Growing up in Lucknow as the only child of a single parent, Gaurav Singh was faced with only two serious career choices — an engineer or a doctor. At 10 or 11, he was considered bright and promising. His mother —whom he affectionately calls Jhansi Ki Rani — was often told that her son had the potential to simply walk into an IIT after school.
But as Gaurav approached his teenage years, he realised that he did not want to go to IIT just because he could. The prospect of material success did not excite him. As the years went by, he began to study less, appeared less motivated and performed far below what was expected of him. Gaurav, now 33, says that all he knew was that a conventional career path didn’t mean anything to him. “I wanted to do something meaningful, and none of the usual drivers cut it for me.” he says.
Eventually, he did get an engineering degree from a private college. And although he continued to perform mediocrely at studies, he found that he enjoyed teaching and explaining concepts to his fellow students. After he finished his studies, he joined Accenture in Hyderabad as a coder, where he worked for about a year in a half-hearted way.
It was at this time, in 2008, that he first came across an advertisement by Teach for India in a newspaper. “It was the first thing I saw that spoke to me,” says Gaurav. Here was something that excited and motivated him. He applied for the job and got it.
Gaurav remembers meeting the almost 100 other fellows selected in the first batch of the programme. For the first time in his life, he met a bunch of people mostly his own age to whom he could fully relate. He almost wept with joy. Gaurav taught for one year at a school in Pune before moving as a Teach for India fellow to a government school in Mumbai. He felt that he had finally found his calling. He had found what he had been looking for.
While working with Teach for India, Gaurav became aware of two things: First, the critical role a teacher plays in the entire journey of a child’s education. And second, how ill-equipped teachers are to hold the attention of 25-30 restless children for several hours a day. “Look at how things have changed for doctors in the last 100 years and how they have changed for teachers. A black board became a white board, but what else,” Gaurav argues.
Again, unlike many other professions, there are no established best practices that teachers can draw upon, he points out. “They are expected to figure out everything on their own while everything remains the way it did 50 years ago,” he says. Moreover, the profession remains poorly paid and women-dominated. “If it were better paid, there’s no reason why more men and women would not become teachers instead of bankers or lawyers,” he says. He was also convinced that any improvements brought into the teaching profession had to be scalable so as to reach every teacher and student over a period of time.
Soon, Gaurav decided he wanted to set up an educational organisation where employees would feel that they were making an impact and having fun while at it. That’s when the idea of 321 came to him. Set up as a foundation, 321 is focused on working with teachers in schools to help them teach better.
What sets 321 apart from thousands of other NGOs is that it operates on the basis of a few foundational principles. When they began to go to schools to work with teachers, Gaurav says they found that teachers were fed up with trainings given to them by NGOs. According to the teachers, these trainings worked best in unreal, simulated classrooms — not in the real world where there were 25-odd children in class. Hence, the first thing that 321 tries to do is win over the teacher. “We never talk down to them and tell them what to do and how to do it. The process is very interactive,” explains Gaurav, arguing that "getting the teacher on their side" is intrinsic to 321's success. There is an effort to ensure that the solutions work both for the teacher as well as the student. "Placing a huge extra burden on an already burdened teacher doesn't work," Gaurav says.
After each training, the teacher is observed in the classroom to make sure that they practise the new method of teaching. "Often, once the training ends, everyone goes back to class and continues to teach in the same way as they did before. We make sure that doesn't happen,” adds Gaurav. The programme itself lasts for a period of two years. Crucially, 50 per cent of the training time is devoted to practising the new methods. On the first or second day of training, teachers are encouraged to assess how the new technique is working. Most react positively when they see the student responding. This is the light-bulb moment for many teachers," Gaurav says.
Ashish Dhawan, founder of educational policy think tank Central Square Foundation, and chair of the 321 board, says that they "apply their learning to solve a particularly sticky problem for low income private schools — that of teacher capacity and motivation." He says that 321 has been "exceptional in comparison to their peer set in building and retaining a high quality team with a vibrant culture and in being data-driven in their approach."
In its seventh year now, 321 currently works with around 2500 teachers across 130 schools in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru. A second programme has been started where 321 is supporting the curriculum. The organisation is funded mainly by grants, foundations and CSR contributions. Schools also pay a small amount depending on their capacity.
Headquartered in Mumbai, the 321 team, which has grown from seven-eight people to around 75 now, has an average age of 25 to 27 years. With a passionately motivated Gaurav spearheading it, 321 seems poised to make a difference to learning outcomes in Indian schools.