Kक्षा [Kaksha]

I am an Economics and Finance major from Ashoka University who has always loved stories and reading. Straight after completing my undergraduate degree I decided to join the Teach for India fellowship as I had always been interested in working with children from low income communities and had been involved in running a similar program at my university as well. My love for reading and belief that stories have the power to influence individuals greatly led me to co-founding Kaksha along  with four other Teach for India fellows. We noticed novels had greater depth and nuances than the traditional school textbooks and could help students grow immensely if only they had access to them. So we decided to go ahead and attempt bridging the gap.

Kaksha is committed to solving the problem of education inequity. While teaching in low-income government schools we noticed that the curriculum in schools was not sufficient to spark interest, excitement and curiosity to learn more in students. We are proposing to solve this problem through novels. We create rigorous learning experiences based on novels that focus on knowledge, skills, values, mindsets, awareness and expression. Teachers can sign-up to receive our resources and take the magic of novels to their students. We believe in experiential learning and try to ensure that students learn by doing and not just by passively reading. Through this we create two-fold access - to learning experiences (curriculum) for teachers and to novels for students. Kaksha could elevate humanity by creating responsible and aware individuals who are above all good human beings who strive to be better versions of themselves since they love to learn and grow.

Our problem statement is: “How can we foster love for learning in children while their textbooks can’t offer sufficient depth and excitement?” While conducting a survey with 100 educators across India, we found that 96% of educators felt that there was a need for novels in their classroom, 30% had begun teaching a novel before, and 63% out of them could not finish it due to scarcity of time to plan, scarcity of time to execute and other reasons.

Research shows that children who read are more likely to attain skills like vocabulary, general knowledge, a better understanding of other cultures, decision-making, enhanced social skills, etc.

Children from low-income communities face a lack of access to novels largely due to their socio-economic background. Additionally, not all government schools in India have libraries, and the ones which do are usually filled with academic textbooks and barely any storybooks. 

Teachers in Indian government schools are often overloaded with additional responsibilities which leaves them with very little time to create customized curriculum for their students, even if they want to. This is where Kaksha comes in to fill the gap and share our resources with them to give students access to novels. 

We select a novel, which may be different for elementary and secondary students. We analyse it with our team and identify the key knowledge, skills, values and mindsets that can be learned through this novel. We then create learning experiences based on the novel that are deeply rooted in experiential learning since research shows students learn better by doing or experiencing. We ensure to have many activities which give students a chance to express what they feel and their opinions. We also compile all the illustrations from the book as well as any printable resources we mention in the learning experiences to ensure everything is available in one place. We then invite teachers to sign up to execute our resources in their classrooms.

COVID Response: Creating virtual learning packets (resources) for novels which teachers can send directly to students or use in a virtual classroom.

Our project serves two communities:

The Student Community - students aged 7 - 16 across low income communities. Our team has directly worked with them, teaching in classrooms, for 2 years and is actively trying to understand their changing needs. We are conducting surveys to ask kids about their reading preferences to cater to novels which they are interested in. We are helping them access novels which they may not have otherwise had access to.

The Teacher Community - teachers teaching in low-income schools who don’t have the time to create customized curriculum for their classrooms. We conducted a survey with a 100 such educators who felt there was a need for novels in their classrooms but not enough time to plan for it. We hope to bridge this gap by giving them resources they can directly execute in classrooms with little to no preparation required.

Students from low-income communities are traditionally left behind as they don’t have the opportunity to go to the elite schools which have high academic standards and focus on holistic education through various opportunities like reading or sports. They don’t have access to books nor the opportunity of engaging with novels. We want to bridge the gap between a private school experience and a government school experience. Our learning experiences for novels focus on holistic development aimed at evolving knowledge, skills, values, mindsets, awareness and expression in students. We hope these students in turn spread awareness in their communities as well. 

One of our co-founders, Shruti, felt that the curriculum did not offer students the path to grow holistically, as learning outcomes were only result oriented. As an experiment, she thought of sharing with her students her favourite novel, Tuesdays with Morrie, and developed a curriculum based on it focusing on kindness and compassion. Students who could not read their textbooks fluently due to low reading levels, two months later showed improvement in reading levels and were also kind and compassionate towards each other. She reached out to other educators to help her solve this problem of holistic learning. Kaksha was born with the vision to make holistic resources easily accessible to teachers to enable them to bring holistic development to their classrooms. Our team brainstormed and decided that novels were a great idea to inculcate holistic development and ran a lean pilot with a group of 7-8 children using our curriculum based on ‘The Little Prince’ by Exupéry. The insights we got from our pilot helped us develop a rubric focusing on knowledge, skills, values, mindsets, awareness and expression and love for learning to gauge student growth and further strengthen our vision of developing curious and aware individuals. 

I have always loved reading and stories and the highlight of my school week was the library class where I got to pick a new book. I loved challenging myself and picking up tough books to read and trying to finish them as quickly as possible to be able to pick up another book. Books were a way to escape into new worlds for me. I also started frequenting a club library and would borrow 6-8 books at a time. Being so fond of reading books, I have seen the benefits of it as well. Reading improved my vocabulary, made me aware of other cultures and stimulated my imagination and creativity. I taught 32 second graders in a government school in Delhi and made a small library corner in my classroom. I saw how excited the students were to have access to books. Many students would spend their recess reading books. I then asked them if they would like to read a novel with me and they were extremely enthusiastic about it. I believe students want to read, discover and explore. They are naturally curious and it is our responsibility as teachers to give them access to novels and books. 

Our team is well-positioned to deliver this project as we bring together a variety of skill sets. We have a history major, philosophy major, economics major and an MBA graduate. We believe this variety helps us understand different perspectives better in order to create a holistic curriculum. All of us have also worked on the ground with students for 2 years during the Teach for India fellowship program. We taught different classes ranging from grade 2 to grade 10. This helps us ensure we make our learning experiences accessible to all students. This also helps us contextualise the learning experiences to ensure that students relate to them and enjoy them. 

We also have 2019 Teach for India fellows who have joined our team this year and will help us work with Teach for India classrooms. We believe we can leverage the Teach for India classes to begin spreading awareness about the effectiveness of Kaksha and then once we have more evidence we can take it forward to different stakeholders. I personally believe that no one can understand the needs of the students better than their teachers. 

Teach for India has a mini incubation program, for projects that fellows decide to take up, to help them manage their projects better. However, they only pick 8 projects for the incubation program.

Two months before the actual pitch, there was a practice pitch round. Team Kaksha pitched our idea to the panel. We got mixed reactions. One of the panelists even went as far as to say that our project was currently a ‘shit sandwich’. The consensus was that we were too unclear and needed to refine our problem statement.

This definitely hit us hard but we decided to take the feedback in our stride. Over the next month we conducted a lean pilot to ensure our solution was backed by evidence, did some research, conducted a survey and refined our problem statement. It was difficult to coordinate since we had to do this during the summer holidays when everyone was in different places but we persevered. It was all worth it when we left the panel had no questions for us during the actual pitch. The same panelist who had earlier called our project a shit sandwich, now said that he would put his money on this project!

During the Teach for India (TFI) fellowship, I was leading a class of 32 second graders. It was extremely gratifying to see their parents' trust in me. They would be willing to put in any extra effort I asked them to. It was because they saw the work I put in with the students and they could see the difference in their students. Hard work is an important part of leadership in my opinion, it signifies leading by example

Kaksha recently opened sign-ups for new TFI fellows to join our project team. Due to COVID we have only had one in person meeting. This meant that the new members didn't feel as connected to the team even though they had a strong purpose of joining. They raised many concerns and a couple of them were of the verge of quitting. Our team scheduled a call with them to talk it all out. I quickly understood there had been a lot of misunderstandings and steered the conversation to discuss everything and also come up with solutions at the same time so that miscommunication could be avoided in the future. 

Until recently, we were working under Teach for India as a project. However, now we are trying to take our project forward and turn it into an organisation which has some sort of revenue stream to ensure our operations are sustainable and do not rely solely on funding especially since we know funding is difficult to come by in these tough times.

We believe our idea is simple yet efficient. It bridges the gap faced by educators between curriculum and holistic development and the time crunch to plan for a curriculum they truly believe in and want to teach. With our project, we aim to reduce planning time for educators and maximise activities and fun for students. We believe it is a fun and simple way to inculcate knowledge, skills, values, mindsets and awareness that is required to navigate the turbulent times faced by humanity with compassion and innovation. 

We have already impacted 45+ teachers and 1200+ students.