had fallen trap to the “natural-born teacher” fallacy which Elizabeth Green (2014) so brilliantly summarizes in Building a Better Teacher (p. 6). Unconsciously I had equated manic energy, hilarity, sacrifice, and other aspects of personality with “good” teaching, but those are not essential characteristics. A brief survey of some of my high school friends uncovered something incredibly revealing. When asked “Who was the best teacher you ever had?” many responded with a question of their own: “Do you mean best or favorite?” And that, I believe, is a truly important distinction. The most energetic, the most memorable, the most loved teachers are not always going to be the “best” teachers.  

So what does make a teacher “good?” It is an incredibly nuanced question. At the heart of the issue is that fact that the majority of the stakeholders in education define the term “good” differently. For some, the “goodness” of a teacher is directly proportional to students’ achievement on standardized, high-stakes testing. For others, a “good” teacher is one that “gets” students into the best colleges and universities. For others still, a “good” teacher broadens a student’s horizons, challenging him to become a valuable member of society. But then the question becomes, how do you measure something so nebulous? What individual factors, what criteria, when added up, total a “good” teacher?

I think it is important to take a moment to note that in addition to these definitions of “good” being disparate amongst US stakeholders, this idea of “good” differs from country to country as well. How a culture defines the “goodness” of a teacher depends greatly on that culture’s norms and values surrounding education. As Pasi Sahlberg points out in the article What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools?, “In Finland, half of surveyed teachers responded that they would consider leaving their job if their performance [were] determined by their student’s standardized test results” (Strauss, May 2013). This is in stark contrast to the US, where in some areas, 50% of a teacher’s evaluation is based on Value-Added Measures (Jones, Slide 15, October 2014).

Thus, at the heart of the “good” teacher debate in the United States is the question of our culture’s reliance on standardized testing. Given my background with Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory, it may be somewhat unsurprising that I am fiercely weary of standardized testing, especially the ability of these measures to accurately portray a student’s “intelligence.” Consequently, I do not think using Value-Added Measures truthfully determines a teacher’s “goodness.” My definition of a “good” teacher is not one who is able to churn out students capable of acing high-stakes testing. While this is no small feat, and not an achievement that should be ignored given our culture’s perception of academic success, I believe that a “good” teacher is something else, something more.

In my pursuit to find the handful of criteria which I believe comprise a “good” teacher, I decided to peruse the Danielson Framework for Teaching. Overall I found the Framework incredibly extensive, and I definitely agreed with several of the components, but nonetheless I felt that some aspects of effective teaching were still missing. After much deliberation, I drafted my own Framework for “Good” Teaching: 1) Thorough knowledge of content and pedagogy, 2) Passion for content and pedagogy, 3) Dedication to differentiation, 4) Excels at crafting dynamic, engaging, and energizing lessons, and 5) Willingness to continually develop, learn, and adapt as both content and pedagogy continually evolve. While I readily admit this is not a complete list, I believe that if an educator adheres to these criteria, they would be viewed as “good.” In fact, I have seen this in practice. 

But before providing an example of a “good” teacher, I want to explain my criteria. It was not until enrolling at SED that I began to truly realize the monumental importance of a strong education and background in both content-matter and pedagogy. I cannot even begin to comprehend how an educator enters the classroom without a background in Lesson Design, or Adolescent Development, or Teaching Text. I strongly believe that, much like Finland’s system, it should be mandated that every future educator should graduate from a Masters-level teacher education program. Were that the case, so many more teachers would have a thorough knowledge of content and pedagogy, a strengthened ability to craft thoughtful lesson plans, an understanding of differentiation, and a flexibility to evolve as an educator. In other words, were everyone to have to graduate from such a program, so many more teachers would meet the criteria I detail above and would be given the foundation necessary for effective teaching.

I would also like to note that, because of my background working with the Good Project, differentiation has been of particular importance to me. The Good Project defines work as “good” when it is excellent, engaging, and ethical. I believe that, in turn, differentiation embodies these “Three Es,” as this practice challenges teachers to teach more purposefully and more thoroughly, with a clear focus on the success of every student. Utilizing differentiation as a guiding principle, I have found myself completely engrossed in crafting some of my most thoughtful lesson plans. But what about the ethics of differentiation, of teaching in general? How can I devote my time to be maximally effective for the widest range of students? That’s a difficult question, but an important one. As a student teacher, I am still practicing this skill, but I have observed a common trend in the master teachers I have observed so far: they are continually adapting their teaching to better respond to each student’s individual skill set. That was particularly true of my 10th-grade English teacher, Mr. Robinson.

Mr. Robinson met most, if not all, of my criteria. Most striking, however, was his true dedication to differentiation. One teaching strategy he employed that I hope to emulate in my own teaching was, each semester, instructing students to read one book of their choice and to write a brief paper in response. This brilliant move allowed students to choose readings that would challenge and interest them on an individual level. Above and beyond that teaching strategy, however, Mr. Robinson also identified my personal frustration of not being challenged. Noticing my apathy, Mr. Robinson gave me a suggested college reading list. He instructed me to read as many books as I wanted and informed me that he would grade any additional response papers accordingly. Holding me to a higher standard, he graded me as a college professor would, forcing me to grow exponentially.

Thus, I truly believe that Mr. Robinson was such an effective teacher because of his adherence to my five aforementioned criteria. Mr. Robinson wasn’t an especially lively or energetic teacher, nor did he have us continually bent over with laughter; these fickle aspects of personality were not what made him a “good” teacher. Instead, I consider Mr. Robinson a good teacher because of his knowledge, his passion, his strong lesson plans, and his differentiation strategies. Unfortunately, these criteria better adhere to the education culture in somewhere such as Finland, than they do here in the United States. Which, in turn, raises a striking question: How can I strive to uphold my Framework for “Good” Teaching when my criteria do not align with the educational culture to which I belong?

References

Danielson, C. (2014). The Framework. The Danielson Group. Retrieved from                                             http://danielsongroup.org/

Greene, E. (2014). Building a Better Teacher. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Jones, N. (2014). Teacher Evaluation Research.

Strauss, V. (2013). What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools. The Washington Post.

Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/15/what-if-finlands-great-teachers-taught-in-u-s-schools-not-what-you-think/

Retooling India’s Rural Schools Using Good Work and Social Enterprise

A guest post by by Sandeep Deshmukh, Hemendra Kothari Foundation

by Sandeep Deshmukh, Hemendra Kothari Foundation

I have been working for the last twenty-seven years in India’s sector, consciously adhering to ethical practices and excellence. I joined the Hemendra Kothari Foundation to work on rural development education and through it, found an arena for Good Work.  I got attracted to the Good Work Project when I heard first about it from Professor Gardner when he was visiting Mumbai in 2011. In his public interface he dealt at length with the principles of multiple intelligences, and how each intelligence can be mobilized to contribute to good work. He also drew richly on the Gandhian school of thought and practice to illustrate his point. His speech and subsequent interaction helped me connect with the work of the Good Work Project.

Since then I have explored Good Work Project material to further the goals of my Foundation and myself. We have been pursuing the three core values of ethics, excellence and engagement since day one of the Foundation’s inception. Today we can speak about a silent yet robust national platform for education centered on the values of ethics, excellence and engagement.

Still, there are tensions that exist in our work that we hope to ease through our interventions. The forefathers of India’s education policy envisioned schools as the vehicles of knowledge and skills that would transform rural India into a modern society. However, with 80% of the nearly 1.3 million schools in India being located in rural areas, one generally sees a dilution of quality with expansion of school base in the country. The farther one moves away from the greater urban areas, the more questions are raised pertaining to accountability, ethical values, professional standards of teachers and support staff, standards of institutional performance and effectiveness of delivery mechanisms.

Our twin foundations, the Hemendra Kothari Foundation and Wildlife Conversation Trust, are working on the issue of ensuring quality schooling to the rural public. We have identified key result areas which require direct interventions. Anticipating changes in the key result areas such as teaching systems; access to knowledge resources; school centered management; and professionalization of work force, we are trying to create baskets of direct interventions that would strengthen the network of educational resources around a socially and economically deprived child. These interventions are evolved by us in convergence with our non-profit partners. Partners like Indian Institute of Education, Eklavya, Aide Et Action, Pratham, Samavesh, Gramin Shiksha Kendra have remained outside the ambit of government yet impacted the school system positively at different points of time through work at practice, policy and curricular levels.Here, we will look at some of the most critical issues we are trying to address and our social enterprise solutions we are testing for these – from utilizing technology to provide teachers with professional networks and supports, to challenging the status quo on what makes an excellent teacher.

1. Inadequate number of teachers: Often one finds less than the required number of teachers in government schools in distant rural districts. Teacher absenteeism or shortages may stem from a lack of responsibility towards the particular school or community. Schools always carry the risk of closure if the teacher does not turn up frequently. In order to address this issue, we need to find individuals from the community who are willing to take responsibility for its citizens’ educations. The creation of two types of support cadres by our foundation with rural communities alleviates the disadvantages resulting from teacher shortage. At the village level, a non-formal education center is manned by a community youth who is trained as a teaching volunteer. The direct support to the school goes through a cadre called Extension Resource Teachers (ERT). These are professionals who live in the vicinity of the villages under support and give planned, dedicated teaching time, community mobilization, teacher support and a government liaison in each village under their cover.

2. Additional professional development: Government teachers on average receive twelve days of training in a year across districts of India. These trainings are generally known to be lacking focus, preparedness of faculty and critical duration. This lackadaisical approach to training can impact the teacher quality. Thus, we extend another fifteen days of subject training, teaching methods, lesson planning, and school management on top of government training. Systematic observation of children, under the guidance of better prepared teachers and for an average period of six months, shows progress on reading, writing, listening, and math. A need-based continuous training support to teacher pays good dividends and has implications for the level of excellence for teaching throughout the entire country.

3. Digital dashboard for teachers: We believe that like every other person, a teacher will go through different stages of job satisfaction. She will come to a stage when she start seeking answers to questions on subject matter and knowledge transaction. Given the existing government support system’s constraints, it is necessary to consider alternatives. A dashboard contains classroom analytics facilitating continuous assessment of children – mandatory for a government school – that was created by our partners Aide Et Action and Vtabeans Pvt. Ltd. The dashboard is also regularly populated with lesson plans by voluntary groups of government teachers. All initial reports indicate that the dashboard is a dependable reflection and reference board for teachers. The dashboard fills up the empty space for peers by single teacher schools in remote forest areas.

A multitude of other important problems pertaining to learning ecosystem are being addressed by our group, such as developing official policy for inclusive education and constructive engagement with teacher unions.  We supported groups of 355 government schools in remote forest areas during the previous year. In the current year, we are extending support to 540 schools. The latest drive by our twin Foundations is to facilitate establishment of six centers of education excellence in different regions of India. We will keep looking to the Good Work community often with issues and updates.