(Apologies to Dachis Group, David Armano, Peter Kim et al.!)
As I grudgingly got up this morning to attend an orientation session at my son’s school, I never knew that I’d end up blogging about the experience…let alone drag social business design into it. The grudge was due to the incredibly beautiful Bangalore weather, by the way; drizzly, cloudy and chill!
The orientation was for parents of children who are moving from KG to standard 1 (called Prep 1, in this school). I was quite disappointed that they started explaining the difference in curriculum with a powerpoint presentation – after a week of doing tons of presentations on powerpoint, the last place I want to see one more was in my son’s school.
Thankfully, the presentation was very focused and explained the kind of teaching and curriculum our son would be exposed to in the next year. The only thing I can add to express how impressed I’m with the school is the fact that even I, as someone who has hated education in any regimental form all my life, would have loved studying in this school!
Presentation over…it was a free flowing discussion with the parents on various topics, including the touchy topic…fees! Here’s where the school completely differed from any other school I have personally studied/ interacted.
The session today was conducted by two teachers/ coordinators and not the headmisteress/ principal.
They had – seemed to have – all the authority to face and answer any kind of question from the parents. In fact, they took turns answering questions and it really looked like they were all adequately empowered to answer sensibly.
One of the parents (the dad) had a HUGE issue with a particular facet of the fee (it was about next year’s session, for which parents were asked to pay advance annual fee by the end of November, as a sign of acceptance of continuing in the same school). This particular dad was livid that the school treated them with an ‘ultimatum’ (to quote his own word) to show their loyalty, that too so early (8 months in advance!).
The teachers present handled the situation really well, even as the outraged father was speaking at the top of his voice, all excited and even arguing with other parents who did not seem as offended as him. He demanded that the principal be available in such meetings to answer queries, for which the teachers present confidently said that they have all the answers he required and if only he allowed them to respond, they’d be glad to address his concerns.
To be fair, the angry dad had a point – what if we pay the annual fee now and the family gets a transfer to another city/ locality (in office/ whatever) – would the school refund the annual fee? Seemed logical and the teachers offered to definitely look into it. That too, without consulting with the finance head or the principal – this was a decision taken by the teachers present and a representative from the admin division of the school.
In my son’s earlier school, I’ve seen the silent reverence with which parents pay the fee. Its usually a queue, and the money is collected by 2 school reperesentatives with a stern demenour and the only conversation is about operational details. No opinion or actual information is shared, ever, by anybody! As for the fee – it’s usually pay it, or move on to another school; no negotiation or discussion!
And here is a school that actually has an orientation session for parents to explain what their children will be learning, differently, in a higher class. A school which has empowered its teachers to confidently discuss this topic with a large group of parents – they discussed every dicey topic that is usually hushed under the carpet in other schools or discussed privately – student-teacher ratio in class, fee hike percentage each year, fee for the school bus, special teaching for children with special needs/ learning difficulties – you name it, they had an opinion and they shared it confidently.
Parents can get quite unruly in such meetings…emotions can go haywire when children and money are discussed in schools. It did, today too. But the teachers handled it gracefully and confidently – and publicly (at least in front of all the parents assembled today), the very essence of having conversations on twitter!
And the best part – some of the parents had got their kids along and a bunch of such kids were playing very happily in the adjacent room, causing a mild commotion. Not even once did the teachers ‘shush’ them or even signed to them to keep quiet! I was tempted to because I was not able to focus on what they are saying – but the teachers merely continued to speak and speak louder. The only time a teacher did something towards this is go to the kids and spoke to them softly on why they should make less noise.
The kind of respect shown towards children is one of the most important reasons why we chose this school. This was the school that actually has parents vouching for it; most of them actually recommend it vocally!
Why does this happen? To me, its a simple matter of having multiple spokespersons who communicate and stand by the school’s vision. The teachers take so much ownership of not just their core job of teaching the children but also in interacting with so many parents and offering their viewpoints as the school would have.
This, to me, is social business design, for dummies.
I do understand that social business design is a lot more complex and amounts to an actual business transformation, but at the essence of it, sans any jargon, it is this. And the social media that we discuss excitedly these days, is merely a tool that enables some/ part of this transformation for different parts of an organization.
How many organizations do you know that have this level of empowerment? Most of them have specific departments to address very specific areas of operation (for good reason – size and scalability), but the social business design demands that employees (to begin with, not to ignore other constituents) be a lot more evolved and aware about how the business intends to grow and what it’d do to achieve that growth. And, most significantly, how the organization and its many constituents interact with the outside world, of which, potential customers are only a small subset.
I’d love to know how this school manages to create such evolved and empowered teachers (employees). But, to start with, I love the fact that my son is studying here!
After all the glowing praise, it’d be unfair on my part not to name the school, but let me also not make it look like a blatant plug for the school – so here’s the school’s website.
Picture courtesy: RealAbstract via Flickr.