By: Uma Asher

The annual Principals’ Breakfast Roundtable, a highlight of the One Globe Forum, brought together nearly 30 participants from around the world in its 2018 edition. Attendees includedprincipals of reputed schools in Delhi and other Indian cities, as well as top faculty and representatives of the University of Cambridge and St. Mary's University (UK), New York University Abu Dhabi, St. John's University and Hofstra University (US), RMIT University (Vietnam), and the United States India Educational Foundation.

The theme was the role of failure as a stepping stone in the learning process. Salwan Media Ventures CEO Harjiv Singh welcomed the gathering and kicked off the discussion by noting that in India, failure is generally viewed as devastating.

Noora Noushad, Head, Design & Technology, the Heritage Xperiential School, Gurugram, said, “We’re preparing students for jobs that we do not know. The theory that you’re doing well just because you got 90% will not sustain. Failure is not a bug but a feature of the learning process. So we need to bet on design thinking and innovation.”

Nidhi Nijhawan, Regional School Director, Zee Learn, emphasized the need for teacher training. Dr. Neeta Bali, Director of the G.D. Goenka World School, underscored the need for “a drastic change in the mindset of not just the teaching community but also parents to accept failure.” Andrew White, Senior Associate Director, Graduate Business Recruitment, Frank G. Zarb School of Business, Hofstra University, concurred, adding, “The mindset of perfection starts in the home. Parents who expect perfection are probably looking for trouble.”

Sunita Nagpal, Principal, DPS Sushant Lok, said, “Just yesterday, I spent four hours with the parents of seven students who did not clear their pre-board exams. Their question was: what is going to become of this child? They cannot handle this failure.” The parental anguish that she described clearly struck a chord with everyone in the room.

Dr. Zafeena Suresh, Senior EducationUSA Advisor at the United States-India Education Foundation, said the concept of failure was relative. “We stratify students: going to SRCC, 90 percenter, and so on. Our definition of failure must change.”

Meenakshi Sharma, representative of New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) in India, shared a story of a student who appreciated that NYUAD had taught him how to accept failure. She said, “His failure was that he got a B grade for the first time. Seeing my confusion, he explained that he had always got A’s, so for him a B was like a failure.”

Dr. Bennett McClellan, Lecturer, School of Communication and Design, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Vietnam, said it was important to think about levels of failure. “We don’t have the language for fractals of failure,” he said. He pointed out that for every success at even NASA, there multiple failures. The case was similar for sports stars, he said, adding that the important thing was the practice that led to success.

Prof. M. V. Kumar, consultant to the Krishnamurti, Step by Step, and Shiv Nadar schools, asked, “Can we junk the binary of failure and success? It’s no longer relevant. We worry about the fish that cannot climb a tree, and fail to notice the fish that can fly!” While the imagery caused amusement, participants appreciated the serious point he made: “Experiential learning is the way to liberate ourselves. When you invite students to be what they want to be, you’ve taken a step forward.”

Smriti Nanda, Zonal Head (Ghaziabad and Noida), Presidium Schools, added, “Failure can enable children to leap forward in the learning process.”

Quoting the late President of India, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Dr. Timothy Fryer, Secondary Principal, The British School, said that failure was the first attempt at learning. He gave examples of how his school tries to foster the spirit of innovation by putting students in situations where they can be creative. “It’s not always easy but we have to try,” he said. He gave the example of camps where students spend three or four days without access to any kind of screen, giving them the opportunity to be creative without technology.

Ms. Sharma raised the issue of how we define success. She said, “Being competitive is seen as an indicator of success, although it’s not true.” Mr. Phalgun Kumar, also a representative of NYUAD, added that people often confused ambition with success. “Would you say the Buddha was not ambitious?” he asked.

Christina Quartararo, Executive Director, The Language Connection, St. John's University, turned the discussion to the challenge of assessment. She asked, “How is assessment done? Teachers are compelled to teach a certain way.” Things could be different, she said, if the assessment didn’t look like an exam at the end of 12 years, but more like an ongoing process.

Dr. Siddharth Saxena, Director, Cambridge Central Asia Forum, and Principal Research Associate, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, sounded a note of caution, saying that creativity sometimes displaced competence, and that this was becoming an issue. “We’re not looking at the value of rote learning, which is too easily dismissed,” he said. He noted that students’ ability to identify and define problems was growing, but their ability to create solutions was “plummeting”, and this trend was evident in the students who enter the University of Cambridge every year. He added that students from China, India, and Eastern Europe performed much better because of their background of rote learning. “We need to think carefully about that,” he said.

Mr. Phalgun Kumar underscored the need for scalable solutions in order to avoid polarization of civil society. “In India we need methods that can work with a 400:1 student-teacher ratio,” he said. “Millions of Indians don’t have access to quality education, so education actually increases inequality instead of doing the opposite.”

Dr. Suresh of USIEF noted that academic assessments were important because they determined college outcomes, and highlighted the gap between what school assessments measure and what colleges want.

Dr. Shailaja Fennell, Director of Research, Cambridge Central Asia Forum, and Lecturer in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, noted that the gap between school and college went beyond assessment. She said schools need to teach to exams, but often students had no idea what to put in their personal statement when applying to colleges.

Ms. Quartararo noted that many institutions, including St. John’s University, were making SAT scores optional for applications, as “gatekeeper scores” were not the best predictors of success.

Mr. M.V. Kumar narrated his own story as an example. He was among the first batch of graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, who celebrated their 51st class reunion in December 2017. He said, “We did not learn much of what we knew from the teachers at IIT. We had the best teachers in 1954, but we learned our life skills through our own lives.”

Mr. Phalgun Kumar added that children were not always free to learn. He said, “Children spend too much time under adult supervision, and this hampers learning. Perhaps we don’t allow our children to be independent because we are afraid that they can do well without us.”

Ms. Quartararo added, “Many students come to us with no life skills – waking up, laundry, basic meals, and so on. Given a little freedom, you make very bad choices, and may say, ‘Thank God my parents don’t know!’ But it’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – if you haven’t given students the tools to take care of basic needs, they will never self-actualize.”