Feedback Is Not An Obstacle, It Is An Opportunity

Teachers must always be the focal point for design. Use cases borne otherwise hazard high risk of existing in echo chambers.

It’s crucial to listen in an unbiased manner with radical openness to both the good and the constructive, because no feedback most often implies apathy.

Teachers have creatively used Rangeet’s Social Emotional and Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) curriculum to teach and enrich hundreds of thousands of children. What we’ve learnt from outreach is that: teachers have expanded the use of Rangeet as a resource for social studies, language and science classes prompting us to create a search function to easily access activities for different purposes bringing joy across classrooms. Teachers use their own experiences in their classroom and we encourage this by asking teachers to share how they tweaked an activity for their particular context; how we can further lighten administrative loads and make account creation and identity verification processes easier; and what additional resources teachers need in the classroom to make the teaching/learning process easier and more effective.

The development and curriculum teams take Rangeet’s community feedback extremely seriously. Because our process focuses on gratefully learning from the community, we actively share how teacher input has real development and release impact. It is vital to reinforce this 2-way communication of feedback and Rangeet’s design/development as a strong living loop which demonstrates that we are not just paying lip service when we solicit feedback.

Innovation through collective teacher engagement is extremely effective. We will continue to learn from our communities because we believe we can only fix inequities in learning with our teachers as our central knowledge partners.

On the Road

We’ve been interacting closely with thousands of teachers across the country in cities like Kanpur, Gwalior, Delhi, Mumbai and Pune. The objective has been to train teachers to use the Rangeet app to teach our SEEK curriculum in their schools or adopt the “My Happiness and Me” workbook series published by Oxford University Press India, authored by Rangeet. We recently held a workshop to implement SEEK in Pune schools, in collaboration with Improving Lives Foundation and Navneet Foundation, sponsored by OmniActive Health Technologies. 

Teacher Well-Being At The Forefront

Teachers have been hit hard by drastic changes in their work environments. Heavy workloads and limited psychosocial support are leading to low teacher wellbeing (OUP / Rangeet webinar 2024). One hears that teachers are apathetic and disinterested in adopting something new due to a lack of time to balance yet another in a long list of tasks. But this could not be further from the truth. The teachers we met were a friendly, passionate group that threw themselves into the many activities we conducted and engaged thoughtfully with us when we talked about the problem Rangeet is trying to solve. 

Community Centric Design

People like to talk about mobile phone penetration in India, and the wide usage statistics of Internet data. However, even in ‘tier 1’ cities like Pune, socio-economic status, occupation and privilege change how well-versed people actually are with smartphones. Many teachers we met didn’t remember how to sign into their email accounts, let alone clear space on their phones for a new app. Rangeet’s mobile app is easy to use. It works with very limited connectivity and battery consumption which teachers valued. It has been built with teacher suggested features such as search, book-marking and sticky notes making class preparation easy. Teachers particularly enjoyed that they could follow the SEEK curriculum as well as use the search function to teach children different subjects using active pedagogies. 

These workshops reaffirmed our commitment to listening, because through this process we ensure our platform and curriculum truly bridges the digital divide, delivering equitable learning opportunities for all.

What are your thoughts? Would love to hear from you!

Originally posted by Simran Mulchandani on the Rangeet blog page here.