Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

Quick to adapt with the gamification trend, the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS) has tied up seat belts tight to come up with its biggest reforms with the aim to make a 360° in the way learning is organised in these Centre-funded schools. As a part of their ‘Back to Basic’ initiative, a total of 1,200 KVs are making an attempt to take up a better road than textbook-learning and cheer for originality among its 12 lakh students.

To make a full circle of creativity for the students to foster a high level of creativity, tablets have been introduced for e-lessons, assignments, videos and programming games. This will bring activity-based learning to connect knowledge with life and has been in collaboration with Council of Scientific and Industrial Research laboratories.

Students will be accessing popular computer games such as Minecraft and Kodu game lab, a visual programming tool to boost their imagination once the revamped curriculum is implemented. Moreover, to uplift creativity in the technical field to another level, ‘Hackathons’ are also planned for classes XI and XII. Officers laid out that it was a “troubling” focus on academic scores as the sole assessment criterion that  triggered the reforms. In the past five years, KVs’ Class XII pass percentages, have been more than 95%.

“The reforms aim at achieving learning outcomes set by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) right from Class I,” says the additional commissioner (academics) of KVS, U N Khaware.

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal interest involved in the improvement of KV schools, a senior HRD ministry official said the initiative was pushed by the former.

The KVS is all set to roll out these reforms during the current academic year also  creating annual targets in the way of a 1,000-point system to assess its school. Under this, the schools will be maintaining a detailed pro forma to assess these on all aspects – from infrastructure to academic development. Greater autonomy has been given to the heads of schools to devise an annual plan, which will be taken into account to rate the schools.

“The heads of schools have been asked to set their annual target, which is based on what a specific school depending, on its resources, is capable of achieving. No target can be lower than the previous target or the average of achievement of past three years,” said Khaware.

Although, these assessments are not supposed to be the parameters to penalise the schools, as the prime focus of the initiative is to build capacity of these institutions. Along with several inspections over the year, an audit in March will be analyzing the performance of these institutions “to understand the reasons which lead to either success or failure, so that we can draw from the experience and improve,” mentioned Khaware.

There will be multiple rewards that the point system will bring in. To state an example, in the case of students performing well in sports from a school that lacks in infrastructure will bring grace points to the school.

“We have close to 1,200 schools. So how to know how are our schools are functioning? We use to depend on a subjective database which we found was overrated. The finding that only 5% of our schools were average and the rest good gave us a shock. The picture can’t be so good,” Khaware continued. “To remove such subjectivity, we need something holistic and realistic. Only depending on Class XII results can be disastrous. Now, we have a holistic testing system where schools will be assessed on parameters set by themselves.”

The final document to be submitted by schools for assessment is “vidyalaya plan sustainable document”, covering several areas, including academic. About 500 points will be concerning academic performance.

READ: Gamification – Another boost to online education

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By Rupal