Teaching
is a challenging profession. The effort required to tackle various problems in classrooms for an individual teacher is high. This leads to various problems in classroom remaining unsolved. It limits the outcomes in classroom. It affects the well being of the teacher making them feel fatigued and demotivated.
Needs in classroom: A classroom has diverse, evolving needs which require continuous innovation from the teacher to deal with emerging problems. An ecosystem where teachers share their solutions and interact with each other will help in building a culture of problem solving.
Durbar for Teachers - An ecosystem for peer learning & problem solving: The teachers in a school/region come together and share their *solutions with each other in the physical space of school/office on a periodical basis. A coordinator takes care of the operations for a design that enables teachers to come, share, listen to solutions, interact and maximize the flow of individual and collective learning.
Open & Voluntary nature : The teachers who come to share their solutions, people who watch the solutions, the coordinator who takes the effort to set up the necessary operations for Durbar for Teachers do so voluntarily.
*A solution that is shared is characterized by the questions ( What did you see, what did you do, what changed and how do you know it changed)
Improvement of coordinator actions and discovery for improvement : The person who takes up the role of coordinator of Durbar for Teachers in a region works to continuously improve the settings for improvement of sharing of solutions( and their improvement) between the teachers in the space. The coordinators themselves share their solutions with their peers of how they have been enabling Durbar for Teachers in their schools/regions. The learning loops allow for continuous discovery and improvement of Durbar for Teachers.
Scalable : Durbar for Teachers is simple in design, rooted in systems design for continous discovery towards holistic development of the teacher, ecosystem and Durbar for Teachers itself, that can be applied in any context of teachers across the world. It is robust as it relies on networks and local nodes and allows for emergence . It can work practically without any resources. All that is shared is what that exists in the people themselves. At the same time, it allows for external expertise to flow in as well. The space allows for contextual problem solving and emergence of solutions and accommodates diverse approaches to teaching and brings the teachers together to have a strong sense of community.
The open and voluntary nature of the physical spaces and the network of coordinators allows for discovering deeper insights into how things work and improve. After gaining enough behavioral insights, technology could be used to model the system design principles, methods discovered for increasing the overall flow, effectiveness and efficiency.
System effects of Durbar for Teachers: Durbar for Teachers is designed on the Systems Thinking paradigm and affects various dimensions of the teacher, student and the classroom holistically.
