Solution

INTRODUCTION

A good solution never ignores the conditions that are responsible for the problem that it aims to solve, nor does it demand for new conditions where it has better chances of succeeding. On the contrary, it uses those conditions as the foundation and builds itself on that foundation. Also, a good solution is inherently adaptive and doesn’t prove itself obsolete with change in external conditions.

The conditions that are responsible for the problem of students lacking concept-based skills (hereafter referred to as “the problem”) give rise to some minimum goals that the solution must strive to achieve. The following table lists those goals against the corresponding conditions.

#	Condition Responsible For The Problem	Corresponding Goal Of The Solution
1	Lack of a clear understanding of the distinction between skills and concept-based skills	Spread awareness about concept-based skills.
2	Obsession with numbers	Make it a part of assessment to test and reward conceptual understanding and concept-based skills.
3	Strong commitment to misinterpreted beliefs	Train students to focus their practice on developing concept-based skills and their competition on gaining conceptual understanding.
4	Incorrect understanding of what smartness is	Make learning interesting and enjoyable to ALL students.
5	Lack of proper infrastructure and resources	Find innovative ways to make resources and infrastructure available economically.
6	Inefficient teacher-training programs	Strengthen teacher-training programs to make teaching learning-focused.
7	Nature and ability of students	Set a trend around developing concept-based skills.
8	Logistics	Find innovative ways to teach students to develop concept-based skills while accommodating the current state of logistics.
9	Economic aspects	Make education that teaches for understanding affordable to families with low-income levels.

DISCUSSION

This section discusses the goals of the solution identified above.

1. Spread awareness about concept-based skills. This is THE most important goal. This goal is similar to setting the direction of a journey. That is why success in achieving this goal is critical to the overall success of the solution. Some of the actions to achieve this goal are listed below.
   1. Conduct talent-search programs, science fairs etc. for students at regional, state and national levels.
   2. Conduct workshops, seminars etc. for teachers.
   3. Use media (print, radio, television and electronic).


2. Make it a part of assessment to test and reward conceptual understanding and concept-based skills.It will be a futile attempt to try to change students, teachers and society to make them lose their obsession with numbers. Instead, that obsession itself could be used to make them interested in gaining conceptual understanding and developing concept-based skills. The following is a list of actions in that direction.
   1. Create standards and benchmarks to test the conceptual understanding of students and measure their concept-based skills; work with schools and government to use these standards in their assessment practices. (These standards must not make it difficult for a student to excel in an exam that measures only theoretical understanding. On the contrary, they should make it easier. In other words, it should be easy for a student with strong conceptual understanding to excel in an exam that measures only theoretical understanding.)
   2. Building on action 1.a, conduct regional, statewide and nationwide exams to test the conceptual understanding of students.
      


3. Train students to focus their practice on developing concept-based skills and their competition on gaining conceptual understanding. A student finds it more meaningful to work on a lot of simple problems than a few tough problems with the belief that his understanding of the subject increases with increase in the number of problems he solves. (He, because of his obsession with numbers, considers a good score as the measure of his understanding of the subject.) This belief does sound intuitive. However, the fact is the student’s true level of understanding comes under scrutiny and his knowledge gaps are exposed only when he attempts to solve tough problems. In other words, a quick review of the relevant theory and learning the required formulas might help a student get started on solving simple problems, but a solid understanding of the concepts involved is a prerequisite to start working on tough problems. The problem, however, is standard text books do not cover the concepts in enough detail and a typical student finds it beyond his ability or an unnecessary effort to visit reference books to gain conceptual understanding. Also, according to the Constructivist theory, students construct new knowledge by ‘experiencing’. In other words, they learn by doing. The following actions are based on this background.
   1. Create learning aides that supplement the standard textbooks and help students gain conceptual understanding.
   2. Design simple practical experiments, which students can do on their own or in groups.
   3. As a follow up to action 2.b, work with schools to increase the participation of students in the exams.


4. Make learning interesting and enjoyable to ALL students. This is something great teachers are naturally good at doing. Opening with a story, asking questions that make students think, using analogies--great teachers always focus on what students learn and not just on teaching them. They make students involved in the learning process and thus make learning interesting and enjoyable for them. The following are some of the actions to realise this goal.
   1. Study the practices of great teachers in different geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds and design generic teaching strategies based on those practices. (The purpose of this study is not to reinvent the wheel. The best practices that are intuitive or famous may not work uniformly across disparate learning contexts. Finding the association between the best practices and a learning context is the main purpose of this study.)
   2. Design (and produce, if necessary) audio-visual and other forms of learning aides.
   3. Similar to action 3.b, design simple practical experiments to explain abstract concepts. Using these experiments, design lesson plans that are learning-focused.


5. Find innovative ways to make resources and infrastructure available economically. Computers were really expensive when they first came into existence; it was impossible to allow exclusive access to a computing resource to a single user. The concept of time-sharing helped with this problem. Time-sharing allows a computing resource to serve the needs of another user when it is waiting for input from a different user. This concept could be used to deal with the problem of lack of infrastructure and resources. The following actions are based on this concept.
   1. Create a pool of qualified instructors and make them available to schools as consultants.
   2. Create a culture of sharing labs and other facilities on time-sharing basis.


6. Strengthen teacher-training programs to make teaching learning-focused. This is another critical goal and motivating the candidates to become great teachers is a big part of it. Dealing with the limited availability of good resources is another one. The following actions address these goals.
   1. Conduct workshops for aspiring teachers and work with training institutes to increase the participation of their candidates in such workshops. (The chief purpose of these workshops is to give a chance to the aspiring teachers to interact with great teachers and benefit from their view of teaching.)
   2. Define standards and conduct certification courses in parallel to the existing teacher education programs. (It is not wise to rule out the inherent liking of candidates for ‘certificates’. Instead, that liking could be used to make them walk the extra mile to become a great teacher.)
   3. Similar to action 5.a, create a pool of qualified trainers and make them available to institutes as consultants.


7. Set a trend around developing concept-based skills. Setting a trend around something is the first step in the long journey of making it part of a culture. The following are some of the actions in that direction.
   1. Building on the actions of goal #1, create a trend around developing concept-based skills. (Students of low-ability could be trained, with some decent effort, to gain skills. Such skills, even though not backed by conceptual understanding, will eventually provide them with a variety of career options. However, students who have a decent ability but are unmotivated due to a variety of reasons are hard to train and this solution does not target such students.)
   2. Continue action 3.c.


8. Find innovative ways to teach students to develop concept-based skills while accommodating the current state of logistics. Very few issues in life require dealing with an all-or-none type of approach and teaching is certainly not one of them. Completing the entire syllabus with a firm focus on making students understand and learn is undoubtedly a Herculean task and a typical teacher might not be able to deliver on it, despite her best intentions. Experience will sure help and picking only a part of the syllabus to teach for understanding in early years helps gain a positive experience. A similar approach benefits the students also. The following actions are based on this background.
   1. Building on action 4.c, design lesson plans that take into account the syllabus and time issues.
   2. As a follow up to action 5.b, work with schools to increase their interest in sharing resources (labs etc.) with other schools.


9. Make education that teaches for understanding affordable to families with low-income levels. Even if all the conditions discussed so far have been addressed successfully, the income inequalities in the society still affect the quality of education a student receives. This section analyses such economic aspects of the problem in detail.
   1. For four decades now, the government has fallen behind its set target of spending 6% of GDP on education, with the highest it had ever spent never crossing 4.3% of GDP.
   2. Household expenditure on education has been consistently increasing. Currently, on average, a typical household in India spends 4.5% of the per capita consumption expenditure on education, up by over 60% since 1999. This spending is considerably more in the southern states.
   3. On average, about 65% of the students in urban areas go to private schools. Although this number is considerably small in rural areas--about 20%--it is going up every year. For example, about 30% of the students in government upper primary and secondary schools in rural areas moved to private schools between 2002 and 2006. Economically backward areas too are catching up with this trend pretty fast. For example, the district of Mahbubnagar of Andhra Pradesh has half of its school going children in private schools.
   4. Across the country, private schools are expanding at a rapid rate compared to government schools. For example, over the last ten years, private schools in Andhra Pradesh grew at an average rate of about 9.5% per year, whereas government schools grew at a rate of only 2.5%.


It naturally follows from these observations that more and more families will buy into the concept of private education and will continue to spend more money on education. There is only one problem: there is no standard fee structure across the 2-lakh private schools that are spread all over India; the ‘popular’ schools charge almost arbitrarily and the fee hikes are common.


Consider, for instance, the district of Hyderabad, which has about two thousand unaided private schools. Of these, some are International schools, which charge a few lakh rupees a year in fee. The Concept schools, IIT Foundation schools and other types of corporate schools charge in thousands. Thanks to the unequal income distribution in India, the effect of such schools--either positive or negative--chiefly impacts rich and upper middle class families, and maybe some middle class families that try to ‘catch up with the trend’. However, the impact of the remaining schools, which form a major percentage of the two-thousand in Hyderabad, and similar such schools across India that cater to the middle class, lower middle class and poor families is highly substantial and these schools are the subject of discussion here.


Standardising the fee across the country for these schools is not a practical solution because such standardisation needs to be done through strict regulations and, if history is any evidence, enforcing such regulations is not easy in a vast country like India, largely because of corruption and bureaucracy.


Although these schools are different in many aspects, they are all similar in one aspect: they are all in business; they are all for-profit organisations: they have a service to offer and they want to offer it at a price that makes them profits. Now, if they are in business shouldn’t the rules of business apply to them? Since the price of a product or a service is always what the consumer is willing to pay for it, shouldn’t it be the case here too? It should; there is only one thing that is preventing it from happening: Unlike food, travel or consumer electronics, the business of education is not commoditised. The following are some of the actions that make it possible. (It might be hard for a conservative reformist or an educator to see the terms like business and commoditisation linked with education. It will be harder for people with a Marxian view. However, facing reality is more important than sticking to a comfortable point of view. Confronting reality is the fundamental responsibility of a reformist. Wishful thinking is considered a sin, and not just in business world.)
1. To support action 5.b, create a business opportunity around the concept of sharing labs and other facilities.
2. Design an economical after-school learning program and create a business opportunity around it.
3. Leveraging the benefits of above actions, create a model school that teaches for understanding at an affordable price and still makes a profit. Develop a franchise opportunity around that school’s concept.

GETTING STARTED

Create an organisation with the following objectives:

1. Create a culture around teaching and learning for understanding.

   1. Study the practices of great teachers in different geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds and design generic teaching strategies based on those practices.
   2. Create standards and benchmarks to test the conceptual understanding of students and measure their concept-based skills; work with schools and government to use these standards in their assessment practices.
   3. Design lesson plans that are learning-focused, taking into account the syllabus and time issues.
   4. Design (and produce, if necessary) audio-visual and other forms of aides that supplement standard textbooks and help students gain conceptual understanding.
   5. Design simple practical experiments, which students can do on their own or in groups.
   6. Conduct workshops and seminars for teachers and aspiring teachers.
   7. Conduct regional, statewide and nationwide exams to test the conceptual understanding of students; work with schools to increase the participation of students in those exams.
   8. Conduct talent-search programs and science fairs for students at regional, state and national level.
   9. Use media to spread awareness about concept-based skills.
   10. Create a trend around developing concept-based skills.
   11. Create a pool of qualified instructors (teachers and teacher-trainers) and make them available to institutions as consultants.
   12. Define standards and conduct certification courses in parallel to the existing teacher education programs.
       


2. Commoditise education to make it affordable to families with low income.

   1. Design a program to share labs and other facilities on time-sharing basis and create a business opportunity around it.
   2. Design an economical after-school learning program and create a business opportunity around it.
   3. Create a model school that teaches for understanding at an affordable price and still makes a profit. Develop a franchise opportunity around that school’s concept.