Giving kids a lesson not taught at school

Despite struggling for funds, a Mumbai-based educator made it possible for children of zilla parishad and municipal schools of Maharashtra, to access quality English education over WhatsApp during the lockdown.

Piroja Shroff, 31
Former CEO, English E.Teach

Educator Piroja Shroff always knew she wanted to do something extraordinary for the underprivileged. It's one of the reasons why she gave up her job as English teacher at the elite Cathedral and John Connon School in Fort back in 2015, to work with NGO English E.Teach, which has been at the forefront of providing digitised textbooks to state-funded schools. From mentoring municipal school teachers and handling digital content for 800 BMC schools, Shroff's role quickly expanded to schools across many districts. In January this year, she was given complete charge of the organisation, and made CEO. "It was a new chapter that I was excited about. We were planning trips to Solapur and Satara, when the pandemic broke out, and all schools shut down overnight," recalls Shroff.

While most private schools were still figuring the logistics of how to make the switch to digital, Shroff, who already had the advantage because of her experience in the field, immediately launched a WhatsApp campaign.

Pre-lockdown, their material was distributed on pen-drives to 41,000 schools across Maharashtra. Once the lockdown began, they decided to move the same content online. "Our team in Mumbai and other states tapped into their network of teachers and formed WhatsApp groups. Once we had done that, we launched the 30-day Challenge [on March 30]," says Shroff. Every day, Shroff's team would send out a WhatsApp message across the groups, with links to the videos, classified grade wise. The teacher would forward the message to all the parents in their network. "The students would then watch the videos, and send another video of them answering the questions. Our team would analyse the videos, and share feedback accordingly. We ensured that every video was attended to."

Following the success of that particular campaign, Shroff launched three other successive initiatives to ensure that the learning didn't stop. The content for the new programmes was created at home by Shroff and her team. "We realised that we didn't need to stick to the text book, as most of the children were not going to school. So, we created content, which we thought was lacking in the syllabus."

The next campaign was the phonetics challenge. "To teach any new language, especially one like English, you need to have a strong foundation. The children need to understand and be familiarised with the varied sounds of every letter. We even asked them to send us voice notes and videos, so that we could correct their pronunciation. We followed this up with a month-long grammar challenge, covering articles, verbs, nouns and adjectives, among other things," says Shroff. The students, she says, were more receptive to the newer campaigns, because it was the kind of education they had never received in school. By September, the BMC had recognised all their online campaigns and given the NGO a permission letter, asking their Block Officers to send daily WhatsApp messages to the principals of all the BMC schools in every block, across Mumbai.

During the lockdown, the views for their videos on YouTube surpassed 4.5 million, and the team would receive an average of 120 homework videos from students daily. They also conducted a grammar and phonetics quiz, and received 11,000 replies. "We were, however, never too hung up on measuring how well these videos were doing. Our goal was to constantly create content."

Unfortunately, Shroff and team haven't been able to continue the campaign due to lack of funding. Shroff has now moved on from English E.Teach, and will be working with NGO Ananda Care to train teachers of zilla parishad schools in Dahanu. "I will be visiting Dahanu once a week to work with them," says Shroff. Her biggest learning from the lockdown has been patience. "Sometimes, even when you think that the results aren't showing, you just have to wait it out. In the field of education, you don't get to see tangible changes, and that can be demoralising. But, you have to give yourself as well as the students, time."

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