Guy sacrifices Rs 21 Lakh/Year Job, aims at revolutionizing education system

Aiming at transformations in the education system, Divanshu Kumar, a final year Mechanical Engineering student at IIT-Madras, has started a non-profit edu-tech startup called “Involve Learning Solutions Foundation”, to develop leadership skills and improve learning outcomes of school students, with a new method of teaching.

Divanshu, a resident of Gaya in Bihar, had found out his vision for the education system, when he was studying 8th class.

Speaking to the media, he said, “I was in a school where there were barely any teachers, and acquiring a decent education was a challenge. For the most part, I didn’t have a clue what was going during my classes. So, in the back of my mind, there was always a desire to fix these things.”

The idea behind setting up “Involve Learning Solutions” has come when Divanshu enlisted with a Chennai based non-profit organization Avanti Fellows. It was aimed at explaining the school students, about the importance of collaborative learning, which could help them in getting the seats at India’s top universities.

As part of the concept, the IIT students here would support high-performing, yet underprivileged school children in cracking IIT-JEE exam.

“In my first year, I was a mentor and the following year, I became a manager. In the latter role, one of the things I worked on very closely was understanding the potential of peer-driven learning in schools and experienced a 100% success rate of students clearing JEE,” Divanshu said.

After noticing the success of this system, he came up with a model, where the senior students would teach their juniors at school, anticipating that it would reduce the teachers burden of focusing on every since student in the class.

With the support of his friends, Divanshu implemented the model at ASN Senior Secondary School in East Delhi, where he had studied in. They also had 15-20 interns working for them from Delhi University.

Current Model

The seniors will get trained and mentored to teach the juniors in an after-school program.
The training and curriculum support, with 6+ hours of intervention/week from Involve Learning Solutions Foundation, enables seniors to teach effectively, thereby improving their academic performance.

All these sessions will generally be conducted after the school hours. There is a manager in every school who will be responsible for making sure that everything is on the track and thus inform progress to the chiefs.

How it works?

A team from Involve Learning Solutions reached out to the schools and convince the management to permit for the implementation of the program.

“We have an orientation programme for senior students, whom we call SLs. Besides enabling them to teach, we will also develop them into strong leaders. We conduct an orientation session with these students, teach them the programme and find out how many are interested. The selection criteria is pretty basic. In every school, we will not take more than 30 SLs in a batch. For each of the 30, we assign four Learners struggling with their academics. It’s a very personalised learning program. Once the number of SLs and Learners are finalised, we conduct a two-week initial training program for the seniors,” says Divanshu.

Content, method of teaching and understanding what a teacher does, are the three facets, Involve Learning focuses and trains the senior students accordingly.

Adding to it, the Foundation also conducts a bi-weekly leadership programme for SLs, where they are given material to enhance whatever skills they need during teaching. It is a continuous process of teaching and learning throughout the year. The learners remain the same in the following year and student teachers will be replaced with a new set.

Outcomes

Divanshu claims that there are no other programmes, like his foundation, where student get to practice and hone the non-academic skills. He said that they would teach the students—responsibility, communication, problem-solving, social and emotional intelligence, adaptability and resilience,” claims Divanshu.

“Most of the students have been constrained in a stale environment. But, the moment you bring them into a classroom, where someone just two years older is teaching them, the entire dynamic changes. The learning is personalised, and they engage with what is being taught to them, which increases their motivation to learn,” he adds.

The Foundation was able to successfully motivate around 65% of over 800 Learners. Adding to it, they have developed 150+ SLs from 8 schools, who are now all set with great communication skills, social and emotional Intelligence, and organisational skills.

Involve Learning Solutions is backed by Singapore International Foundation, N/Core (Nudge Foundation) and Cisco. It also has Ujwal Thakar (Ex-CEO Pratham), Lakshmi Narayan (Chief Endowment Officer, APF) and Sanjay Purohit (Infosys Ex-EVP) as their mentors.

“Schools, in general, think very conventionally. To convince them that students require other life skills besides hard academics is a serious task. Once you enter the school, the challenge is figuring out logistics and how teachers see this programme. In no way are we suggesting that teachers in a particular school are incompetent or that our programme seeks to compete with them. We want to help teachers overcome the restrictions they are bound under in their ability to reach every student. Convincing them that our motivation is to take the load off them is a task that consumes some time,” says Divanshu.

The foundation aims at solving a problem in the education as opposed to making money. As it is tough for a single institution to reach all the students across the country, the foundation is hoping to turn this idea into something replicable and scalable.

“The way we design the whole module, using technology to ensure that the entire programme is standardised over certain parameters—programme implementation, content, lesson plans, how day to day sessions would look like and the assessment that would happen for both senior and junior students, among others. We are putting all this onto a tech platform, which we can offer to any profit or non-profit platform working in the education sector. They can integrate our work into their model,” he claims. This is work in progress.

Sacrificing Lucrative job offers

Aiming to make it big with the foundation, Divanshu, along with his friend Samyak has rejected several big job offers. Divanshu left a whooping Rs. 21 lakh per annum job offer.

“Very few of our education models have ensured that a student-driven learning process, which makes them capable of doing something beyond books. If we can drive peer-learning systems throughout the country, the whole tuition system will go for a toss. Expensive tuition centres are exploiting the parents fear that their wards aren’t getting extra attention at school,” Divanshu says.

“Also, there is a lot of talk of making students into future leaders. But all these initiatives at the school level are limited to workshops. My understanding is that if I have to develop problem-solving capabilities within you, I can’t tell you that ‘problem-solving is this and now you go and develop it on your own.’ You need to practice it over a long period of time. This is precisely what we at Involve are doing,” he adds.

By 2022, he is further aiming to empower 20,000+ Learners and 5,000+ Student Leaders in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, believing that his concept would bring the major and much needed transformation in the education system.