[ Beatrice Chopra ]
A dedicated pre-primary teacher in Deomali, Tirap, is making waves with her innovative approach to early childhood education. Chajo Lowang, or Chajo Ma’am, as she is affectionately known, has developed unique teaching methods that are significantly improving student engagement and learning outcomes in her community, with support from the Adhyayan Quality Education Foundation (AQEF), in collaboration with the GE Shipping CSR Foundation.
Key highlights
Lowang has implemented creative teaching techniques, including play-based learning, audiovisual aids, and storytelling to captivate young learners. Her students have shown marked improvement in critical thinking, problem-solving skills, confidence, and classroom engagement over the past year.
Lowang’s personalised approach includes regular assessments and curriculum modifications to accommodate diverse learning styles. Her dedication has earned the trust and respect of parents and guardians, strengthening community bonds.
She cites former Deomali ADC Vishakha Yadav as a source of inspiration. This underscores the importance of supportive administrative figures in motivating and empowering teachers at the grassroots level.
Lowang’s innovative methods were developed over months of dedicated effort. “To improve teaching for pre-primary children, I have adopted several pedagogies, like play way, audiovisual, showing cards, story telling, etc,” she explains.
Her ultimate goal reflects her commitment to holistic education: “My goal is that every child should be able to read and write, become a good person, achieve success, and contribute to society,” she says.
About AQEF
The AQEF is a Section 8 company (CIN No U74999MH2015NPL266864). Co-founded by Ashoka Fellow and Qimpro gold medal winner Kavita Anand, the Adhyayan Foundation is a seven-year-old capacity-building organisation dedicated to improving the quality of educational leadership and learning outcomes through leadership capacity-building, evidence-based school reviews, and data-driven professional learning communities.
We have worked with the DoE, Goa (across 770+ government schools; 11,000 teachers); Samagra Shiksha in Tripura (across 1,440 government schools); DoE, Arunachal Pradesh (200 government schools); the Nagaland school education department (1,900 government schools); The Delhi education department and MCD (150+ government schools);the Karnataka rural development & panchayati raj department (1,300 public libraries), and several civil society organisations for various projects.
Our work has been supported by the Tata Trusts, the ATE Chandra Foundation, the SBI Foundation, the Cipla Foundation, and GE Shipping, among others. The World Economic Forum recognised our work as one of the Top 50 last-mile responders in India during the Covid. (The contributor is programme manager, AQEF, Mumbai.)
