We have amazing women leading schools

by admin

On the occasion of International Women’s Day, we bring you some of the most notable and distinguished women eduleaders from the education industry to share their incredible journey, insights, and experiences. Here are the excerpts from the interview

Radhika Zahedi
Director, The Green Acres Academy & Centre Director
The Acres Foundation Centre for Teaching
and Educational Leadership, Mumbai

“School Leadership has been a space in which we have had amazing women leading for years now and I am optimistic about continuing to see women rise as leaders both in education and across other fields,” says Radhika Zahedi. She herself is a leader who first started teaching on weekends while in junior college, volunteered as a teacher with an NGO, worked as a software engineer also taught Salsa. Today, however, she is a director overlooking a whole gamut of issues.

On school leadership, she says patient optimism works along with faith in the power of human potential. If you don’t believe that your teachers and students have the capacity to grow, you won’t be able to lead them to success. The trust imposed on teachers has proven to be beneficial in more ways than one, especially during the lockdown.

Radhika says, “The gains from tech integration outweighed some of the learning losses.” She adds further, “While we plan our recovery from the pandemic it is important that we are strategic about the use of learning time in classrooms – what is the most important gap (if any) for us to cover at this particular age? For example, in primary years, foundational language and mathematical literacies are a higher priority than covering vast amounts of informational content. Why? Because gaps in literacy/numeracy result in a ‘Matthew effect’ in subsequent years, i.e., they negatively impact all subjects in the subsequent years, not just maths and language. If you can’t read well – you can’t access information in English, Science, History, Geography, etc., and it is hard to fix gaps in foundational reading when the volume of work increases in secondary. Relatively, if you miss out on some information on the water cycle, or the Harappan civilization in the primary grades, it will not have a major cascading effect on the students’ learning in the subsequent years and can be made up later.

A strong supporter of technology she says we live in a fully digital world, yet we expect children to go through 15 years of school in a classroom with almost no technology. “We have seen students use tools to design beautiful illustrations, code animations, host live streams and podcasts, visualize data, collaborate on work, and learn with experts well beyond the four walls of the classroom,” says Radhika.

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