Dharmapuri district is situated in the north-west of Tamil Nadu. The district was chosen to be one of STiR’s first six districts in the state in 2018, in partnership with the state government and the Samagra Shiksha. One of the pertinent challenges faced by our team in Dharmapuri district was a lack of understanding about the purpose of network meetings among officials. Although they engaged in all of our activities, many officials were not making action plans based on their learning. A culture of standardised follow-up on the action plans was also missing, which in turn resulted in limited engagement and development of teachers and officials. There was also a lack of ownership. Since action plans were not followed up, this in turn acted as a hurdle to the introduction of new innovations in the network meetings. From early 2020, these challenges were exacerbated by Covid-19.
Our team was clear that we needed to find a way to bring teachers together to ensure peer learning despite the constraints of Covid-19. In consultation with the district CEO, we decided to conduct virtual meetings at cluster level using Google Meet to bring all the stakeholders together to increase the engagement and development of teachers and the officials. We’re extremely pleased to share that the introduction of the virtual cluster level meeting was a huge success and we have made a proposal to mirror these best practices in other districts as well.
Read more about these virtual cluster level meetings and our overall story of change in Dharmapuri in our case study here.
