Providing students from lower income backgrounds a platform to enhance their critical thinking skills, practice public speaking and develop a global perspective

Overview
During my Teach For India Fellowship, I spent a great deal of time with underprivileged students in the slums of Mumbai. These students had great potential but often lacked the opportunity and resources to help them cultivate the skills needed to succeed later in life. Two other Fellows and I, who had all participated in Model United Nations during school, teamed up to implement a similar program at TFI to give our students a platform to enhance their critical thinking skills, practice public speaking and develop a global perspective. Being the first of its kind in Mumbai, our program ranged from designing the curriculum to finding sponsorships and ultimately executing the Conference.

Role
Research, Design & Curriculum Development

Organization Teach For India

Find us online
#tfimun
‍TFIMUN
TFIMUN Pune
TFIMUN Conference

Student's gather to get to discuss their proposals

Challenge

Creating an accessible program that provided students a safe space to practice public speaking, critical thinking & develop a global perspective.

We moved forward being mindful of the following

  1. Learning Level
  2. Conference sponsorship & logistics
  3. Parents participation
  4. Scalable implementation

Solution: TFIMUN Program & Curriculum

Teach For India (TFI) Model United Nations (MUN) curriculum was a result of testing 3 iterations across 4 classrooms. The final program and curriculum was implemented in 36 classrooms across 2 cities.

We integrated the MUN curriculum into their existing school curriculum and sessions were held over a course of 5 units (about 5 to 6 weeks each). Each unit (mentioned below) focused on a different council and one agenda that ultimately would be discussed at the main conference.
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Unit 0- Introduction to the United Nations (UN)
Unit 1- United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP): Water Disputes
Unit 2- United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC): Refugee Crisis
Unit 3- United Nations Security Council (UNSC): China Border Dispute
Unit 4- United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) optional
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Distribution of syllabus was via Google Drive to the fellows & volunteers, who then projected or printed it out for the students.

Help & Impact

  1. Partnering with college level MUN participants allowed us to provide knowledgeable volunteers to assist teachers
  2. We initially provided weekly checkin, moved to biweekly and then monthly
  3. Study guides and procedures were simplified to suit the understanding of the children - for initial sections we provided the same information in 2 different levels
  4. Impact was measured against a rubric which was created in accordance TFI's rubric and through videos

My role & responsibility

Developing the Program & Curriculum (2013)

  1. Orchestrated open forums with stakeholders about students’ aspirations and opportunities
  2. Conducted longitudinal surveys for Fellows to evaluate learning levels
  3. Organized and ran mock sessions
  4. Explored global precedents to develop program framework
  5. Wrote the UNHCR study guide and guided fellows through lesson plans

Conference Preparation (2013)

  1. Negotiated with institutions for sponsorships and collaborations
  2. Designed logo, t-shirts and marketing collateral for the program
  3. Responsible for logistics including teams, photographers and volunteers for the conference

Potenital App Exploration (2016)

  1. Executed 15 interviews to identify users
  2. Created storyboards
  3. Explored accessible technology for students - ended up not being as scalable and the idea was dropped

Outcomes

  1. We had 600 students participate in the program across 2 cities, and conducted 3 mock sessions. Our students were selected to participate in the InspirED, a conference connecting education leaders around India.
  2. The program ended with a final Conference where only two students from each participating class were selected. We developed a partnership with a prestigious private school, Dhirubhai Ambani International School and secured sponsorship by Larsen&Turbo. The Conference consisted of 3 committees, 100 selected participants and 6 chairs.
  3. 20% of the parents came to watch their children partake in the conference, as compared to the 5% that initially showed interest.

Success

  1. By year 2 students critical thinking scores increased by 80%.
  2. In the 3rd year, we had 3x the number of students at the conference and added 2 more cities.
  3. 9 years later, the program continue to grow, during Covid they just had their first virtual event. #tfimun

Learning

Mindset is a huge problem when it comes to non traditional types of education. That coupled with limited time, resources & accessibility to those resources is even a bigger problem. Designing for children brought me back to the basics of how key simplicity is in user experience.

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