Making Mistakes And Learning

Teachers living in a village, in my imagination, can feel this is all. This week, Project Fuel, one of our partner organisations had a long chat with the teachers at Arthur Foot Academy. The conversation got stirred in the direction where we had to think about what wisdom can we bring to the world. When the teachers were sitting together, the Principal exclaimed, "We are ready to take on any task that comes our way!" Education, now branching out to the well-being of not just students but teachers as well, will have a significant impact on our learning in the classroom. 

The teachers at Arthur Foot Academy are slowly speaking in our reading sessions. There are voices in every classroom. We need more listeners. This brings me to a very heartwarming session with Ms. Ratna Manucha. Our dear author from Dehradun. In an impromptu conversation with her, we were discussing that we have more writers in our community and less readers. There are more stories in every classroom but less listeners who are asking questions. Questions that stir us from within. 

Learning Forward Saturday

The session was primarily on storytelling and using stories as a medium to teach. Meenakshi Ma’am started the session by introducing the need to use stories and talked about how teachers could make students tell/write stories.

Brinda Ma’am then gave the teachers a task. They were trained to use personification and imagine being any non-human and weave a story. Each teacher narrated their creation. There was then a discussion on how a storyboard could be created in class. It could be an individual storyboard or a collective class storyboard. 

The teachers were excited about trying out the collaborative story building activity.

We are making small attempts with our due share of mistakes but we are. 

Neelashi Mangal, Good Schools Alliance

Motivation - we all ponder over it.

 

Priya Kuriyan often brings sweet humour to her stories not just through words but also through her incredible art. The decision to bring this story to the teachers' group this Saturday was to have a laugh or two seeing a baby pigeon born in Uttar Pradesh go to school, have birthday parties and travel the world. The struggle that Kamala Mukunda brought in her chapter this week about 'motivation' is real. It touches everyone, each one of us. We are often afraid to say it out loud. How do we incorporate activities that organically build intrinsic motivation in students in our classroom to be curious on their own and take charge of their learning? How do we, as teachers, find ways to have fun while teaching? 

On that note, we explored the idea of having scrapbooks for certain topics that the teachers teach and having students experience the real agency in their learning by making these. One teacher gave an example of a Hindi sound and letter she is teaching. She said she would make a list of vocabulary words and have children find these words in their environment and make pictures and write about it. Children love creating and often appreciate just a tiny bit of challenge. Another teacher asked the group what she could do with the social science scrapbook. 

This week ended with Jaahbaaz Kishori training in life skills. Midway through it, it felt like life skills should be a part of the B.Ed programme. We often dismiss each other, give feedback without praising, and question without listening, and we are often not listening at all. If we could do just simple things for ourselves as teachers and for our students, we would already have a school that values all aspects of human beings – emotional, physical and mental. How could we leave behind one's emotional life in the learning process? It is a part and parcel of this whole network we are all in. 

- Neelashi Mangal, Training and Development Lead at the Learning Forward India Foundation 

Reading about motivation...

Are there moments in your day when you think of what your motivation to do anything is? Do teachers, with all their identities and teaching jobs, have the time to reflect on their intrinsic or extrinsic motivation? 

Brewing Knowledge Fridays is a pill that gives you all the reflective thoughts; there is no way one eats it and does not see its influence working. There is one young student in the reading group, and it is fascinating to hear how the world touches them, what they think about, and that they have a voice that one hears when we are mostly indoors or on phones. 

On the 26th December, 2025, Brewing Knowledge will host a special guest at the bookstore. Ratna Manucha is bringing a topic that everyone thinks about, wants to discuss, and wishes to have a safe space to discuss: body shaming and humour. This will take place in the bookstore and virtually. She will read selections from her two books and engage with the audience to discuss them. 

This week ended on a special note, with Project Fuel joining us to collaborate on various aspects of design, education, and wisdom (they specialise in these areas). It is part of our brewing culture at LFIN: meet people, hold hands, and dream together. 

Redefining and Reimagining Education - Neelashi

This week, a community engagement project in Bhandarjood and the Arthur Foot Academy's hinterland is seeing the light of day. 

The village teachers, girls, panchayat, and schools are coming together to redefine what education can be for adolescent girls in their village. For official purposes, not disclosing the names of the organisations involved to implement this project. What we can reveal is what is coming ahead of us and what has come along so far. 

This project will bring together adolescent girls to talk about their health, empathy, self-awareness, and critical thinking, and not just 'talk' but reimagine and redefine their village's responsibility to provide girls and women with a better standard of living. The truth is that these 'life-skills' are not taught in schools or at home. 

So many girls spend their time trying to observe and assume by how adults behave around them to learn, but can we bring their voices to life? Can we make them feel safer asking these questions of their fellow village girls and women who face similar circumstances? Right now, the group has identified that this is important and needs to be thought about. 

Stakeholders have had their first round of meetings. What is coming along in this project are art sessions, reading, training, and people coming together to dialogue and meet essential stakeholders of the village to move along with them. All of this is easy to write, but more difficult on the ground. But this is the journey we are going to embark on with some schools and community members. If not this, what is education? If not about taming the fear? 

At Learning Forward Saturday, teachers discussed setting up shops in their classrooms to teach students language and mathematics. When children bring their everyday life experiences into school, they engage more, ask more, and actively participate in their own learning. 

• Neelashi Mangal is our Training and Development Lead at Learning Forward India Foundation. Feel free to reach out to her, and we would love to have your support for our efforts to spread #JoyOfLearning, focusing on reading, reflection and building meaningful relationships #JoyOfGiving. Email her at NM@LearningFroward.org.in
• For more about us and how we work to support schools that help young people enage society, please visit the website www.SchoolEducation.com

A tribe of parents, teachers and children - Neelashi Mangal

Occasionally, at the Good Schools Alliance (GSA), we are reminded of the African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child." The saying sounds like a symphony but is difficult to implement at every step. We all try our bit during the week with our small but thoughtful sessions to establish a dialogue, raise questions and find answers from our collective that is growing each day. Two of the many sessions of GSA during the week are Brewing Knowledge Friday and Learning Forward Saturday. 

Brewing Knowledge, as the name suggests, invites teachers and our readers to come together to read together and discuss some questions with each other and share openly about our views, and once a month, we invite authors of the books we have read. This week, we had Dr Anupam Sibbal; he reminded us of the tribe – parents, teachers and children working together. He is an author of Is Your Child Ready To Face The World? Our cohort of teachers has read the book in both Hindi and English. Teachers have done a series of reflective writing exercises based on his book. Yesterday, we all left the session with some more inspiration and motivation to keep doing our work at GSA and bring parents onboard. 

Children are like buds, and they need thoughtful nurturing, pruning and play (not on the phone). The teacher and the parents have to be each other's allies to make the childhood more joyful. If parents and teachers could join the cohort together to read, ask questions and find answers in this space created by both, it would be both a doable and a practical way to move forward in learning together. 

Learning Forward Saturday, on the other hand, is a group of teachers gathering to participate in practical learning sessions. We identify small things we want to transform in our classroom, make stories together that are age appropriate, contextualise the learning with the child's home environment and take a tiny moment in the week to reflect on our classroom practices. 

The village in the proverb is everyone one of us for all the children around us; it takes practice to unlearn our old beliefs and question our conventional answers and thoughts, and it takes dialogue to win the trust of a child and not authority. Let's keep tuning into our essence – reading, reflection and relationship – to make this into a reality. 

- Neelashi Mangal

Training and Development Lead

Learning Forward India Foundation

Thinkers at school - teachers and students.

"Schooling may improve short-term memory, metacognitive skills, and knowledge in certain domains; it does not fundamentally change the way children think but rather influences their performance on school-like tasks." Our reading this week at Brewing Knowledge threw me back into a conundrum – will this child in front of me be able to not just make a living but lead a happy, fulfilling life? Will students be able to discover what they truly enjoy doing and learn how to be by themselves while living in a community? Is there anything that I am bringing as a teacher to the classroom that is contributing to their life in a meaningful way?

I have stopped feeling sad about these questions, like I used to; I let them sit with me. I let these questions make me feel the way I do. I want to learn more, and this is the only way – to be stuck with questions that move me. My work as a teacher should involve considering all the lives I encounter and engage with. Ms Kamala Mukunda's chapter on Nature and Nurture is beautiful. It leads you to believe there is no point to school, and then you start asking your own questions. Then she brings you back to the reasons why it might be a learning and enriching space for children. But the question is, what do we want them to learn? How? Why? As a language teacher, I was thinking, can critical reasoning be built or encouraged without schooling? I am sure it can be. Literature can. It connects us with ourselves, the world and the text itself.. 

Some reflections from our teachers from Brewing Knowledge- 

हमे अपने वातावरण में सीखने के लिए सिर्फ किताबें ही नहीं चाहिए होतीं बल्कि अच्छे अनुभव, अच्छे लोग, प्रकृति, और सबसे महत्वपूर्ण है कि हमारे मन में सीखने की इच्छा होनी चाहिए l हम अक्सर अपने आसपास की हर चीज़ से कुछ न कुछ सीख सकते हैं- जैसे माता- पिता से व्यवहार, दोस्तों से सहयोग, पेड़- पौधों से धैर्य, और जानवरों से प्रेम आदि l - Swati (Arthur Foot Academy) 

Minimum one skill honi chahiye humare paas. Special emotional intelligence. Students ko only syllabus centered na rakha jaye wo bhull hi jate hai. Focus on holistic development of every child. Real life learning di jani chahiye schools main- Priyanka, Abohar

Teaching is like having a garden

When I look at the flowers in the small garden near my house, I am reminded of the ongoing discussion about the balance between nature and nurture in teaching and gardening. The very nature of the flower is to bloom, and some even give out fragrance, but would they blossom if the gardener did not prune at the right time, did not give them enough nutrition, and did not provide the care they need? The question we discussed this week in Brewing Knowledge, based on Kamal Mukunda's book, was about nature and nurture: how do they influence human behaviour, and how do genetics and environmental factors interact with one another? 

 

I loved learning that we have an inbuilt capacity to understand and process complexity around us from the moment we enter the world. As infants, we know a whole language as part of our innate capability, with the external environment providing cues, socialisation, and stories, I would assume. A small instance of a mother speaking to her newborn, knowing the child may not understand or respond. These are all essential aspects of growing the vocabulary and learning the language. 

As a teacher, I find it highly fascinating that we all learned a language from an early age without the aid of chalk, a blackboard, or formal teaching. We have an environment that helps us acquire it – parents and family speaking to us, buying groceries at a shop, so there is utility in the language that we keep experiencing. We also express ourselves in language, so there is an aspect of expression. But do we provide this fertile environment for the child when they are learning English in a classroom that focuses solely on teaching grammar? Can we consider a child's innate qualities and create our classroom environments so rich that the language is present around them in all forms and utilities? 

The discussion about nature and nurture is an essential one in teaching and learning. Do such discussions make it to the B.Ed programme for our young teachers who enter the workforce? Are we giving ourselves enough food for thought as teachers before we enter our classrooms? These are all questions that are essential for me, and I am still mulling them over in my head, like a filter coffee, with our small group of teachers. 

Neelashi Mangal

Training and Development Lead

Learning Forward India Foundation 

Nature and Nurture - a harmony of both

बच्चों का विकास घर ओर बाहर दोनों वातावरण से प्रभावित होता है।घर का वातावरण उन्हें सुरक्षा, प्यार संस्कार और आत्मविश्वास देता है,वही बाहर का वातावरण उन्हें नई बातें सीखने, मित्र बनाने और समाज को समझने का अवसर देता है। यदि घर का माहौल सकारात्मक होगा तो बच्चा बाहर के चुनौतियों का भी साहस और समझदारी से सामना करेगा। दोनों वातावरण का संपूर्ण बच्चों के संपूर्ण व्यक्तित्व निर्माण के लिए आवश्यक। - रीना देवी, Principal, AFA

हम जो भी बनते हैं, वह सिर्फ हमारे जन्म से मिले गुणों (Nature) पर ही निर्भर करता है, बल्कि वह हमारे पालन- पोषण और हमारे आसपास के माहौल (Nurture) पर भी निर्भर करता है l प्रकृति हमें गुण देती हैं l परंतु पालन पोषण हमें सही दिशा दिखाता है l अगर हमें अच्छे संस्कार और माहौल मिले तो हर व्यक्ति अपनी प्रतिभा को और भी बेहतर बना सकता है l इसलिए हर व्यक्ति की पहचान उसके जन्म से मिले गुणों ओर माहौल से मिले गुणों दोनों से होतीं है- Swati, teacher, AFA

Personality is like a recipe. Nature gives you the raw ingredients — maybe you're born with extra sugar (kindness) or a bit too much spice (temper). But nurture is the chef, deciding whether you end up as a sweet cupcake, a spicy curry, or a burnt toast. And honestly, our personalities keep changing, because life keeps throwing in random ingredients we never asked for — like stress, heartbreak, or that one embarrassing childhood memory that pops up at 3 a.m. In the end, we're all just weirdly flavoured dishes, thanks to the mix of nature and nurture!- Manisha Khanna

Both nature and nurture play vital roles in our development. The divide between the two is hardly visible. And then the environment adds to these to shape our personality. Today, I am a very different person from what I was twenty years ago.- Minakshi Prasad, Director, AFA

The perspective that the book offers on calling the growing period 'sensitive' instead of 'critical' can shift the weight we place on time, and instead of a more conscious effort that can be applied to every phase/period. Kamala Mukunda was inviting us teachers/parents/educators to be mindful of our actions, rather than giving ourselves clean chits, claiming we had no role to play in a child's life because the 'critical' period was not within our control. Her examples draw us right into the discussion, creating space for reflection. When I ask myself this question as a teacher, it looks very similar to what I would have asked of myself: am I a person made of many atoms of past, present and future that includes my parents and all the other people I have met, things I have read, imagined, watched, etc.? If I extend the same empathy to the child in front of me, that they are a culmination of so much, I can make sense in my moments of difficulty. This might help extend my understanding instead of falling back on a concrete consequences approach. 

Like always, the book is a constant source of learning and reflection. Our group makes it even more helpful since all of us are teaching and engaging in real time. 

Neelashi Mangal
Training and Development Lead
Learning Forward India Foundation