Through Virtual Parent – Teacher meetings!
“If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility”
– Robert Musil
In 2020, the world witnessed one of the harshest realities possible – COVID-19. A pandemic that shook the world and the foundation of its everyday existence. There has been no normalcy in the way it functioned since then. Everything came to a pause and there needed to be a re-imagining of how the world would function anymore.
The Education sector, like many others, took a serious hit and just like the body assimilating all its strength and resources to cope with COVID-19, the world had to figure out a way to function too. But with the crisis comes creativity. A number of things changed about schooling. In a nutshell, the whole process from instruction to evaluation moved online. And there has been a gradual growth in the quality of these new processes too over the past one and a half years.
Having said this, there is another pandemic that took birth along with COVID-19 and our fight against it – “Disconnect” . With every imaginable activity moving indoors and travel restrictions (whether local, domestic or international) having its own swings, disconnect has seeped through the walls of every human relationship. If this is the situation in families – smaller units of a large civilisation, then there is no further question on how devastating the reality has been for bigger units and systems like industries, community centres, schools etc. More and more school leaders and teachers have testified to the broken dialogue between them and the parent community. This broken chain can mean a broken impact on the continuous learning and development of students. And the situation in a state in India, Uttar Pradesh was no different. Taking this as a challenge, in early 2021, instructional leaders in UP – the State resource groups (SRGs) embarked on their leadership journey to heal this disconnect in their communities. More than 100 SRGs registered on DIKSHA learning platform to deep dive into the basics of community engagement and took up action projects for systemic improvement in education.
Through these action projects, SRGs initiated a game changer to heal this disconnect through Virtual Parent Teacher Meetings (PTMs).