Digital technology is being widely explored to improve the quality of education in India. The Khadijatul Kubra Girls’ Mission (KKGM), despite its humble infrastructure, strives to augment its regular curriculum through virtual English classes. The KKGM, a residential institute for Muslim girls from low-income backgrounds, uses Bengali as its medium of learning. Though they teach English as a second language, the students are not comfortable with its usage. The role of teachers, educated local girls, who were themselves introduced to English through rote learning, plays no small part here.

Acknowledging this shortcoming in its own system, and recognising the importance of English fluency for employability, KKGM partners with the Ann Foundation to bridge this gap. The Ann Foundation connects volunteer tutors residing in any part of the world with its partner schools to enable virtual learning. I completed a year of teaching last November at KKGM, a year that involved as much learning for me as for my students. A group of 15 odd girls sat in a room with a single laptop in front of them while I was on the other side, in another city. Engaging them in a virtual setup was no mean feat. By trial and error, we were able to find methods that worked for us as a team. Now, in my second year of teaching, I wanted to pen some of the techniques that proved most effective in my previous year.

At the start of the year, written assignments helped gauge their acumen. The results were not too poor. However, once conversational exercises began, there was a noticeable dip in their abilities. Clearly, more conversational exercises were needed. The class too was more energetic when we conversed. So, for the rest of the year, we focused on conversations.

The initial barrier was overcoming their shyness, which came mostly from their lack of confidence in speaking in English. They feared choosing the wrong words or constructions in front of the tutor and their friends. To address this, the class was divided into groups of two. When given an assignment, they were asked to discuss it in pairs and then take turns to narrate their answers to the class.

To further boost their confidence, we practised normal, everyday conversations, such as introducing oneself to a new acquaintance or discussing one’s hobbies or interests. Sometimes, each pair was asked to engage in a dialogue between themselves.
​‘Where are you from?’ ​‘I’m from Nadia.’
​‘What is your favourite food?’ ​‘My favourite food is biriyani.’

We also explored scenario-based communication, such as a visit to a store or reporting a crime to the police. On one occasion, they were asked to write a skit and deliver it in class. Picture compositions were another popular exercise – each pair was provided with a picture and asked to describe or weave a story around it.

It is a well-known fact that to be able to write well, one must read. And to speak well, one must listen. This philosophy gave rise to a two-pronged approach of reading and watching videos. We read together about famous women in history – Malala Yousafzai, Marie Curie, Hellen Keller, Amelia Earhart and Anne Frank. Each girl would read a paragraph out loud as I showed them the biography on my screen. Afterwards, they would explain the meaning of the paragraph to the class in Bengali. I translated the more complicated words for them in Bengali.

Reading classes were their favourite, second only to watching documentaries. Maybe reading about these personalities instilled a sense of hope and aspiration in them. Of course, even that was not enough to hold their attention for the whole 60 minutes. For this purpose, I would add a video at the end. I almost used this as bait – if they read well and finished on time, we would use the last five minutes to watch a mini-documentary about the woman they just read about. Not only did this incentivise them to perform better but the videos also helped bring to life whatever they had just read about.

The key element that really took their performance to the next level was a dashboard I introduced that mapped their real-time performance. The pairs I talked about earlier were maintained unchanged until nearly the end of the year. There were seven groups and the students picked names for their teams. After each class, I evaluated them on a scale of 1 – 10 and entered the score into a colourful dashboard. These scores were cumulative, and the girls saw their rankings change across the year. We applauded the highest performer in each class.

Soon it was clear that some groups were consistently performing well while others performed poorly. I realised this was the effect of overachievers being paired together and vice versa. By then, we were nearly at the end of the year, but I still decided to change the teams. This time, each strong student was paired with an under-performer. In the last month, I observed the weakest girls in the class doing considerably better than when they had started. The stronger students continued to perform well.

Last, but not the least, we established a sense of camaraderie; they were curious about my personal life, and I obliged. They shared their hopes and dreams while I shared mine. In fact, it was this mutual honesty and trust that led to all the other learnings. If they had not opened up about their needs, we would have never discovered the impact of these teaching methods.

Author

Srijita Chakraborty is a Senior Research Specialist with Gartner. She lives in Gurgaon. When she is not at work, Srijita likes to read about innovative ways to keep her class engaged and writes about her personal experiences in her blog.