Case Study- Glow & Lovely Foundation
Challenge
Glow & Lovely Foundation is a Unilever initiative that aims to empower 5 million women across Asia and Africa through knowledge, skills and career guidance. English Edge believes, there is a great need for an initiative to provide training to young women to enhance their skills and provide them with career guidance. Given that the objectives of FAL and EE are aligned we proposed a collaboration to train 1000 girl students, in the state of Rajasthan, studying in government colleges, in English language and workplace readiness which would help them build their career. A 30 day pilot of the program targeted at the Government girls’ colleges in Rajasthan was launched in January 2018
The participants in this program were from low-middle income, rural
households. These are kids who are at not just economic but social and education disadvantage which takes away their confidence and enthusiasm for activities that try to bring them into the mainstream. Most of the girls had their schooling in a Hindi medium. There were 2 biggest challenges-
1. Getting a good quality trainer for a 30 day program in these remote locations.
2. Delivering a standardized program across all 10 locations without hampering the effectiveness of the program.
Discovery
English Edge crafted a tailored program for the target student. The intent was to make the program such that it not only teaches English but also helps build students’ personality, confidence and communication skills. Keeping the duration and learner’s profile in mind, an 80-hour English Language and Communication skills program was divided in the following areas:
- Elementary skills : Basic Communication bilingual – Hindi to English
- Basic Communication English to English
- Interview Preparation Skills
- English For Specific Purpose
This specific sequence was defined to move students from “lacking confidence” to “confidently incorrect” and then focus on building “correctness”. Therefore, the program started with focus on
building English conversation skills by using a vernacular bridge and then focusing on day to day English and finally preparing them for the real world by building interview skills.
Apart from the above mentioned subjects the goal is also to empower and train teachers/trainers in education-technology modalities so that a seamless functioning of this program can take place. In this particular project EE constantly managed:
- Hiring of trainers
- Handholding of weak trainers
- Rotational webinars for continuous referencing
- Content delivery for learners
- Maintaining desired flow of activity
- Continuous monitoring of results and translating numbers into qualitative judgments
- Measuring learning effectiveness
- Location and Logistics
The program was run as thirty 3-hour sessions at ten centres with 100 students. The sessions were preceded by a pre- assessment and ended with a post-assessment. Both before and during the pilot, we pre-empted challenges and implemented measures for the success of the program.
Approach for Train-the-Trainer (TTT) Program
Focus not just on what to teach and how to teach but also on who will be taught. We helped the trainers understand the student profile and how to teach a new language to this profile. The direction was to focus on breaking students’ inhibition and making them confident and comfortable before talking about grammar AND to provide personalised attention
Student engagement and support strategies
- Innovation in classroom seating arrangement for better participation and engagement; reducing the boredom of the traditional classroom; and provide a sense of being prepared for the professional environment
- Local activities and local context (directions to the temple, familiar names, )
- Access to the content and practice activities for the session on the FAL online platform and mobile-app
Continuous monitoring and action
- Addressal of technical infra challenge at the colleges by conducting pen & paper
- Collaboration with FAL for designing the student and principal feedback forms
Audit of sessions and addressal of gaps / deviations
- Sitting through running sessions to identify deviations from the defined approach
- Capturing student feedback on training and trainer
Video-based assessments
- Video-based pre- and post-assessments to ascertain the degree of improvement in the students in the area of reading, listening and speaking
Results: Improvement in Results from Pre to Post Assessments
The results of the pilot indicated that our approach for the program was successful. Over 84% of the improvement was seen in the students from pre to post assessment. This highlights the effectiveness of the approach of continuously monitoring ongoing sessions and the actions taken to address challenges faced at run- time. Our conversation with some of the students highlighted the impact of the program on their personality and life. All of them mentioned that they felt confident of being able to use English to communicate with others.
One student told us that she used to feel ashamed and under confident earlier when introducing herself to others in English. She knew that her pronunciation wasn’t correct. But after attending the program, she could not only introduce herself but also got the confidence in introducing others in a large group. Another student said that this program helped her enhancing vocabulary in day to day life and boosting up the confidence. Her family also felt proud and happy to see her progress and encouraged her to participate more in such kind of programs
