Centre For Learning Resources

Centre for Learning Resources (CLR) is a Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) located in Pune, India. It works with the goal of improving quality, rather than quantity, of early childhood care and development, early childhood education and elementary education of the rural and urban disadvantaged children in the country. It also works in collaboration with government agencies and NGOs engaged in the same field.

HistoryEdit

CLR was founded in 1984 in Pune, India with a vision to enhance development of children in disadvantaged communities and to fulfill their right to a good education. It is a non-profit educational institution of The Society For Educational Improvement And Innovation which is registered under the Societies Registration Act of 1860, the Bombay Public Trust Act of 1950 and the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act of 1976.

Areas of workEdit

Since 1984, CLR has been working in the fields of Early Childhood Care and Development, Early Childhood Education, Elementary Education and the Teaching of English in Maharashtra and other states in India. Additionally, CLR works with post-secondary youth literacy too.

Why We’re HereEdit

A large majority of children from under-served backgrounds in India are deprived of optimal levels of care and good quality education in the early years, as well in elementary education. The effects of this deprivation during the early years often cannot be overcome later in life. Research has established that the development of social behaviour, personality and intelligence occurs most rapidly in the earliest years of our lives. This is a window of opportunity to lay the foundation of health and wellbeing whose benefits last a lifetime – and carry into the next generation.

The quality of care and education that children receive in homes, in the school and pre-school systems in India, in spite of the existence of well meaning policies such as National ECCE policy, 2013, Right to Education, 2010, and National Education Policy, 2020, has been a subject of increasing, well-documented concern. Most interventions aimed at improving the situation focus on the capacity deficits of frontline workers, such as teachers, anganwadi workers and ASHAs. While that is undoubtedly a central concern, we trace the cause to a widespread deficit of effective leadership capacities in large scale systems. The focus on the greater objective in large scale systems is often lost due to various reasons, and many functionaries internalize disinterested roles in a hierarchical administrative culture that renders them powerless instead of functioning as the organisational/ community leaders they need to be. It is difficult for them to invest in capacity-building, create supportive supervision systems and provide meaning and inspiration to those who work there. Hence, the system’s concern towards quality of implementation and outcomes gets adversely affected. This further impacts the largest sections of the underprivileged communities and results in millions of very young children being deprived of good quality care and education, school dropouts and dismal learning levels in young children. Our work is designed to address these challenges.

What We DoEdit

Our primary goal is to ensure that the large majority of children from low-income urban and rural communities have access to good quality early childhood care, development and education, as well as primary education. Towards this, we design and implement capacity-building programs with government (and non government) organizations towards enabling them to:

Deepen their commitment and focus on their core agenda of development and education
Cultivate a discipline of strategic long-term system-wide planning and implementation of programs
Build a learning culture across the organization, in which each layer of the organisation takes the responsibility of training, monitoring and coaching (Triple Hat Leadership) the next layer in achieving good quality implementation
Build capacities of the organization in three areas important for effective implementation:

Pedagogical leadership
Organizational leadership
Community leadership

Our programs are designed to be medium to long term (3 to 10 years), with a typical size ranging from a few districts to a whole state. Much of our work in recent years has focused on working with systems like the Departments of Women and Child Development, and Health, for strengthening ECCE delivery and parenting education. In the area of primary education, we have worked with Municipal and Zilla Parishad school systems, as well as the Department of Social Justice to develop system-wide capacities in teaching English as a second language. CLR places particular emphasis on capacity-building for early childhood education and parenting, seeing these periods as foundational in the long-term health of the society.

How We Do ItEdit

Theory of Change (How Change Arises)? CLR’s programs are large scale design and implementation interventions, constructed from the needs and context of the ‘field’, and informed as much by the team’s insight and experiences as by theories and findings from multiple sciences such as child development, education, implementation science, applied psychology and organisational behaviour.

CLR creates evidence of effectiveness → CLR accesses and advocates to policy levers → CLR provides Capacity Building for building capacity within large systems → Cumulative and sustained change in large-scale systems that reach millions of deprived children.

Evidence of effectiveness In the absence of much prior exposure to good practice, Governments need a live view of a model site that can demonstrate both the mechanics and the effectiveness of the practice. This evidence of effectiveness is created in pilot sites from within the system, not separate from it; the pilots, therefore, point to the potentialities of the existing large scale system. The evidence is experienced through changed anganwadis and schools, inspired champions among teachers and senior government functionaries at all levels of the hierarchy, empowered and engaged caregivers and healthy and happy children. Our monitoring & assessment processes as well as print and video documentation help codify this evidence.

Capacity-building for building capacity (C-BBC) Even after a government adopts a new policy and a programme to support it, the capacities to implement the programme typically do not exist, simply because it is a new programme. Such capacity-building must take place during the implementation itself, given the usual time and budget constraints. This requires the government to develop new ways of knowing and behaving in at least three areas – a) the technical subject matter, b) the process of leading and managing the change/implementation at each level of the sub-systems, up to the ultimate recipient, and c) relationship with the community. CLR’s C-BBC helps governments develop leadership for large scale programme implementation. It fosters, among people at all levels, discovery of meaning in their work, personal role redefinitions, a sense of agency and competence, and the importance of relationship. It strengthens organisational processes for minimising cascade losses in learning, establishing learning and feedback channels throughout the organisation, incorporating opportunities for frequent shared reflection upon their learnings among functionaries and using multiple cycles of capacity-building. These processes are applied to each of three areas – pedagogical knowledge, organisational behaviour and community relationships.

Access to policy levers Much research has indicated that when policy and political leadership is committed to a cause, change is not only possible but also sustained. CLR and its partners access policy levers (senior administrative officers, political leaders) with the evidence of effectiveness of our approaches. While these efforts must contend with the revolving doors and the shifting political and administrative priorities, sustained advocacy creates the space for the pilots to be extended to larger scales. We have, in this way, gone from working at the level of a lab of a few anganwadis to a block, to a district, to a few districts, to an entire state, to multiple state implementations.

Monitoring and Assessment Monitoring and Assessment (M&A) of interventions is an integral part of our work at CLR. Through ongoing monitoring and assessment of process as well as outcome variables, CLR makes data-driven decisions related to program and implementation design. Needs and context studies, baseline, formative, and endline assessments are routinely conducted during the course of CLR’s intervention

Our M&A processes look like the following:
Needs and Context Analysis	Baseline Assessments
At the beginning of any intervention, a study is undertaken to understand the current context, needs, and gaps in the given location or scenario. Methods for such an enquiry can include focus group discussions, interviews, observations, and surveys. The findings from such studies provide a nuanced understanding of the context and needs, and inform strategic decisions related to the roll-out of an intervention and implementation design.	Baseline assessments are undertaken at the beginning of the intervention. These typically examine process and outcome variables such as learning environments, status of age-appropriate child development, status of subject matter fluency/ mastery, depending on the objectives of the intervention. The baseline assessment functions as a reference point for subsequent monitoring and assessment processes.
Formative Assessments	Endline Assessments
Formative assessments are conducted using mixed methods, to measure both process and outcome variables. Both monitoring and formative assessments provide valuable inputs on what appears to be working, what doesn’t appear to be working, and these in turn, influence program strategy.	Endline assessments are to be conducted at the end of a project. The same process and outcome variables used at the baseline stage are revisited at this stage, to not only measure impact, but also to try and understand all the variables and conditions that influenced the change.

Projects and activitiesEdit

Early Childhood Care & Development

Technical Support to Chhattisgarh Government Agencies for Forthcoming Project in Caregiver Education for Home-based Holistic Child Care and Related Community-based Advocacy: Known as Sajag, this program was started in January 2012 in Rajnandgaon Block of Chhattisgarh. The program aims at promoting holistic based Child-care. Financially supported by the UNICEF and EU, it is a unified effort by various government departments like the Dept. of Health, State Literacy Mission Authority (SLMA), Women and Child Welfare Department (WCD), to promote integrated health care for children with the assistance of CLR. It was originally a one-year program but has been extended for another year till March 2014.

Early childhood education

Observation-Cum-Lab Centres to Demonstrate Effective Early Childhood Education (ECE): Since 2008, CLR has been developing anganwadi centres in Mulshi Block, Pune as model observation blocks for other Integrated Child Development Services (Integrated Child Development Services) and NGO functionaries involved in ECE.
Building Capacities within NGOs-Corporates-Government for Early Childhood Education: CLR is providing technical inputs to Kalike Samruddhi Upakram (KSU) and Community Development Foundation (CDF) in Yadgir, Karnataka and the CSR initiative of Forbes Marshall, Pune that assist anganwadis in providing school readiness support to early-school-going-age children.
Fulfilling the Young Child's Right to Development by Strengthening the Pre-School (ECE) Component in ICDS Anganwadis: Since 2009, CLR has initiated an action research project in Melghat, Amravati District that enables anganwadis across Dharni block to provide Quality ECE to the pre-dominantly tribal population of the area with the goal to demonstrate a replicable decentralized strategy, through capacity building at all levels of ICDS, for strengthening the ECE component in ICDS projects in Maharashtra and other regions of the country.

Teaching Of English As A Second Language

An English Resource Centre for Pune Municipal Corporation Schools: An overwhelming number of young people graduating from mainstream regional-medium schools lack functional English skills. In order to improve Standards of English in government schools, CLR has set up English Resource Centres [ERC] in Marathi medium schools across the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) which aims at improving English speaking, listening and writing skills of students and English – communication and teaching skills of teachers in these schools.
A 3-Year Interactive Radio Course for Teaching Spoken English in Pune District Elementary Schools: Initiated in 2010–2011, an interactive 3-year bilingual radio course “Aamhi Ingraji Shikto / We Learn English” was implemented in primary Zilla Parishad schools across Pune District that has led to substantial listening and speaking skills of these students.^[1]
Yuva English: Funded by Tech Mahindra Foundation, Yuva English is an interactive bilingual course designed to impart Knowledge of basic speaking, reading and understanding English to learners of age group 16–30.
Development of Graded Reading Series in English for Students in Regional Medium Schools: With very little appropriate reading material available for students learning ESL, CLR has developed a set of 12 fiction and non-fiction books that are graded in three levels and can be enjoyed by students of both Regional Medium schools or English medium schools.

ReferencesEdit

↑ "Centre For Learning Resources – "We Learn English", An Interactive Radio Course/Program.mp4". YouTube. Retrieved 4 December 2018.

External linksEdit

[1] "Centre For Learning Resources – "We Learn English", An Interactive Radio Course/Program.mp4". YouTube. Retrieved 4 December 2018.

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