Rashid Sharfuddin
Principal, SelaQui International School, Dehradun

An alumnus of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, the University of Bath, UK, and former housemaster at the top-ranked The Doon School, Rashid Sharfuddin is the headmaster of the CBSE-affiliated fully-residential SelaQui International School, Dehradun.

Degree of satisfaction with shift to the online mode of learning. We were probably among the first schools in the country to switch to the online mode via Microsoft Teams in the last week of March 2020. Colleagues quickly adapted to this new mode of teaching-learning, indicative of our institutional growth mindset. We also took sports, clubs and hobbies to students’ homes and in many cases, parents have become our active collaborators. In fact, our special thanks to parents who found themselves homebound with their children 24×7 — an unusual situation for boarding school parents. But my fear is that virtual classes for six hours daily cannot be sustained.
Nevertheless, we were also lucky that we had secondary students on-campus for almost six months in the academic year 2020-21. This helped to break the monotony of online learning. We were among two boarding schools in India to reopen in November last year with almost 98 percent attendance. But in April this year, we had some Covid-19 cases. Despite this, our parents trusted us to care for their children, and stood by us until government ordered closure of all education institutions. This is an indicator of the faith that parents and students have in the school’s management.

Main factors behind smooth switch to online learning and classes. One of the few silver linings of the pandemic is the time and opportunity it provided to revisit our curriculum and make it more engaging and futuristic. SelaQui’s revised 2020 curriculum promotes inquiry-based, student-led learning and redefines student profiles, teaching resources and assessments. Now, our new, blended learning model consists of synchronous and asynchronous pedagogies to enable self-paced, independent study with integrated formative assessment.

Moreover, regular interaction between teachers to share and design teaching-learning models has been empowering for our faculty. Parallely, online parent-teacher meetings, webinars for students/parents, career counseling sessions, discussions on issues of national and international importance and lectures on mental and emotional well-being have been regularly delivered during the past 15 months.

Community service/staff/student welfare programmes. The pandemic has been hard on all of us and more so for socio-economically under-privileged households countrywide. Our class XII students have devised several initiatives to aid people in need in our neighbour communities. Moreover, the management organised free vaccination drives for all staff members and their families and partnered with the local administration to provide aid to migrant labour. We have also given fee waivers to financially distressed parents and increased the pool of student scholarships.

Future plans to deal with pandemic disruptions. I am certain schools will reopen this year and many state governments have already given the green signal. We are fully prepared to implement our digitally-enabled hybrid learning model with parents as partners in their children’s education.

For the full Cover Story:30 Eduleaders weathering covid tsunami