Kaizen in school: Small changes could have an enormous impact

Amazing outcomes can be achieved through tiny improvements by people dedicated to education

- ANURAG BEHAR is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.

It would be inaccurate to call the three rooms in this school 'classrooms.' In most primary schools, dedicated rooms are assigned to classes—Class 1 to Class 5—or shared if there aren't enough; and so they are called classrooms. Here, however, the rooms are designated by subject. Perhaps they should be called 'subject rooms.'

Unlike in other schools, when a class period ends here, students move but the teachers stay. The system is not unheard of. It exists in some countries as standard practice and in a few elite Indian schools. But to find it in a government primary school, tucked away in what we might call a 'remote' area, is astonishing. How did this happen?

The head-teacher has been with the school since it opened 18 years ago. A local, he studied in a village primary school before moving to a town for middle and secondary education. Years after founding this school, he found himself reflecting on his own student days. What stayed with him was the monotony of sitting in the same room, year after year. Through his middle school years, his class remained in one room—only the sign outside changed from 'Class 6' to 'Class 7' to 'Class 8.'

That memory sparked an idea: Why not have students move between rooms for each period? Not for any grand educational theory, but because he remembered how dull it was staying in one place all day. He suspected the children would enjoy the little chaos of moving. And so he re-arranged the school.