12/22/14, 2:23 PM Educational Excellence, One Child at a Time - TruthAtlasTruthAtlas | Discover who's changing your world. Page 1 of 8 http://truthatlas.com/designing-excellence-one-child-at-a-time/ Tweet Tweet 4 Educational Excellence, One Child at a Time AHMEDABAD, INDIA–This is not the story about somebody who wanted to become a change-maker. It is not the saga of a struggling individual who fought against overwhelming odds to build a personal fortune. Instead, this is the inspiring story of a mother who was committed to a cause she believed in for her child– and had the tenacity, resilience, intelligence, and infectious energy to build an everlasting legacy for children everywhere. What would you do if your child’s school failed to measure up to your expectations? Accept the status quo? Or start a school that met your exacting standards? Instead of enduring the poor quality of her six- year-old son’s school, Kiran Bir Sethi founded the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India, and it quickly became recognized as one of the most innovative educational systems in the world. Even more amazing, PHOTO OF THE WEEK TRUTH ATLAS SPECIAL REPORTS “Alaskan Sunrise” by Alyes Brunke TruthAtlas Specia Reports feature t inspiring people are propelling en movements beyo conception ANAND RAO, TRUTHATLAS SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT • DEC. 27, 2013 • HELPERS, VISIONARIES • COMMENTS (0) • ♥6580 462 Like Like SEARCH ! HOME ○ VIDEOS FEATURE STORIES GOOD NEWS WHAT IS TRUTHATLAS? CONTACT US SPECIAL REPORTS » PEOPLE | SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS | PEACE & CULTURE | SCIENCE & EXPLORATION |
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12/22/14, 2:23 PMEducational Excellence, One Child at a Time - TruthAtlasTruthAtlas | Discover who's changing your world.
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Educational Excellence, One Child ata Time
AHMEDABAD, INDIA–This is not the story about somebody who wanted to become a change-maker. It isnot the saga of a struggling individual who fought against overwhelming odds to build a personal fortune.Instead, this is the inspiring story of a mother who was committed to a cause she believed in for her child–and had the tenacity, resilience, intelligence, and infectious energy to build an everlasting legacy forchildren everywhere.
What would you do if your child’s school failed to measure up to your expectations? Accept the statusquo? Or start a school that met your exacting standards? Instead of enduring the poor quality of her six-year-old son’s school, Kiran Bir Sethi founded the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India, and it quicklybecame recognized as one of the most innovative educational systems in the world. Even more amazing,
PHOTO OF THE WEEK
TRUTH ATLAS SPECIAL REPORTS
“Alaskan Sunrise” by AlyeskaBrunke
TruthAtlas SpecialReports feature theinspiring people whoare propelling entiremovements beyondconception
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she did so without any formal training as an educator—only by a desire to do good coupled with an intensecommitment to excellence. What she created has been acknowledged by experts as a stellar model for theholistic development of children.
“It’s my personal story,” says Kiran. “I just wanted better quality education for my son. It was never myintention to build a big institution that would become world-renowned.”
Her passion for the highest of standards stems from her early upbringing. The youngest of three children,Kiran was born in 1966 in Bangalore, India. Her father, Raghbir Singh Bir, a graduate of the prestigiousIndian Institute of Technology, was a pioneering industrial designer who designed the first indigenouslybuilt lathe machine in India. The entire family would go to his factory and work with him on his projects. “Ifthere was the slightest of mistakes in our technical drawings, Dad would make us start all over again,” sherecalls. Under the tutelage of her talented and perfectionist father—who encouraged all his children to becurious, inquisitive, and independent thinkers–she also learned the virtue of putting an all-encompassingeffort into everything she set out to accomplish, whether for biology projects in middle school or designinga curriculum decades later. “Excellence was the only language I knew,” she says.
Influenced by her father, Kiran attended the National Institute of Design (NID), the premier college fordesign majors in India. “I fell in love with the place,” she says. “It was bright, windy, open, and verywelcoming.” Her experience there helped shape her thinking as much as her upbringing did. “I learned atNID from my seniors and faculty that there was no dogmatic hierarchy. No one had any hesitation to helpbuild others’ ideas,” she says. After graduating with a degree in visual communications, Kiran set hersights on becoming a designer of customer experiences. “I wanted to get myself involved in the whole partof a design,” she explains. “From landscaping and ambience to how a customer is greeted and how phonecalls are answered to how food in the restaurant is presented, and everything that constitutes an
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experience for the customer.”
Once she became a parent, however, and her son was old enough to go to school, Kiran was shocked bythe mainstream school system’s conspicuous absence of the qualities instilled in her as a child. “Mostschools don’t stimulate children to develop empathy, or give them freedom to express themselves andfearlessness to ask questions,” she says. “It’s always about what not to do and what not to say. By thetime a child turns fifteen, all his natural talents are completely eroded.”
“Call it my naiveté or my confidence that I could do a better job than the others, I never thought about theenormity of the situation. I just needed to change my son’s experiences. The very fact that every day myson was told by an adult that he was not good enough was depleting the trust he had in others andhimself,” she says about deciding to home-school him. It was a decision that soon changed her life.Despite being told from many of her contemporaries not to rock the boat, Kiran never accepted the factthat there were no other options. “There are always choices. I have grown up believing that I have achoice to do what I think is right,” she says.
Kiran decided to travel around India with her son, seeking out the best schools and then teaching herselfvarious methodologies. When she heard about a new school in her town, started by a group of five youngmen fresh out of business school, she was instinctively drawn to them. “These young idealistic boys hadgood intentions, which was a great starting point,” she says. Her son was admitted as the first student,and, much to her surprise, she was offered the job as principal. “In less than a year, it became clear to methat these five people who knew nothing about running a school were doing a much better job than allthose people in the business for twenty years,” she says. She realized that a good school was all about analignment of good intentions with action.
Kiran soon decided to start her own school in a house she and her husband had built but hadn’t yet moved
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into. On December 18, 2001, she publishedan advertisement in the newspaperannouncing its opening, and eighteen peopleresponded. When she was eagerly preparingto take the first group of parents on a tour,disaster occurred on January 26, 2002. Oneof the largest-ever earthquakes in the region’shistory struck, causing widespreaddestruction. In addition to the damage to herbuilding, many parents and teachers wereseverely affected. A state of emergency was
declared, and all activity in the entire state of Gujarat came to a crushing halt. The process of recovery andrebuilding was slow and painful, yet Kiran was undaunted even when many tried to dissuade her to giveup before she’d even started. “It was a promise I had made for myself. It was a moral responsibility I hadsigned up for,” she says soberly. Finally, the school was able to open in June 2002 with 26 students.
Over the next seven years, Kiran continued to study different teaching methodologies while runningRiverside; her design training helped her create a curriculum that could be adopted by teacherseverywhere. “I didn’t want anyone telling me what I should be doing, because it was my story, and thechildren would teach me what I had to do. In education, every day you need to do better. That’s thefoundation on which Riverside is built.”
Since its formation, Riverside has grown way beyond its original vision of satisfying one mother’s need forexcellence in her child’s education. The school now has 374 students and 56 teachers, and schools in 36countries embrace Kiran’s concept of “Design for Change” – a four-step process of feel, imagine, do, andshare. Students are given a free rein to feel and think about what bothers them, brainstorm ways to makeit better, implement the act of change, and share the stories with others. As a first step, students aresensitized to local issues as they are taught about their communities. Then they identify the peopleaffected by problems as well as those who are a part of the problems. Next, they are asked to speak withthe people involved, opening their eyes to specific issues from a practical perspective. For example, ahands-on lesson about the evil practice of child labor was made real when the students were exposed tothe harsh environment of an incense-making facility.
As a second step, students look at ways in which situations can be changed for the better. They areencouraged to think boldly, creatively, and on a large scale. Teachers assist the students, letting thechildren take the lead in creating easily replicable and long-lasting solutions to the problems they wouldhave recognized and experienced firsthand.
In the third stage, the students work together to make their ideas a reality. They learn to becomemanagers and workers on their projects by deciding how many people they need, the time the project willtake, the resources required, the budget, and how to raise the money.
The fourth step is for the students to proudly share their success stories with the world. Their hard workand developing skills transform them into confident leaders and empathetic team players.
Kiran’s model has become the new mantra for many students in schools far from Ahmedabad. Fromteaching adults how to read and advocating against child labor in India to getting their own bike lane inLancaster, Pennsylvania to raising awareness about packaged food in Bhutan, children in schools all overthe world have become the torchbearers of this flexible concept.
“It was always meant to be an open source. When people call us, we readily share the design concept withthem, and allow them to apply it in their local situation,” says Kiran, adding that the Design for Change
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framework integrates well into service-learning curriculums anywhere in the world. “It’s all aboutempowering students with the confidence, compassion, empathy, and ability to find solutions to their mostpressing community challenges.”
Kiran is a well-deserved recipient of The Rockefeller Foundation Innovation award, is a fellow of the U.S.-based Ashoka Foundation that recognizes outstanding social entrepreneurs, and a recent winner of thePatricia Blunt Koldyke Fellowship 2013 in Social Entrepreneurship.
“I am lucky to have been surrounded by excellence, at work and at home,” she says with a wide smile. Herhusband, Geet Sethi, is a nine-time Billiards world champion. “He fully well understands what passion,madness, commitment, and excellence is all about.”
Photos courtesy of Kiran Bir Sethi
Want to get learn more?Riverside is the amalgamation of an approach to learning that is embedded in common sense and avibrant research centre for school education. At Riverside, insights from cutting-edge research are turnedinto working models of pedagogical practices with a single-minded focus – student well being. Since 2001,Riverside has developed, implemented and shared a unique curriculum that is proving to be thebenchmark for providing a no-compromise school education of the highest quality.
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