A P Sharma has led several schools and always left a legacy if it was to incorporate innovative teaching practices, specialized training programmes or empowering the student community with skills.
When he was with Maheshwari Public School, Jaipur, he started Project Eureka with classes 9, 10, and 11, where he asked the students to come up with one empirical question, the answer to which they found together as a team. This helped students learn about asking the right kind of questions.
He started another brilliant training program for the National Talent Search Exam (NTSE), where the students of class 10 received special training from a retired expert. In fact, the first ten positions in the state-level NTSE for two consecutive years were all held by the students of the school. His students were even selected for Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana (KVPY). Such was the success that the chief secretary of the Bihar government visited the school to study the methods he employed.
Sharma has been bestowed with several awards of which the most significant is the Exemplary Leadership Award (2018) from President Pranab Mukherjee. Mr Sharma has also worked a lot for women empowerment and was awarded by the Delhi Commission for Women and UNESCO for it. He is initiating a scheme for underprivileged female students. He also sent students of class 11th for a 15-day internship programs to different hospitals and chartered accountancy firms.
He was included as a member of the ‘Niti Aayog’ committee for picking projects, ‘Atal Tinkering Lab’ and a member of several CBSE committees. Mr Sharma contributed substantially to Design Thinking and Early childhood Care education. He is also a parenting expert. He worked with William De Kooning Academy, Netherlands, and MIT, the USA on the inclusion of Design Thinking in education.
Mr Sharma strongly believes in the human touch. On Teachers Day, a nursery student entered his office early in the morning and handed him a chit. Written on it were the words “very good.” The child said that on her birthday, Mr Sharma wrote “good” in her diary, and since she thought it was his birthday, she wanted to give him a “very good.”
He says, anything a teacher gives to their students, they get back two-fold. He also believes that as an eduleader, it is his job to create more leaders. It is also important to have a human element in education to ensure that schools are producing well-rounded good human beings.
Ideas coupled with a human touch can do wonders and Anand Prakash Sharma, Principal and Director of Academics in Kundan Vidya Mandir, Ludhiana has been at it all through his career that spans over two decades.
