The Feedback Card - Gurdeep Kaur

8:00 am – Reading a newspaper article quoting the Supreme Court on student stress and suicides.

5:30 pm – Saturday Master Class: Reading Productive Failure, Chapter: Affect – The Curious Child.

The newspaper article felt like a problem statement; Productive Failure felt almost like the book for the solution.

Once, in class, I said: “If you don’t study, you’ll fail.”

It’s a familiar line — the pet dialogue of many teachers and parents. But with those words, the joy of learning fades. Curiosity is replaced by anxiety. The stakes shift — no longer about learning, but about performing. The curious eyes in front of me turn into eyes clouded with fear.

Fear of failure — a fear we plant ourselves. And as these children grow, that fear becomes a wall they cannot climb over. Because from the very beginning, failure has been a bad word.

Rethinking the Report Card. What if we redesigned it?

What if we called it a Feedback Card, where we don’t declare success or failure, but offer guidance?

Instead of: “The child is not promoted to the next class,” we could write: “The child hasn’t yet mastered these topics — please focus here next year.”

This slight shift would turn the report card into a bridge, not a wall — a handover to the next teacher, not a judgment.

When a child learns to cycle, we say: “Try again, you’ll get it.” When they learn to drive, dance, paint, or play a sport, there’s no deadline, final exam, promotion clause, or report card.

Only feedback. We allow the journey to take as long as it needs. One day, I hope to read a Supreme Court directive that says: 

“No report cards to be shared — only feedback cards to be shared.”

If we can redesign a small piece of paper called a report card, maybe we can also redesign the way children see themselves. Years later, they’ll look back and say, “Those were the days when learning felt alive, not like a race.”

Note: I am curious about designing a feedback card. I’m open to collaborating with anyone who believes in reimagining how we record and communicate learning.

Gurdeep Kaur

The Teachers Centre Ambassador and C0-host Saturday Masterclass

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We have a solution!

Check out the GSA Record Book and the My Good School Report Card, available as Creative Commons at: www.inYouth.org

Best Goal Setting - Richa Solanki

Talking about an honest assessment of the situation & taking action even when it's way out of your comfort zone. Thus we grow & don't suck & we have success if we are efficient in our original look inside at the "real" situation we "suck" at. Where can you find the motivation?

There isn't going to be an easy answer. My suggestion is to avoid looking at the entire meaning of life and focus on the meaning of tomorrow. It might take your whole life to be fully satisfied with an answer to the meaning of life, but finding meaning in tomorrow is closer to reaching. Then - How do you find meaning in tomorrow? There are many routes.

1) Setting goals.

2) Finding something I'm passionate about.

Setting goals you really care about is a good way to give your motivation a head start. If you're cynical and set goals you don't think you'll achieve, they won't motivate you. But whenever you spend a lot of time contemplating what you truly desire, motivation usually follows.

Usually, it is not that we don't have dreams, but that our dreams have been smothered by what we view as "reasonable". If you can let yourself set goals and think about what you want, you can recapture some of that motivation. Setting goals isn't an instant cure. There will still be times you lose motivation and slip into apathy. But they are helpful. The second path I've used to recapture motivation is to find something I'm passionate about. This is a harder path because you can't force it. Stumbling on your passions isn't as direct a route as goal-setting.

Richa Solanki 

The Fabindia School

rsi@gmail.com

Self Motivation - Urvish Singh

Self-motivation will always lead one to success provided that one stays committed after being motivated. Self-

motivation is of great help in fulfilling your own objectives and to make your life as you want. Let’s discuss how important self-motivation is for an individual.

The Oxford English dictionary definition of motivation is it’s a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way. It’s a desire or willingness to do something. Motivation is a psychological process reinforcing one to take action in order to accomplish one’s desired goals or objectives.

Self-motivation definition is staying motivated due to one’s own interest. One should be a self-motivated person, as self-motivation is the key to living a satisfying life. Self-motivation plays a vital role in one’s own life, as it enables one to make self-assessment as often as one can. The process of self-assessment discloses one’s strengths and weakness by which one can strengthen more one’s strengths and begins to strive for overcoming weakness. In this way, self-motivation leads one to the desired success in life.

One of the main reasons why self-motivation is important in your life is that it does not let you depend on others and you can achieve success in your own goals and objectives that you set on the basis of your abilities, while it aids you to eradicate your weakness that hinders your success. In this way, each and every objective you establish for yourself.

Urvish Singh

The Fabindia School

ush@fabindiaschools.in

Lucy Crehans: Five Principles for High-Performing, Equitable Education Systems

Principle 1: Get Children Ready for Formal Learning
Enhance children's social and pre-academic skills through rich environments and playful learning before age six, rather than requiring specific academic outcomes from them.

Principle 2: Design Curricula Concepts for Mastery (Context for Motivation)
A good national/provincial curriculum should be:
Minimal - Focusing on fewer topics, but in greater depth.
High-level - Clear on what concepts and skills are required, without prescribing context or pedagogy.
Ordered - Organising concepts in a logical order, based on research into how children learn.

Principle 3: Support Children to Take On challenges, Rather than Making Concessions
Delay selecting children into different schools based on ability until age 15 or 16.
Teach children in a mixed ability classes until 15-16.
Provide small, flexible group support from qualified professional before/after lessons.

Principle 4: Treat Teachers as Professionals
Require prospective teacher to undergo a rigorous teacher training programme of at least a year, which is recognised by a professional body and includes the study of pedagogical content knowledge.
Ensure newly-qualified teachers have a reduced teaching load and time with a dedicated mentor who also has a reduced load. Encourage teachers to plan and evaluate lessons in small teams, so that all teacher are pedagogically supported and learn from one another.

Principle 5: Combine School Accountability with School Support (Rather Than Sanctions):
Monitor school performance at a local or national level using school-level data or irregular national assessments.
Make use of or create a network of successful former school leaders, to visit schools regularly and provide practicing school leaders with advice, support, and connections.
Incentivize demonstrably good teachers and middle leaders to work in struggling schools, and provide pedagogical leadership to other staff.

What top-performing systems understand is that when schools are underperforming it is often because of the teachers within them last the knowledge, expertise or capacity to make that change, and so they support them in whatever way is required to make the school better for the children.
- Clever Lands: Lucy Crehan
As a teacher in an inner-city school, Lucy Crehan was exasperated with ever-changing government policy claiming to be based on lessons from ‘top-performing’ education systems. She resolved to find out what was really going on in the classrooms of countries whose teenagers ranked top in the world in reading, maths and science.