A PARADIGM SHIFT IN FLN: Making India Literate in Months, not Years

“Just reopening schools is not enough. Students need intensive support to recover lost education.” Robert Jenkins, UNICEF Chief of Education ¹

A paradigm shift is a concept identified by the American physicist Thomas Kuhn. It refers to a fundamental change that radically alters our worldview, thinking, awareness, policies, practices and actions. For example, the widespread use of smart phones and media represents a paradigm shift in the way we communicate, or when many educational, social and economic structures were changed as a result of the industrial revolution.⁵

The dominant paradigm under which education operates has been rendered incompatible with the new needs of a child living in the 21st century. Incremental change is not enough. Education urgently needs a paradigm shift in order to ensure that EVERY CHILD learns the foundational skills of literacy and numeracy quickly and time-efficiently, and the 21st century skills to further enlighten our children’s future, and with this, the future of the world.

TARGET: NIPUN Bharat & SDG4

NIPUN Bharat Mission or National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy is launched by the Education Ministry of India under National Education Policy 2020. This scheme ensures that every child in India gains foundational numeracy and literacy by the end of Grade 3. NIPUN Bharat focuses on transforming the monotonous education system into an integrated, enjoyable, all-inclusive and engaging.⁴

Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 Unlikely to be Reached Post-COVID

Target 4.1 By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes. The provision of 12 years of free, publicly-funded, inclusive, equitable, quality primary and secondary education – of which at least nine years are compulsory, leading to relevant learning outcomes – should be ensured for all, without discrimination.⁵

Target 4.6 By 2030, ensure that all youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women, achieve literacy and numeracy. The principles, strategies and actions for this target are underpinned by the contemporary understanding of literacy as a continuum of proficiency levels in a given context. It goes beyond the understanding of a simple dichotomy of ‘literate’ versus ‘illiterate’. Therefore, action for this target aims at ensuring that by 2030, all young people and adults across the world should have achieved relevant and recognized proficiency levels in functional literacy and numeracy skills that are equivalent to levels achieved at successful completion of basic education.⁵

ALfA: Boosting the Speed of Learning

Slow speeds of learning are the greatest challenge in education. Even after five years of schooling about half the children cannot read, write or do mathematics at the grade level. We do not have five more years to build up the skills of the children currently in our classrooms, many of whom are greatly lagging behind in the foundational skills after the COVID school closures of nearly two years. Clearly, highly disruptive methods are now required immediately, so that no child remains without the foundational skills this year itself, or the results will be further devastating.

What if we shared new disruptive methods of teaching that are making it possible to reach grade-level FLN skills in 5 months or less for the vast majority of primary-aged children who attend regular school.

Accelerating Learning for All or ALfA is a groundbreaking new pedagogy incorporated in the Global Dream Toolkits that radically speeds up learning by all children. There are short modules inside the Toolkit that are arranged step-wise from known to unknown and simple to complex. These help children scaffold learning by working in pairs to dramatically improve learning outcomes. This new transformative pedagogy further empowers children with the 21st Century Skills of Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Character, and Citizenship, as anticipated by NIPUN Bharat Mission and the New Education Policy of India.

ALfA enables transformative change. Its reverse methodology dramatically alters our thinking about teaching and learning. ALfA is not an incremental change made to an existing system of education, but rather a paradigm shift, much like the new smartphone is to the old landline phone, that employs vastly different thinking and design.

Global Dream Toolkits were born out of experimental work in the laboratories of slums and villages. They have proven to be effective in different settings including in the government schools. (Check out Evidence – even five-year-olds can read newspapers and do mathematics one grade up).