Ponder along...

What? Where? Who? Which? Whom? How? When? Why?....I have had to answer a flurry of questions on TFI. Let us look at some of these in brief.


What? The Teach For India (TFI) Fellowship is a 2 year full-time commitment during which you will be placed in a low-income municipal or private school to Teach. You just don't go and teach - you go above and beyond by taking complete ownership of the academic achievement of all the kids in your class. For example, you taking additional sessions for those children who are facing challenges to keep up; or you visit the parents in these low-income communities and "educate" them to provide a conducive environment for their child's education.

Additionally, in the second year you need to implement a community project that uplifts the entire community from where these kids come to school. For this, you would need to partner with all the stake holders - Community leaders, Municipality, Corporates, Non-profits, NGOs, Parents, School Administration and others. We will need to put all our skills to use to bring about a change in such challenging enviornments!


Where? As this is the inception year for the Teach For India movement, the schools are restricted to the areas of Bombay and Pune. We plan to expand to Delhi next year and then slowly grow our presence in all major cities in India. In the future, there is a definite plan to spread the outreach to rural areas in India, where the need is the most.

Personally, I have taken the option of Bombay - getting back to being home and close to family is truly the icing on the cake!


Who? TFI is an independent non-profit organization which will be running the Fellowship program. The team is lead by Shaheen Mistry, a well-known social enterpreneur and a champion of education equity in India. TFI has strong connections to the Teach For America and Teach First (England) programs through the Teach For All association. They raise their funds from philantropic organizations, corporates, government and donations.

In this foundation year, a 100 Fellows between the age 19 to 35 will be placed. Each of these folks are diverse and eclectic youth leaders, selectively chosen by TFI through a rigorous screening process - the acceptance ratio is around 5% (100 Acceptances : 2000 Applicants). All 100 Fellows from all across India, factually the world, will be placed in Mumbai and Pune this year.


Which? The medium of instruction is going be in English. There are plans to expand to regional language education in the future but for this pilot year, all instruction will be in English. Actually, trends show that low-income families are gravitating towards English medium public and private schools as they see it as a panacea to give their children golden opportunities.


Whom? The program will be implemented in low-income communities across Bombay and Pune. Specifically, we will be teaching standards (grades) Ist to the Vth, this year. Research shows that we can have maximum impact with younger children and hence, this choice. The plan is that TFI will grow to cover classes from 1st to 10th standard in the future.


How? The concept of TFI is based on "Teaching as Leadership". The premise is that if you take bright, driven and proven-leaders from all spheres of life, and put them into the toughest and most-challenging teaching environments; they excel. The TFI staff works incredibly hard to provide the conducive environment to teach and bring-in change at the grassroots level. They identify the school administrations who are willing to take on a program, provide training in Teaching, provide mentors - experienced teachers - who will monitor progress/feedback and pretty much everything that goes into having a solid foundation to enable fellows to focus on enhancing the classroom experience.


When? Now! :) The first batch of TFI Fellows - the class of 2009 - starts training on 3rd May. All 100 of us will be in residential training in Pune for 5 weeks before we start our assignments around June 15th.


Why? In brief - a desire to make a small but meaningful difference. There are many reasons for this and there are many implications of this program - professionally, financially, emotionally and otherwise; I prefer to cover these in detail as a seperate post.


As one of the Fellows aptly put it - "Ofcourse change is good! We just don't talk about it but, we make it happen." We definitely hope to make it happen...