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Ed. Magazine

The Jains Go Out on the Balcony

Map of India

India ChalkboardThe quote on the front page of the Heritage School website basically sums up Manit Jain's education growing up in India: "For most children, schooling is about being leashed, not unleashed."

Jain, Ed.M.'14, who started the Heritage School in 1999 and spent the last year at the Ed School in the master's program along with his wife, Smriti Jain, Ed.M.'14, explains, "There was no authentic relationship with learning. If I asked, 'Why am I learning what I'm learning?' the only answer was, 'If you don't study this, you won't do well on the exam. If you don't do well on the exam, you won't do well in life.'"

The problem with this approach is that while it may help students cover the syllabus and score well on the critical grade 12 exam that decides in India where you'll go to college, it also "robs children of the ability to be themselves. With that kind of system, there's a lot of judgment and ranking," Jain says.

As a result, students end up developing strategies for doing well in school.

"I'll be this way with this teacher and that with that teacher and this way with the principal," he says. "Students also begin to see everything as a job. There's no sense of meaning or purpose. This pattern of 'hard duty' is difficult to break out of, and it isn't limited to school. Eventually we even see the sense of hard duty when parents are playing with their children or taking a spouse out to dinner." When he was young, he says, "I never had moments in my childhood where I went home and said, 'Wow, Mom, I learned this!'"

In 1999, Jain decided he wanted to offer a different option for students in India. Along with his father, a teachertrainer, he opened the first of three Heritage Schools. He admits that it took a few years to work out the kinks.

"I knew what I didn't want to do," he says, "but I didn't yet know what I did want to do." They started out fairly traditional. Then, just as he was beginning to rethink the schools, he met two Ed School alums, Anustup Nayak, Ed.M.'02, and Ashish Rajpal, Ed.M.'02, who were also interested in transforming education in India. Together, they began a complete school overhaul — hearts and minds, Jain says. There was pushback, of course, given the deepseated belief in rote learning among parents and teachers in his country.

Smriti was a teacher there at the time. "Teachers were resisting. We were all a product of similar rote learning," she says. "What changed was starting to ask hard questions. We asked ourselves what we really want or believe in. It was the first time, as teachers, that we felt empowered. The key was a lot of dialogue and reflection. Structure within the school also changed. Teachers started to collaborate, and they let the students express their opinions. It went from an authoritative atmosphere to one that was more equal."

They got rid of formal testing and uniforms and made learning project-based. They put an emphasis on teamwork while also celebrating the uniqueness of each child. They pushed hard to make every student and teacher feel respected and included. They encouraged parents to be more involved.

Today, the hope is that they are creating a progressive model for learning in India, weaving in elements taken from other progressive schools, such as Sudbury Valley in the United States and Reggio Emilia in Italy. The difference, Jain says, is that they want to show that their model can work at big, 2,000-student schools like theirs — not just at small, intimate schools. He estimates that they have covered about half of what they want to accomplish. That's partly why the couple decided to spend a year at the Ed School. Smriti says they had been thinking about applying for at least seven or eight years. They finally filled out the applications after Vishnu Karthik Ramani, Ed.M.'12, head of their senior school, came back to India after graduating from the Ed School and talked about what he had learned.

"I knew we needed to look at our systems from the outside. We needed to get on the balcony," Jain says, using a phrase they learned from Harvard Kennedy School Senior Lecturer Ron Heifetz after taking Heifetz's January-term class. The idea is that in order to lead, you need to step back from the day-to-day and see the whole picture.

Since they arrived last August, the Jains say they've mainly focused on classes that will help them revamp or refine certain areas of their schools that still need work, such as inclusion and Universal Design for Learning, as well as technology.

"We thought, rather than reinventing the wheel with these issues, let's go to Harvard to see what's already happening," Smriti says. Some of her classes, particularly in the arts and instructional coaching, also reaffirmed the path they were already taking at Heritage. As the couple heads back to India, Jain says they feel more prepared.

"I have a better appreciation," he says, "for what the gaps are and what my blind spots are."

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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