I have been watching the Teach India series of ads and the campaign with interest. Having been involved in Primary education for a number of years, the development / the campaign to do raise the awareness and create a media structure of "mass" volunteering is very interesting....
However, part of my skepticism and part experience is making me take a bit of a "back seat" and watch what happens next. The reason(s) being
- I've never seen campaigns that start to evoke the "feel good" factor really pick up steam
- In my interaction with the teachers in primary (esp rural) schools, there is a marked interest in continuity or we (the so called arm-chair intellectuals) run the risk of creating an "excuse" for the teachers / local influencers to point their finger and blame "another" set of people
- Continuity DOES NOT come by a few 2-3 hour sessions, IMHO it takes greater committment.
- Was speaking to a few people who have volunteered and ALL of them were looking at 9-11 kind of session once a week ie. on a Saturday. Have never seen this work either as Saturday AM is the most muddled time for a rural school
What has been good though is the campaign coverage. I do sometimes wonder what would be the "effect" if we had just run a similar campaign asking individuals to contribute an hour's salary and then "hire" real full-time teachers to teach ?
I am sure people will lampblast me for suggesting such an idea - but, I must confess, when it was proposed to me, I thought the "efficiency" of such a process should be much better ?
Monday, August 25, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Getting people to "Visualize" in India
This is a post after a bit of a gap. I guess I'm as prone to the writers' block as anyone else ;-)
Thought I'd post a few comments on how we are NOT trained in our schools to visalize. ...
As most people in our Business Team will tell you, I have this pet peeve that people cannot put together a proposal if they cannot visualize the work to be done. This may sound insane, but, the idea is to get them to think about what needs to be done before they go about describing it in words.
This is exactly the same principle that is used in design (E-R diagrams, state diagrams, Business flow diagrams) or even in mindmaps.
Unfortunately, this continues to be a struggle. Probably the issue is much deeper ?
Late yesterday evening, I was in conversation with one of the senior members who was going to go to Chennai to train a few people. He mentioned that one of his standard questions to guage thinking capability is to ask people to "draw" the equation (a+b) square. ie. get people to explain the concept of why there should be the "2ab" portion. I was not surpised to hear that less than 30% of the people asked to explain could do so !
Maybe we should do a company wide session on visualization followed by De Bono's 6 thinking hats ?
Thought I'd post a few comments on how we are NOT trained in our schools to visalize. ...
As most people in our Business Team will tell you, I have this pet peeve that people cannot put together a proposal if they cannot visualize the work to be done. This may sound insane, but, the idea is to get them to think about what needs to be done before they go about describing it in words.
This is exactly the same principle that is used in design (E-R diagrams, state diagrams, Business flow diagrams) or even in mindmaps.
Unfortunately, this continues to be a struggle. Probably the issue is much deeper ?
Late yesterday evening, I was in conversation with one of the senior members who was going to go to Chennai to train a few people. He mentioned that one of his standard questions to guage thinking capability is to ask people to "draw" the equation (a+b) square. ie. get people to explain the concept of why there should be the "2ab" portion. I was not surpised to hear that less than 30% of the people asked to explain could do so !
Maybe we should do a company wide session on visualization followed by De Bono's 6 thinking hats ?
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