In India, Making Small Changes on a Large Scale

LONDON â€" It was the taxi ride from the Mumbai airport that pulled Sharath Jeevan off the corporate ladder. Although born in Chennai, India, he had been raised mostly in Saudi Arabia and England, graduating from Cambridge with a degree in economics. An M.B.A. from Insead, a prestigious France-based business school, led to a management consultant’s job at Booz Allen and then a job with eBay in Britain.

“I’d go back to India every summer, and the only option was to go through Mumbai,” he recalled. “We’d drive through the slums and kids would run up to the cab to sell things, or to beg. It made me see how on a knife edge their lives were. Education seemed like an area where you can make a real difference.”

The problem is not a lack of schools. “Ninety-five percent of kids in India have access to free government schools within a half-mile of where they live,” he said, a distance of 800 meters. The problem is that many of these schools offer poor-quality education. “The average Indian fifth grader reads like a second grader in Britain or the U.S. Two-thirds of them can’t read a paragraph or do simple fractions,” Mr. Jeevan said.

His new venture, Schools and Teachers Innovating for Results, which will be officially introduced on Monday in Delhi, aims to change that. Backed by funding from the British Department for International Development and a number of British charities, STIR has spent the past 15 months researching the most successful “micro-innovations” â€" small, inexpensive, easy-to-implement changes â€" in classrooms across India.

“We visited 300 schools and conducted 600 face-to-face meetings, speaking to over 3,000 teachers,” he said in an interview at the STIR office in London.

The explosive growth of Indian schools means that many teachers have had little or no formal training.

“Indian teachers are used to thinking of themselves as instruments of a ministry or of government policy,” Mr. Jeevan said. “It was the first time many of them had been asked about anything.”

“Through innovation, we wanted to get teachers to think of themselves more seriously â€" as professionals,” he said. “The idea is to create a platform to collect the best of these micro-innovations, test them to see if they work, and then take them to scale. There are 1.3 million schools in India, so scale is a huge problem.”

Some of the ideas, recounted in STIR materials, will sound familiar to parents in wealthier countries. At Majeediya Madarsa-e-Jadeed, a school catering to a predominantly Muslim community in Seelampur, Iram Mumshad, a teacher, noticed that parents, many of whom worked as day laborers, seemed unaware of how to support their children’s education. To engage parents, the school started incorporating their feedback on children’s behavior at home into school reports, building relationships between teachers and parents, and underlining the importance of parental support.

At Babul Uloom, a public school in one of the poorest neighborhoods in East Delhi, Sajid Hasan realized that his students started school with fewer learning skills than students from wealthier parts of the city â€" a gap that seemed to increase with each passing month. So Mr. Hasan, a member of the Teach for India program that puts young, highly motivated teachers in some of the country’s toughest schools, decided to give his students extra time to catch up by extending the school day for two hours.

“India normally has one of the shortest school days in the world,” Mr. Jeevan said. Most schools finish by 1 p.m. The two extra hours, he said, “gives the children more time to learn and also more structure in their lives. It also helps the teachers to focus on the students’ current level to help get them to where they need to be.”

But some of the innovations have a uniquely Indian flavor. Students at the S.R. Capital School in Shahadra struggled with the poetry included in the curriculum, yet they all seemed well versed in the latest Bollywood hits. So Bindu Bhatia, their teacher, fit the words of the texts studied in class to the tune of popular songs, then encouraged the students to perform the poems, making classes more fun and giving students added confidence in approaching potentially daunting material.

After it is officially introduced in Delhi, STIR plans to open additional hubs in Mumbai and Bangalore â€" big ambitions for a program that has just 10 full-time employees, four in Britain and six in India. But Mr. Jeevan has a track record of developing similar programs.

While he was at eBay, he started eBay for Charity, which let buyers and sellers on the auction site donate a portion of the price of items they bought and sold to the nonprofit organization of their choice. The initiative has raised €43 million, or $65 million, for British charities. Then he introduced a new program, Teaching Leaders.

“We know that Sharath is really good at taking an organization from scratch and building it, because that’s what he did with Teaching Leaders,” said Sally Morgan, an adviser to Absolute Return for Kids, a hedge-fund education charity that is one of STIR’s main backers.

Based on the recognition that standardized tests showed four times as much variation within schools as between schools, Teaching Leaders was started by Mr. Jeevan in 2008 “to help great teachers become great leaders and managers.”

The program was given initial backing by Absolute Return for Kids and within five years, the results were sufficiently impressive to win the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a £10 million, or $15 million, grant to expand the program across Britain.

“Sharath is very focused, very driven by results,” said Ms. Morgan, who also serves as the chairwoman of Ofsted, the British government’s school inspection agency. “So when he came to us and was able to show that seemingly simple things â€" like using phonics when teaching English as a second language, instead of making the students start by memorizing grammar or rules â€" had a big impact in the classroom, it ticked a lot of our boxes.”

“Even if you find something that works in your own class, there was no way of sharing those results with anyone else,” Ms. Morgan said. “People who want to make change happen can feel really isolated.”

STIR is designed to allow innovative teachers to feel like they are part of a network. “Small changes in practice can make a big difference in the classroom,” Mr. Jeevan said. “But what matters more in the long term is the change in how teachers think of themselves.”

A version of this article appeared in print on March 4, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.