We bridge the gap between education policy and everyday practice.

At Noldenbirge, we collaborate with parents, teachers, and school principals to field-test education theories at the grassroots level, translating education policy into authentic teaching and parenting practices nationwide. Why does Noldenbirge view this as its calling?

India is currently at a crucial juncture in its history of school education. Despite the Central and State Governments in India allocating less than 3% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to education and there being no significant increase in the school education budget for a long time now, what happens in and around our schools remains a critical national priority for two reasons:

Reason One

We must unlock our Demographic and Gender Dividends

India's demographic dividend began showing in 2005 and could last till 2056, after peaking in 2041. Experts estimate that the phenomenon will last longer in India than elsewhere. In absolute numbers, India will have 1.04 billion working-age individuals by 2030, and our age dependency ratio will be the lowest in our history by 2030 at 31.2%. School-going children make up approximately 26% of our population. According to the UDISE+ dashboard, 127.3 million girls and 137.9 million boys go to schools in our country every day. We expect this number to be roughly equal by 2040. With declining fertility rates and a shifting age structure, more women will enter the working-age group, contributing to economic growth, provided they are healthy, skilled, educated, and empowered. In other words, we are at a juncture in our national history where we must prioritise school education to leverage the potential of our demographic and gender makeup.

Reason Two

We must keep our promises about Sustainable Development Goals.

India adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their 169 targets as our national transformation agenda in September 2015. At the UN Sustainable Development Summit 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi noted, “Sustainable development of one-sixth of humanity will be of great consequence to the world and our beautiful planet. It will be a world of fewer challenges and greater hope; and, more confident of its success”. While aligning our policies and practices with Sustainable Development Goals, India is committed to developing a school system that "ensures inclusive and equitable quality education and promotes lifelong learning opportunities for all." To achieve this goal, we must build schools that facilitate cognitive and metacognitive development, affective and meta-affective development, and psychomotor and meta-psychomotor development in children.

How is India responding to these two reasons at the policy-making level?

India's post-independence education policy documents eloquently reflect our evolving understanding of how our children should learn in school. The Scientific Policy Resolution 1958, considered the predecessor of our national policies on education, ignored school education. School education became a national priority only when we introduced our first National Policy on Education in 1968. However, at that point, the policy focused on bringing all children to school and keeping them there, lacking direction on how we must teach them. Eventually, when we realised that our colonial-inspired approach to teaching children was counterproductive, we decided to redefine it. As a result, our second National Policy on Education in 1986 and its Programme of Action in 1992 revolved around the theme of child-centred education in schools.

Child-centred education in a country where a teacher-centred approach to education prevailed for over a century or more and rote learning was the norm was an unrealistic aspiration. Though the then Central Government came up with a set of position papers to make the process of revamping schooling around child-centred education easy and practical in 1992, our attempts at making school education child-centred confused parents, teachers, and school principals and failed. Child-centred education is about children making decisions about what to learn, when and how to learn it, with little or no adult guidance. As Prof. Krishna Kumar, former Director of NCERT, wrote in Politics of Education in Colonial India, "Patterns of teaching, once established, do not go away easily. They become part of the culture of education." It was extremely difficult for a school system that thrived on control and coercion to teach children to suddenly leave all the decisions about learning to children. Eventually, we diluted the idea of child-centred learning to activity-based learning at the grassroots level. Our second and the third National Policies urged teachers and parents to run before they learned to walk and failed.

Fortunately, the National Education Policy 2020 rectified this error in judgement at the policy level. More than just removing the word "child-centred" from the policy and replacing it with "child-friendly," the new policy advocated for learning-centred classrooms. Besides placing concept-based and outcome-driven instruction at the heart of classroom teaching, strengthening it with experiential and active learning, and layering it with a multi-disciplinary and art-integrated approach, the National Education Policy 2020 proposed two pillars to scaffold the education process in our schools. First, it urged us to build schools as data-driven systems and adopt a systems thinking approach to school improvement. Second, it argued for strong and active parent-teacher-child partnerships that support learning. In other words, finally, at an education policy-making level, we now have greater clarity as a country about how our children must learn in schools.

How is India responding to these two reasons at the policy-practice level?

We liberalised and partially opened up our economy to the world in 1991. It meant that all of a sudden, the Indian economy had to compete and collaborate with the complex global economy to survive. However, there was a problem with our workforce. We learned in schools that never taught us the art of balancing competition and collaboration under teachers and parents who used coercion and control tactics to force us to learn by rote. Our schools relied on enforcing textbooks to promote rote learning. To develop a globally competitive workforce, we thought we had to do two things. First, we had to help teachers learn that textbooks are redundant in a world where information technology is the foundation of an ever-shifting knowledge economy. We brought smartboards to our classrooms and connected them to the world wide web of knowledge so that teachers could share the latest information on what they are teaching with their class. Second, we had to help our children learn to collaborate and work in teams to solve problems. However, our teachers did not know how to achieve that because they mostly knew to read from a textbook and explain what they read. We promoted teacher training that supported teachers to use collaborative learning activities in the classroom and distributed activity-based lesson plans and worksheets to make their lives easy.

Moving from printed content in the hands of the teacher to digital content in the hands of the teacher failed to impact learning in the ways we thought it would. Overloading teachers with training to do activity-based lessons or pre-designed lesson plans did not help us to shift from teacher-centred to child-centred classrooms. By 2014, we decided that perhaps bringing content directly to children instead of teachers would help us bring about the much-needed paradigm shift in education. We started developing and distributing learning apps that children could use to learn without the help of adults. However, learning apps failed to make any significant dent in the school education landscape, and by 2024, we reached a state where investors are scared to bet their money on edtech.

If you pay closer attention to what we were doing from 1986 to 2024 to improve learning in schools, you'll find it hard to miss one critical piece of information: our education policies and policy-practice are far removed from each other. Our education policy talked about making learning child-centred from 1986 to 2024. From teacher training to edtech, our practices never reflected this intention. At Noldenbirge, we kept asking ourselves why.

Why is there a gap between education policy and its everyday practice?

National Education Policy 2020 lists a set of approaches like experiential learning, concept-based instruction, and outcome-driven teaching to redesign our schools as learning systems that build the capacity for lifelong learning in our children through dynamic parent-teacher-child partnerships. However, none of these approaches originated in India. For example, John Dewey, an American philosopher and psychologist, described the concept of experiential learning in 1925. Fifty-nine years later, in 1984, David Kolb, another American psychologist, defined and developed the Experiential Learning Model. Ralph W. Tyler, an American educator, initiated the discussion on outcome-driven learning in 1949 after an eight-year applied education research project involving 30 secondary schools and 300 colleges and universities in the USA. Benjamin Bloom, another American educator and psychologist, and his colleagues started building on that idea in 1950 to lay the foundation for outcome-driven learning as we see it today. Hilda Taba, who introduced concept-based instruction in 1962, was an American architect and curriculum theorist. H. Lynn Erickson, an independent education consultant from the USA, and her colleagues wrote extensively about this instructional approach in 1998 and promoted it in schools worldwide.

While it is true that decades of rigorous applied education research inform all three above-mentioned pedagogical approaches, their American origin is a challenge for the average Indian school teacher or parent. For the past two decades, school educators in India have worked tirelessly to modify and adapt these approaches to make them work in Indian settings. Some have successfully developed Indianized versions, but most of India's 9,483,294 school teachers struggle to understand, much less implement, these approaches effectively in their classrooms. There are three reasons for this.

Reason One

The Culture Challenge

The American educators developed "Experiential Learning," "Outcome-driven Learning," and "Concept-based Instruction" as a response to their socio-cultural realities. For example, for John Dewey, experiential learning was a happy outcome of his reflections on social reforms in the USA. As we have not experienced the same social realities as Dewey and his contemporaries, we are distant from the original cultural context of experiential learning.

Reason Two

The Structure Challenge

American educators developed and practised these pedagogical approaches as responses to the classroom realities of their country. They visualised these approaches in the context of their educational structure, including the number of children in a classroom and the time a teacher gets to spend with their students in a day. With 30 to 60 students per class and 40-minute lessons, the structure of Indian classrooms differs significantly from those in the USA. Consequently, most Indian teachers struggle to practise these approaches in a classroom setting.

Reason Three

The Experience Challenge

Teachers often teach the way they have experienced learning as students. Unfortunately, most of our teachers sat through traditional lecture-based lessons that encouraged rote learning for exams when they were children. They may not have had the opportunity to experience approaches like "Experiential Learning," "Outcome-driven Learning," and "Concept-based Instruction." As a result, they fail to implement these approaches meaningfully in their classrooms.

How can we bridge the gap between education policy and its everyday practice?

From 1986 to 2020, we never tested the relevance, validity and practicality of any education approach mentioned in our education policies to fine-tune its methods to the socio-cultural realities of our classrooms. We assumed that education technology was the answer to all our questions about improving school education and mindlessly imposed it on the schooling landscape. We also assumed that since these approaches are already informed by research, we should not test them in our field again before adopting them in India. Noldenbirge is working on changing this quick-fix approach to problem-solving in school improvement, teacher capacity building, and parent education. At Noldenbirge, we believe that applied education research must be the first step we take while approaching large scale education transformation. We want to collaborate with parents, teachers, and school principals to field-test all the teaching and parenting approaches mentioned in National Education Policy 2020, bringing together developmental economics, behavioural science, cognitive science, social psychology, and design thinking to bridge the gap between education policy and its practice on the ground. We intend to engage in applied education research and develop open social learning platforms for parents, teachers, and school leaders to conduct clinical trials of adult learning models and solutions that facilitate the implementation of education policy.

If you believe in the power of applied education research as the obvious first step in bridging the gap between education policy and its everyday practice, we invite you to support our work. You can donate to transform school education through applied education research space here.