If you are running a school and struggling to increase admissions, there could be three different types of challenges you are facing.

The first possibility is that you have recently started a new school, and you are struggling to get the numbers. You are finding it difficult to attract enough students.

The second possibility is that your school has been running for some time, but over the last two, three, or four years, your student numbers have suddenly started declining.

These are three very different types of problems, and each of them needs to be solved in a completely different way.

The third possibility is that your school has been running for a while, but you have reached a plateau. You managed to grow initially, but now your numbers are not increasing any further.

And here’s another important thing: all these problems will look different depending on where your school is located.

For example, if you are running a school in a Tier 3 city like Meerut, the nature of your problem will be very different from that of a school in a Tier 2 city or a rural area.

Even within the same city, the situation can be completely different.

Let’s say you are running a school in Bangalore. A large proportion of the families in your catchment area might be living in housing societies. They may have migrated from other cities, and both parents might be working professionals.

In such a situation, digital marketing agencies might actually be able to help you generate admissions.

But imagine that you are running a school in Bangalore itself, in an area where families have been living for generations. The dynamics of that catchment area will be completely different.

As a school owner, if you want to understand how to fix your school’s admission numbers, you need to understand all these different variables.

You need to identify which segment you belong to. And this can be a very nuanced exercise.

So, the first thing you need to do is identify your actual problem and then start working on solving that particular problem.

1. Understand Which Admission Problem You Are Facing

Let’s take the first situation.

If you have just started a new school, this is your first year, and you are struggling to get admissions, then you should leave no stone unturned.

Advertise wherever you can. Explore every possible channel. Invest money in marketing. Do whatever you can to create awareness and bring parents to your school.

But let’s say you have already done that.

You worked hard, spoke to people, visited different places, and managed to establish your school. You have reached 300 students, perhaps even 500 students, but beyond that, your numbers are simply not growing.

You want to reach 800 students, but you seem to be stuck.

Your school has a capacity of 1,200 students, but you are unable to grow beyond 300 or 500.

What does that tell you?

It could indicate a problem with the quality of your school.

You might be having conflicts with people. Your teachers might not be happy because you are unable to pay them better salaries. Good teachers might not stay with you for long. They might eventually leave for other schools.

So, the problem might not be marketing at all. It might be something much deeper within your school.

Now, let’s look at the third situation.

Imagine your school was doing extremely well for many years. You had 1,000 or even 2,000 students.

But now, your student numbers have declined substantially.

And you keep telling yourself things like:

“Earlier, things were different. Now competition has increased.”

“DPS has opened in our area.”

“Other big schools have entered the market.”

“That’s why our numbers are declining. Otherwise, our school is excellent. Our quality is very good.”

Let me tell you something.

You are fooling yourself if this is what you believe.

I’m sorry to use such strong words, but the truth is that you are thinking in the wrong direction.

You can still fix this problem. You can still increase your student numbers.

In fact, you have an advantage because you have an established legacy, an existing reputation, and a history of running a school.

If you believe that your declining admissions are simply because the market has changed or competition has increased, you are looking in the wrong direction.

You need to look within your own school.

So, first, identify which of these three situations applies to you.

2. Define Your School’s Positioning

Once you have identified your situation, the next thing you need to figure out is:

What does my school stand for?

What is the identity of my school?

Are we a Montessori school?

Are we a Waldorf school?

Are we a Reggio Emilia school?

Are we a sports-based school?

Are we a military-style education school?

Are we a technology-based school?

Are we a future-ready school?

There are many possible directions you can explore.

You need to identify what makes your school different and what would make a large number of parents want to admit their children specifically to your school.

You cannot have just one positioning and then try to claim multiple different positions simultaneously.

You need to make a choice.

Your positioning should be based on what parents in your catchment area actually value and what they are most likely to connect with.

For example, if you think holistic education is your positioning, I’m sorry, but holistic education is not a positioning.

Almost every school claims to offer holistic education.

Similarly, if you say that you are a K-12 CBSE school, that is not a positioning either. Almost every school competing with you can make the same claim.

You need to choose a positioning that actually differentiates your school from the others.

3. Build a Strategy to Communicate Your Positioning

Now that you have identified your situation and fixed your positioning, the next question is:

How are you going to communicate this to people?

This is where strategy comes into the picture.

And what exactly is strategy?

Most of the people I meet don’t really understand what strategy means.

Let’s take an example.

Suppose you currently have 500 students, and you want to reach 800 students over the next three years.

That means you want to add 300 students.

Let’s assume your annual fee is ₹50,000 per student.

That means you are targeting an additional annual revenue of ₹1.5 crore.

Now, you have a clear objective. You want to generate an additional ₹1.5 crore in annual revenue by adding 300 students over the next three years.

You are willing to do whatever it takes to achieve this.

So, you start exploring all the possible things you can do to increase your numbers.

You might expand your team.

You might try different marketing activities.

Someone might suggest that you pay parents an incentive for referring new admissions.

Someone else might suggest that you offer commissions to teachers for bringing in new students.

Now, what is right and what is wrong here?

That is quite subjective.

My choices might be very different from yours.

Personally, I would not prefer paying parents or teachers commissions for bringing in admissions.

That is my personal preference. You may have a completely different opinion.

I strongly believe in building brand value. If you have created a strong brand, you should not have to pay people to recommend your school.

Anyway, let’s say you now have 20, 25, or even 30 different options that you could potentially implement.

But can you actually do all 30 things?

Of course not.

You have limited resources.

At best, you might be able to implement three or four initiatives this year.

So, out of those 30 options, which four are you going to choose?

And more importantly, which 26 are you going to deliberately decide NOT to do?

That decision is strategy.

Strategy is about making choices when you have limited resources.

You cannot do everything.

You have to decide that these are the four things we are going to focus on, and the remaining 26 things are not our priorities right now.

Every other option will keep tempting you.

Someone will tell you to try this.

Someone else will suggest SEO.

Someone will recommend another marketing campaign.

But you need to make a choice about what you will do and what you will not do.

By the way, hiring a good school principal should also be part of a good strategy.

4. Consistency: Stick to Your Strategy

So, now you have done three things:

1. You have understood your situation.

2. You have defined your positioning.

3. You have created your strategy.

The next thing you need is consistency.

You need to consistently work on the initiatives you have selected.

And you also need to decide in advance which of these four initiatives you might consider changing, and under what circumstances.

You cannot keep changing your strategy every week or every two weeks.

You need to look at the data and give your initiatives enough time to produce meaningful results.

In the world of strategy, a common principle is that you should avoid changing major strategic decisions for at least six months, particularly when you are trying to bring about a longer-term organisational change.

So, I would generally recommend giving your initiatives at least six months before deciding whether you need to change something.

For example, I personally believe that implementing innovation within a school system can be a very good strategy.

If you manage to do something genuinely meaningful in your school, people will eventually hear about it.

But you need to build a mechanism to make that happen.

For example, one of the things I focus on is word-of-mouth marketing.

I think deeply about how to ensure that people actually talk about your school.

Because generally, people are not going to start talking about your school automatically.

You need to create a mechanism that encourages and enables them to do so.

That is what word-of-mouth marketing is about.

It is not simply hoping that people will recommend your school. It is about deliberately creating the conditions that make people talk about your school.

So, to summarise:

First, identify which admission problem you are facing.

Second, define what your school stands for and establish a clear positioning.

Third, identify the initiatives that will help you achieve your objectives, and choose a focused strategy.

Finally, execute that strategy consistently for at least six months before deciding whether you need to make changes.

If you follow this process, I am confident that you will start seeing better results.

And if you ever feel that you need help with any of these things, you can always reach out to me.

For FREE?

Here is an opportunity for you, an astonishing one

Long ago in 2020, I decided to quit School Space to work in Brand Community Building space for Tech Startups

and when I did that, I thought of sharing all what I have learned in Schools for FREE and decided to create a YouTube channel so that I can share whatever I have learned in there.

But just after 3 videos I felt, it was a lot of work and I may not be able to continue creating this content, so that journey of that channel stopped at 3 videos.

Today these 3 videos collectively have more than 50,000 views and the channel has 1000+ subscribers.

And guess what,

I have reenergized myself to create more such videos on my channel and ofcourse here on substack.

If you are a School Owner, feel FREE to contact me, the first conversation is FREE. Write to contact@edmonks.com

🏆 With a legacy of national and international awards, Mr. Thakur brings more than accolades—he brings a mission.
In this conversation, he opens up about:

• The painful truth of what schools are failing to do

• Why value education is the missing piece in today’s classrooms

• How Muni International’s unique pedagogy is reshaping student lives

• What educators and policymakers must do to restore purpose in education

This episode is a must-watch for anyone who believes that education should shape character, not just careers.

📌 Subscribe to 100 Voices in Schools for more powerful voices redefining the future of learning.
💬 Share your thoughts: What values should schools be teaching today?

#100VoicesInSchools #AshokThakur #MuniInternationalSchool #ValueEducation #UNESCOPedagogy #EducationReform #CharacterBuilding #FutureOfLearning #Podcast

💬 What does discipline really mean in today’s classrooms?
Maj Singh shares powerful insights on:

• The core principles of military education and how they apply to civilian life

• Why private schools should consider integrating military values and training

• How discipline, structure, and mindset shifts can help children achieve the “unachievable”

• The long-term benefits for students, parents, and school communities

This isn’t about uniforms and drills—it’s about cultivating resilience, leadership, and purpose in young minds.

📌 Subscribe to 100 Voices in Schools for more bold conversations that challenge the status quo.
💬 Drop a comment: Should military education be part of every school’s curriculum?

#100VoicesInSchools #MilitaryEducation #MajPravinSingh #DisciplineInSchools #MindsetMatters #PrivateSchools #YouthLeadership #EducationReform #Podcast

💡 What are schools doing today to teach financial literacy—and why isn’t it enough?
Mr. Singh breaks down:

• The current state of financial education in schools

• The gaps that leave students unprepared

• What real financial inclusion should look like

• How Pickney Bank is helping reimagine money education for the next generation

This episode is a must-watch for educators, school leaders, parents, and anyone passionate about preparing students for the real world.

📌 Subscribe to 100 Voices in Schools for more bold ideas and inspiring guests.
💬 Share your thoughts in the comments—how should schools teach financial inclusion?

#100VoicesInSchools #FinancialInclusion #DipendarSingh #PickneyBank #EducationReform #K12Education #YouthEmpowerment #FinancialLiteracy #Podcast

A good thing about Uma mam is that she is always ready to share her learnings if she gets a good mentee or an apt disciple. Be one and you can learn whatever she knows, from her.

Here in this episode of the ‘100 Voices in Schools’ show, she shared everything that we asked for.

Many appreciations and gratitude for speaking from the heart.

This was our first episode and we feel this was a blast. We were able top learn so many things from Lata mam around Foundational education and innovation.

I made some changes in my content and it exploded

but then there were these other posts, where I really had a lot of expectations, and they fall flat

and despite these content pieces plummeted, I was still equally proud of them as I was on those, that crossed a lac impression,

and I thought,

what can I do about these topics,

I thought if any such post, with less traction, is able to gather genuine interest from people,

I will write a whole post here on my newsletter.

‘Strategies of Gurukul’ happens to be that topic, where 3 people Neha Pareek, Madhumita Arolker, and Harish Arora, showed clear interest

So, I was willing to write this edition, Strategies of Gurukul, as a bigger version of my post on Linkedin.

But then I realised that the last edition itself was about ‘Missing Ancient Roots from Schools’, so writing this article will put a lot of focus on one single content bucket.

And I decided to write this time about

Schools teach subjects. Who teaches children how to learn?

because this is very close to my heart and I am building a solution (a program for school students) for this only

Imagine . .

You are a child, some 11 year old one

and you are weak at math and you are struggling in your class

Your parents have changed your tuition twice in last one year

but your performance is not improving and then

someone suggests your parents to talk to Mr Anupam Kaushik

an amazing tuition teacher for math for young children

and in just a week, you realised 2 things

that he explains so well that you understand

and your job is to just follow his instructions

3 year fast forward,

and you have got straight aces in math by now

but Anupam Sir only teach till 8th

and you are entering 9th and you are worried, how will you survive 9th

because Anupam sir, who was your strength so far is now your handicap

you are feeling, you will not be able to learn without Anupam Sir

In most tuition / coaching classes, we are teaching them subjects, but almost every place their favorite teachers are their handicaps

Same is the story in School

But in both places some teachers thrive

those who are not teachers,

these teachers are a combination of

a mentor, a coach and a Guru and a teacher

mentor - this person tells your child how to do things, for example how to learn on their own

Coach - this person asks questions to your child that helps them navigate their path of life, here they might understand the need of learning how to learn

Guru - this is the go to person for your child to solve problems, when your child has a guru, one can give them clear directions to come out of a particular situation or to go on a journey, a challenge, a solution

These are the people who are not trying to become the handicap for their students,

they are becoming their strength

If you see the typical distribution

A tuition teacher has a larger possibility to teach some tricks and techniques for learning to keep the faith of the students

but at school, that is missing in most of the teachers

But then comes a special set of teachers, although a very minuscule percentage, they are really passionate about education

these teachers really want to do the right things for children,

they are interested to develop the thinking faculties of your child, real at deep level

they are really willing to be a mentor, a coach and a Guru

but this is not easy for these teachers

They find huge challenges in executing this, because the parents, the management, and even the students, do not care/support their efforts

and ultimately all these passionate teachers struggle the most in school, both emotionally and physically.

while rest of the lot enjoy and get a pat on their shoulder for finishing syllabus in time, their notebooks are checked, the handwriting was good in notebooks,

but these passionate teachers care about thinking, about learning,

If you really want to help your children to start learning, do the following

• Find such good teachers in the school and start supporting them (join our whatsapp community to learn more about how to identify them)

• Start giving highest appreciation for that teacher (even when school management does not ask)

• Inform us about such teachers and we will take them in our community

• Stop sending your child to tuition instead find a mentor, who can teach your child how to learn

And I agree, this is not easy, we do not have straight answers and that is why we are trying to build a community for passionate progressive parents.

Would you be willing to join a whatsapp broadcast list for progressive parents?

Put me on this list

Join 528 Future of School Education Explorers

As you know, I am fascinated by the idea of preparing children for the future.

And for a long time, documents like Future of Jobs Report by World Economic Forum or 21st century skills by Harvard School of Leadership have been the key source for my work.

But since western philosophy is so influenced by Intellect, I was also fascinated by the idea of brain, and so my entire work was around Learning Needs

But then I was hit by the concept of Panchakosha

and I realised, it is not only about intellect, it is also about intelligence or body fitness, or emotional well being, and you see many more things

Now I was more interested in learning How to Learn

and when I discovered 4 Kaal of Learnings, I was overjoyed

Because now I knew, how to make a learning strategy suitable to a particular individual

and then I was able to make more sense out of 4 dimension of our mind

I myself experienced how we learn through Manana and Nididhyasan

I realised, how the western philosophy of Intellect worship is coining negative words like cramming, and a capability is being able to remember things was being presented to us as an ill thing.

Some people can read things and remember it for a long long time, why it is bad?

It is a capability, some have it some might gain it.

Anyways, this was enough for me to dig further

So, now I am building a new framework and in this article, I will talk about that only.

I do not see my framework changing upside down, but now I am seeing everything in a different sequence, I am sure, now it will be more structured and easy to understand

Future Readiness Framework

While you may follow me on LinkedIn to explore my thoughts (or my rants too)

Where I keep posting about the wrongs in school education and a need for change or how parents should participate (like the following)

It was all good as I was busy making the framework to help children

but then gradually Ancient Hindu Wisdom started impacting my thoughts

I learned about How Gurukul Shiksha was structured.

I learned about how large universities like Nalanda and Takshshila were being run very efficiently with very few Acharyas.

Now when I see the Panchakoshas

• Annamaya Kosh

• Pranamaya Kosh

• Manomaya Kosha

• Vijnanmaya Kosh

• Anandamaya Kosh

I realise, how powerful and profound this knowledge is

I learned about Manas, Ahamkara, Buddhi, & Chitta.

I learned about

• Agama Kaal

• Swadhyaya Kaal

• Pravachan Kaal

• Vyavhar Kaal

I also learned about the 5 fundamental skills for human life (Communication, Logical Thinking, Inquiry, Memory, & Physical Ability)

and all this and more is impacting the framework that I was building.

And if you see closely, the new shape of my framework is including new words, it starts from a new point (althought it is still work in progress so I have not shared the whole of it)

Frankly, this new knowledge have immensely helped me structure the whole idea for better in a whole new way.

These ideas are so profound that now I am building a program for school children to teach them these strategies and see what changes in their life.

If you also have a child between 6th to 12th grade, your child is welcome to join this program

The program will be delivered both in online and offline mode.

There will be in total 3 groups

• One for 6,7,8th students

• another for 9th & 10th

• and one more for 11th & 12th.

If you know any parent who would be willing to explore this program, ask them to connect with us through contact@edmonks.com.

Why not share this post with your network, Now

Share

and in case you would like to share your thoughts with me, make a comment and we will connect with you

Join 524 Future of Schools Explorers

So in the second week we talk about connecting with the wisdom from our ancient shastras and I know you must be excited to learn about ‘How to fix the disconnection of our children from our ancient roots?’

and I promise, I will show you the gap and I will give you a very practical strategy too

But before that, I need a help

While our readers are appreciating our content, not many are helping us spread the word about it.

Will you help us spread this content to a larger audience? Can you share this newsletter on your network?

Just go to our leader board and copy the following link

And share it on your LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram, your whatsapp groups, on your newsletter or wherever you think, it will help

and you will be on our leader board as in the following picture and can avail any of the benefits mentioned below

Now, after this we can move to the main content.

The disconnection from our ancient roots

First I will establish the gap and after that I will talk about solution and mind it, the first part, i.e. understanding this gap, might be a little boring for some people.

But it is important to understand this gap clearly before moving on to the second part, the solutions.

And yes, it exists in adults too, however the gap among children is much larger.

The situation at School

So most people think, oh that may be a challenge only in the schools from Tier 1, or at max all top schools from Tier I & II cities, but beyond that the situation must not be that bad.

As I have worked with many schools, I can tell you first hand, a large number of children from even Tier IV cities or from hard core rural strata also cannot tell you the names of the 4 brothers in Ramayana.

And if it would have been only about this, I would have not opted to write this whole article. there could have been other ways to solve that

But the problem is far deeper and we need to spread awareness.

In India, by law, you cannot teach religion at School and the laws are much stricter for Hindus being the majority.

and the problem is that the Hindu Dharma is not a parallel to any Abrahamic religion, so a lot of evidence based science that was the part of Hindu Shastras was also thrown away because of this rule.

Yoga Sutras, Natya Shastras, Artha shastras, Shilpa shastras, Nyaya Shastra, Sankhya Shastras, all are missing from our main stream education.

Now you may say, “how does that matter? we are learning yoga anyways and whoever wants, their children can learn dance or other things too after school”

The first problem here is that you are accepting that it is not the main stream education anymore

and second it is now only limited to either the riches or the people from a specific geography where that shastra is still available due of cultural density.

and that makes this sort of shastra gyan more peripheral. Lets understand it with a few examples

1. The Yoga Meditation Paradox

So, when I decided to opt for Yogasanas myself, I also decided to learn about what shastras say about Ashtanga Yoga

Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana, Samadhi

Now these are not 8 parallels, these are in sequence

You fix yourself morally, discipline yourself, then you come to Asanas and after that Pranayam, so you see Dhyana is a much later stage after first you make a withdrawal of the senses from external stimuli and after accepting to get ready to follow Dhyana.

Samadhi being the last and final thing.

But this new yoga imported from west is almost a fashion where you are doing meditation (Dhyana) without doing breathing yoga (Pranayam)

and are doing breathing yoga (Pranayam) without doing yoga(asana),

Its like, do whatever you like, its your body, its your choice

In this new culture of choice, we are making a mockery of our ancient shastras.

They will tell you, I do not teach Dhyana, I teach Zen (which was in reality just a pronunciation difference of two countries)

but even though it becomes the new fad.

So you see, we need to restore the originality else we loose the essence.

Same way we are lost on Natya Shastra from main stream schools and now you see bollywood fusion with Bharatnatyam.

I am not against the fusions but then we are loosing the originality

and our children feel that these western versions are superior (which are so peripheral by its very nature)

Who will stop it?

2. The Learning Strategies

I wrote a whole article on what Learning strategies have been told in our shastras and I recall, how our readers appreciated this article.

But today, these strategies are totally missing from our mainstream education and students are suffering on information management. Can’t you at least teach these strategies to our next generation?

3. The Metaphors of Ancient stories (called mythology)

I recall a story where it is told that Shanidev has a handicap in his leg and so walk slowly and when you see that in reality, the planet Saturn actually moves slowly

That means our Jyotish Shastra was also very powerful and probably these stories were the way to remember things in an easy manner.

But over time colonial powers, reduced the value of these stories and removed it from the main stream education and now we have lost this Gyan from our mainstream education

If you are able to see the gap, here are a few ways to solve it.

The ways to solve it

I see 3 specific strategies through which creative adults will be able to remove this disconnection from

Make it Fun Game and give them experience

Gamification is an amazing mechanism to create curiosity, reduce resistance, and build connection.

I would very strongly recommend you to play this Rebus Puzzle to get the twist

I have shared this thing with you to augment your thinking muscle, to let you see, what can be done with a little bit of creativity.

At Mokshaverse, we also built Escape Rooms where a child is trying to solve hard core puzzles and in parallel learning the story of Dhruva.

We built Board Games, Card Games, and much more, but then we realised, we want to make it more like an experience enterprise.

We wanted to build a sort of experience to put children into the Sanatan Land, where they can learn Reading Comprehension with Hanumanji or maybe Geography or Anthropology with Shivaji, that is what we are trying to build.

A sort of curriculum that starts with kindergarten.

And you can also do that with your creativity and your innovation.

Share an idea of yours that you can think right now in the comments.

Leave a comment

Give it as Project and Challenge them

The second strategy can be to create challenges.

This can be a very good way to teach them futuristic skills.

Lets say, you give them a project that help them explore the architectures of our ancient temples.

Now not only they will learn about temples, they will learn

• Information Management

• Working in Teams

• Research

• Data Analytics

You see, it really depends on your calibre what you can really teach?

Can you tell me at least one project that comes to your mind and can be given to young children.

Leave a comment

Give them stuff to flaunt

Imagine, you are speaking at an event and you can flaunt that amazing Samskrit Shloka with the audience, how good you feel?

Many people in this world are governed by the sense of being able to create influence, so in case you can help them learn let’s say the fundamentals from ‘Surya Siddhant’ (side note - even you will be blown away by the knowledge available in that) and when they start talking about it on platforms, in house meets, in parties, people will be in awe, how can such a young child can talk such amazing things.

So if they can flaunt, you can flaunt them

Its good brand marketing too.

If some of your child becomes a performer of Odisi at some big stage, if your student gets the opportunity to speak at a confgerence, if the video by one of your students is appreciated by one of the Indic Wisdom Influencer, things will change drastically for your school.

But for that you will need people who can tell you about such wisdom which is still hidden, which is not apparent.

Why not start inviting the authors? Speakers?

If you want to learn more, read this guide

If you want help on any of the above things, write back to me and I can get you everything.

I just want one thing from you, start acting and start doing something at your school. Host a differentiated event, today.

Join 518 School Innovation Enthusiasts

A lot of parents today want to teach Entrepreneurship to their children

Most schools ignore this need but visionary school leaders can observe it and they are at least trying.

But very rarely a school is able to solve this riddle.

They are failing again and again with no remorse.

Here in this article we will help you understand how to teach entrepreneurship to school going children

The First Step to Entrepreneurship education at School

A very progressive school principal asked me, "Sir, I want to teach entrepreneurship to my students but I feel we are missing something, can you help?"

She is the founder principal of a K12 school that started 20 years ago and today boasts to have around 2500 students

I could not believe my ears that someone with such a successful career is still willing to learn.

In my past, I have interacted with several thousand school leaders for training and consultancies purposes.

and I can testify that an urge to learn the new, is kind of missing from the majority of school leaders

As they say, I don't know is the first step to learning and in case you are also a school leader who wants to consider entrepreneurship for their students, the first step is to be a LEARNER yourself.

I dedicate this article to this visionary school leader, who asked this question and who showed this willingness to learn.

The way the workplace is changing, and the way the gig economy is settling down, it is evident that not many people will get the full time jobs in future and people will have to work on their own and if we do not teach them how to do that, they will suffer.

Amidst of the depleting layer of college education, the onus will now lie on the school to prepare children for this sort of workplace.

But the conventional school do not know a thing about the future of workplace. Their whole job has been to prepare children for college.

So these are interesting times, and schools need to adapt to this shift and change accordingly.

The Second step to Entrepreneurship Education at school

A very important thing that a school leader and parent should do is to remove confusion between Startup Founder and Entrepreneur

I see that most schools do not understand this difference and almost all of them fall prey to terms like Incubator, hackathon, design thinking, funding, accelerator, and of the likes

There is nothing wrong about these terms and I am not even saying that you should not inform your students about these things at the school level.

But they are good terms for building a startup and should be shared with only those who may have graduated to this level.

But entrepreneurship is more fundamental. When I asked Shambhu Nath, a PhD scholar at IIM Ahmedabad, what is entrepreneurship education and he said, 'its like a way of thinking to find a problem for a set of people and developing an urge to solve it'

He mentioned that an entrepreneur may not have all the data or resources but s/he will still try to solve it.

Although this definition by Shambhuath was not exhaustive, but is right.

Entrepreneurship education is a mindset training and so it can be taught by those only who have this mindset.

Others do not even know, what this relic looks like or how to hunt it down.

So schools usually put the guess work and try teaching children two things

Usually the first one is sales, so they encourage children to put a lemonade stand (or any other sales counter like selling paintings, projects, t shirts etc) at a school event

And second they want to teach basic finance,

What I want school leaders to understand that entrepreneurship is not the ability to be able to sit on a shop and run it

Entrepreneurship is the ability of figuring out what is it that people really want and do not have a solution or do not have enough supply.

They think about reducing costs or they thing about building experiences, so you see both the above ideas i.e. teaching sales and basic finance does not seem to help.

So what is it that we want to teach, if we want to teach entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurial Mindset - The Third step to Entrepreneurship Education at school

So, if I am suggesting that the job of the school should be to develop the entrepreneurial mindset, than defining it cannot be exhaustive, it can only be indicative

So the following things can be a part of entrepreneurial mindset

Critical Thinking

Problem Solving

Creativity

Negotiation

Networking

Leadership

Influence

Public speaking

Storytelling

Integrity

Grit

Working in teams

Being able to create a large project independently

And the list can go on and on and all such thinking and skill set collectively gives you entrepreneurial thinking

You see, now as an adult, when you know, it is about these things, don’t you think your education will change for teaching entrepreneurship.

You may try telling them stories to inspire them,

you may give them case studies to solve problems

You may give them tasks to perform in teams

You may give them challenges to execute

So the curriculum to teach entrepreneurship can be built in the go

Build a team - The Fourth step to Entrepreneurship Education at school

So by now, your own mindset has come to a level where you understand what do you want to do and why do you want to do this and now you need to solve how do you want to do it?

The first thing would be to find a few (3 to 4) generalists who are good at critical thing.

Host a few meetings with these people. Explain them what you want and try building an external Peri ferry of the entrepreneurship education curriculum for your school.

Here you are just defining buckets, right now you are not trying to fill in those buckets.

For example with your consulting team, you find a need for teaching AI fundamentals but let's say you do not have anyone on your network who can really do that

So don't worry about it, over here you are just building the structure and you can always build upon that later.

You also need to understand that these kinds of work are dynamic and things will keep changing and that is fir the good.

So here at this step, you are trying to build ideas like, what do you want to do with preparatory level students, or middle school students. or senior school students etc.

And once it is done, now you need to build the next step.

The execution Plan - The Fifth step to Entrepreneurship Education at school

It is time to build your A- team, people who will execute this.

You have to be very picky and think beyond ordinary.

Think beyond your teachers but in case you have some bright one's, take them along.

Do not shy away from hiring your students to be in the A-team.

Somebody in the neighborhood visiting India for just a few weeks can also be included.

Some retired person, a homemaker, a shopkeeper, a salesman, anyone who has requisite skill set can be invited for executing a particular module.

Now I want to talk about a specific problem in execution

Do not fall for that.

So, usually schools may get the opportunity to invite successful entrepreneurs and they expose their students with them.

It looks good for the optics but the impact is not that great because while it can give motivation but it might not give a lot if learning as students might not have relevant questions. (Some schools even prepare students to ask questions beforehand for such event, how phony?)

So, I would always suggest to host such sessions for your A-team and then in case the speaker is willing to put in more time, one can also interact with students too.

But your job is to improve the skillset of your A-team because these are the people who are going to work longer hours with your students.

So use gratis wisely to build your A-team.

Hope that helps, if you need any help on step 4 or 5 for your school, feel free to contact us and we will be happy to help.

See you next week, where we will talk about how and why you should teach your children to explore their body mind and soul and what does our Shastras say about it?

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I am so sorry but before talking about the 4 types of education technology in schools, I would like to start with this satire, yes, most school leaders opt for

Education Technology as a Fashion

Please do not be offended, let me prove my point, I mean why I am saying this?

If you are from the education circles, I am sure you can recall this picture

This is from a recent speech by Sophie Winkleman.

She talked for almost 20 minutes about how wrongly we have impacted our children by excessive usage of edtech, devices, and social media?

But it is funny to notice that only a small clip of that whole speech is going viral where she is talking about how Sweden abandoned computers from their schools.

People are treating it as if It is an official statement by Sweden, while she is actually a British Actress and that entire speech was actually about the british schools

She is not from Sweden, she is not any ways connected to the Government of Sweden

She has been married into the royal family of Britain and Sweden was just a reference in her speech to show path to British Schools

As a matter of fact, when Sweden actually decided to re-examine the excessive usage of computers in schools and decided to oust it by putting the books back in the schools, many international media platforms already talked about this news years ago.

The question is, If that was an old news and it was not even coming from an official source of Sweden government, then why this clip is a rage among the education leaders circles, here in India, be it on whatsapp, facebook, twitter or any other place

Not only social media, people did webinars across the internet, panels were invited in conferences across the nation, newspaper articles were published

All because one clip from one talk went viral

and an entire nation started considering it as a new news

I just want to put a humble submission that our education leadership really need to think, are they in the business of journalism, if not why they are trying to be the first to talk about things without even checking the relevance

why are we making a ruckus now on an old news?

This thing is just to tell you that digital media is influencing all of us and I do not want you to take decisions based on content in fashion

Choose EdTech as per your needs and do not become a victim of fashion that digital media suggests

Are you ready to learn about the technology at school?

Education technology at school

But before we start looking at these 4 types of technologies, I want you to do 2 things for me.

Actually I am planning to host a series of interviews as substack Live and the first one I am planning is around Artificial Intelligence for school educators in second weekend of April (You will get the link to join in our next edition that will be released on Fri Apr 4th, 2025)

The first thing I request you to send us questions along with your name and details

Share a Question

and then second, please respond to this poll

and now after responding to the poll, lets come back to 3 types of technology in schools and how to optimise it.

4 types of Education Technologies for Schools

• Technology Labs - So all those Tinkering Labs, Robotics Labs, STEM Labs, types of technology products are considered under this category

• Efficiency Improvement Technology - This is usually your ERP, sometimes it is also done through multiple different apps, Basic Spread Sheets, Accounting Softwares and even simple Registers.

• Classroom Technology - When you try to put in projectors, screens, panels in your classes, or you are buying content for these classes, or if you are using computers in a class to teach academics, it will graduate to classroom tech.

• Learning Beyond Classroom Technology - Any technology like LMS, or other mobile based software that children use beyond classrooms, MOOCs, Curated list on the internet, Social Media, all comes under this category.

Now

• if you are overwhelmed with tech,

• or if you have limited budget and want to pick a sequence

• or if you are not sure from where to start a revamp

I can give you rule that even a layman would be able to apply

So whether you want to upgrade, audit, or revamp education technology at your school, the first priority must be

• tech that saves time for your teacher

• then comes the tech that gives your students experience

• and in last comes the technology that gives your students visualisation (as a matter of fact, you may completely skip this tech, if you want)

So ERP, LMS, AI to empower your teachers, assessment mechanisms for your students are the kind of tech that should be on the top priority

but always remember, ERP does not work good without defined SOPs and Data Flows, like wise LMS is not good if you are not using it to measure the improvement in each child.

So the first focus is to empower your teachers and save time for them and that is why, while I may not support

Technology Labs

We really see a huge gap here. Most school leaders do not know that they can develop their own STEM Labs, Makers Lab, or Tinkering Labs for their school with almost no money. If you are a budget school and want to start a lab here, we would love to do a pilot project at your school.

Efficiency Improvement Technology

Never buy ERP without fixing your SOPs and Data Flows. We will soon develop a mini-course on understanding the data flows and SOPs.

I would also very strongly support the BYOD for teachers as you need to heavily deploy technology for teachers to manage their time (and you will need a lot of training for them with both carrot and stick else they will not migrate to technology)

If you can fix operations, 50% of improvement of your school is done.

Classroom Technology

This is my least favourite of all. I am not saying, I will not invest into it, but it will be for sure the last priority out of all the tech. This is exactly the types of tech that Sweden stopped using and you can too.

So these screens in classroom can be escaped, these panels, these clickers, these tabs, all these can be and should be ditched.

Learning Beyond Classroom Technology

This should be used selectively. For example a good school should ban social media as it is doing no good to children.

Then comes things like LMS. I am supportive to the idea to improve cognitive performance of students.

You may use curated or created content but must be in a limit.

If you try to understand why that story of Bill Gates supporting Salman Khan (from Khan Academy) was sold to you, because it helped Microsoft to sell their software to hundreds of thousands of schools.

So do not fall prey to such propaganda.

The Way Forward

The theme for the next week is The VUCA School where we will talk about preparing children for the future. Stay Tuned as I will talk about Entrepreneurial Skills. Do you know, what are these? I rarely find a school Leader who really understands it.

So next week, we will talk about, how to build a successful Entrepreneurship Development Program for your students?

Hit a like button to encourage us and share our post

Share

And yes, so far we can see 2 of our subscribers on our Leaderboard.

These are the people, who may have taken their referral link from the Leaderboard and may have invited their friends.

One is Lata mam, our contributor

and another one is Anonymous, If you are the one, please write back to us, we would like to feature you on our newsletter.

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Contents

• General Thinking on School Formats

• Why am I interested in different School Formats?

• 5 different School Formats

General Thinking on School Formats

If you ask a typical Indian School Leader,

“what are different types of school formats?”

chances are that they may answer it as names of different boards

But If you see closely, all these popular school boards be it ICSE, CBSE, or State Boards, prima facie are the same at their core

• where teachers will lecture children for 3/4 + 12 years of schooling

• where children cannot study anything but the National Curriculum Framework

• where children are not allowed to ask why they are learning what they are learning

• where their school day will be divided in equal time periods and forget students or teachers, not even principal or school owner can challenge that

then school leaders may talk about different Brand Positioning, like

• STEM based School

• Military Education School

• Sports based Schools

• Competition Oriented School (that start preparing your child at grade 6 for a competition that one has to write after 12th, sometimes after graduation)

• The Most Expensive totally Air-conditioned EdTech enabled Futuristic School

But I was not worried about this sorts of school format, so what I was looking for and Why

?

Why am I interested in different School Formats?

Over time I have gradually lost faith in contemporary school education system.

You see,

conventional wisdom is that school prepares children for college and college prepares them for life.

But in recent decade, it has been proven that colleges have failed in their job and now all of a sudden the onus to prepare children for life is on the shoulders of the school

And school says, “Well i do not know anything about it, I only know how to prepare for college”

and our children are in chaos.

So, now especially after the pandemic, everybody knows we need newer ways of school education

I thought of 3 types of option

1. A sort of school within a school, where a class or a group of classes are being managed by a new kind of curriculum and pedagogy, while still using the infrastructure of an existing school. I am already in talks with a couple of schools for this option. If it goes good, nothing like it.

2. The second option is a school associated with a school. Think of an independent infrastructure where parents are sorts of home schoolers, where they may enroll their children in NIOS/Cambridge types of options and in parallel can explore a new types of education.

3. And third one was, EdMonks Powered Schools, an economic support program for schools where on a very economic price points, schools can leverage all the innovation research that EdMonks is doing.

Now for all these 3 options, I was not willing to go gungo, just like that.

Instead, I wanted to dedicate this entire 2025 to learn, experiment, and iterate.

What are a few conventional School Formats that are different?

So I decided to first look at the various available format that are being tested and experimented upon.

And I realised the first avenue to learn can be these international boards like IB, Cambridge, IGCSE, etc,

They were expensive, but at the same time a herd, a tribe was appreciating them especially IB. (i do not deny, there are certain challenges as well)

Then there were pedagogy based schools like Waldorf, Reggio, or Montessori.

Again appreciated by a set of people but not many success stories as per the social expectation of Indian Subcontinent.

NIOS is also a conventional and different format.

But you see all these were not being considered as solutions.

For example, even after so many years, there are not even a 1000 IB schools in India, so this is not at all a success story to solve education for masses.

And for other boards, I do not even see much differentiation.

So the question is

What School Formats am I looking at?

When I was looking for the option for a school within a school, the first option I saw was

1. Hybrid School

Alt School

I see it kind of a Workplace inspired School model.

In this school, children do not go to classes, they are instead given a cubicle and a computer, a station to work at, and then the entire curriculum is distributed through activities and everything has been put on a LMS.

Now whenever the student needs support, one can book a one to one or a group session with mentors.

This way children are learning at their own pace, take decision, what they want to learn and mentors can also have a watch at their performance even remotely.

Similar other school is

Acton Academy

They are all software based schools plus a teacher support mechanism.

I believe they certainly improve the possibility of learning for a child. But at the same time, the emotional side may need more consideration.

If you want to learn it better, how such schools are structured, you may have a look at this video by

Summit Public School

2. Online School

Khan World School

In association with Arizona State University, Khan Academy started Khan World School, a 100% internet based online accredited school

If you are a homeschooler, you may opt for it. If you are an educator or a school leader instead, you can still leverage it.

Astra Nova School

Available worldwide to students ages 10-14, Astra Nova took birth in SpaceX, right the initiative by Elon Musk.

Out of all the school and school types mentioned here, I think this one was truely different.

It is technically not an online school.

It is different.

And though, I am not a fan of Elon Musk at all, rather I do not like him for certain things, but this school model, I think, it is amazing.

This school is basically to teach first principals and Joshua Dahn was given the responsibility to build the school.

The school focus on critical thinking, decision making.

I would very strongly recommend school leaders to explore it, if you really want to do something new.

3. Nature based School

Cedarsong Forest Kindergarten - Forest School

It is Outdoor, nature-based learning focused on hands-on exploration for children with technically nothing that can be called indoors.

So children stay close to nature, they explore bugs, animals, flowers, trees, like all the flora and fauna.

And then the school claims that it helps children to get rid of the emotional and mental disorders.

Green School, Bali - Sustainable Development Focused School

Now this is a very amazing school that has been working for several years and is focused on nature and teaching the importance of environment, but it also has indoors. Children do a lot of projects, can go outside the school to learn new things. The students might also get involved into on campus projects outside the class.

Many many years ago, when I first got to know about this school, I was elated

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4. One-Room Schoolhouse

Wildflower Schools

The idea of One room school is all about more engagement and safe environment and obviously for improved education.

Micro School

The one school format, that inspired me most is Micro Schools.

It kind of help me see possibilities for 2 out of my 3 options, a school within a school or a school assosiated with a school

these schools could be even being opened in garage, and malls and in schools and where not.

The beauty is that just before they started schools they were already being admired (and financially very successful) as a software company

But even then they decided to close their entire software for home schooler and went full throttle on Micro Schools. It is already a success and needless to say, is an inspiration for me.

A typical Micro School is a single person run class with 15 to 150 students associated with a nearby school for other requirement.

5. The Fifth Format

So the fifth and sixth and seventh and eights formats must be identified and shared by you. Can you please share at least one format in the comments (with a school example)

I have already seen Community based schools, Startup/entrepreneurship based school, AI powered school.

So next week, under the The Fundamentals, I will talk about Why Technology At School need to be fixed and how?

If you want your name to be included in that edition, share a few ideas on this with us. Write a mail to us at contact@edmonks.com

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Get ready to explore the following three learning strategies mentioned in our ancient Sanatan Shastras

• 2 step learning Process by The Taittirīya Upanishad

• 3 step Learning Process by Anonymous

• 4 step Learning Process by Maharshi Patanjali's Vyakaran Mahabhashya

When 14 year old children from India participated in PISA test in 2009, we ranked 73 out of 74 participating countries.

Do you see, the penultimate position, 73 out of 74?

Why such a bad performance?

Our Political Parties called it a game by global powers to malign Indian Education, and India stopped participating in it since then.

Numbers indicating to similar situation were found by the ASER reports in 2019, one by a local NGO, and we again denied it by calling it an international influence of global powers on Indian NGOs.

While I do not deny that there is a fair chance of maligning Brand Bharat and influencing NGOs by global powers - read this book

But we also cannot deny that there are innate challenges.

Learning levels of students are significantly low in Indian Schools, both in government and private schools.

Schools cannot fail a child till 8th by law, so they keep flooding them with marks, and most parents do not know a thing beyond marks and the learning of child suffer.

What If school leaders knew strategies that could make a significant change in the learning capabilities of students?

What if a parent can apply these strategies even at home?

What are these strategies and can schools and parents collaborate upon these strategies

and that is why

I want to share the following 3 strategies from our Shastras to transform learning for your children.

If implemented well in our schools, these learning strategies can transform our next generation.

The three Strategies are

• Swadhyaya Pravachanam Cha by The Taittirīya Upanishad

• Circle of Learning by Anonymous (I heard it long ago in some podcast)

• 4 Kaals of Learning by Maharishi Patanajali

Are you ready to learn about these 3 strategies?

Will you promise that you will apply them in your class, in your school, or at your home?

Now lets start with the

#1 - Two Step Learning Process from Taittirīya Upanishad

You may have observed that with the advent of the internet, now we discover that many a times, some idea that was being associated with a westerner, have already been mentioned in great depth in our ancient texts

One such thing that I was teaching in almost all my workshops for school Leaders, was the Feynman way of Learning

where Richard Feynman, one of the creamy layer nobel laureate, told that If you want to learn something better, learn it in a way that you are going to teach it.

Now suppose, you are teaching your child or your student in a way that they can actually teach that topic to a whole class

or even if one is able to teach it to one single student,

do you think, this child will perform better on that topic?

Suppose a school leader can implement a SOP that a group of student need to teach at least one topic to the class to get to the next level

Will the overall class perform better?

For long, I taught this in my workshops, how a school leader can implement that in a class

but then I learned about

स्वाध्याय प्रवचनं च

In Taittirīya Upanishad, there is a story that the students are graduating from a university and the kulapati (the vice chancellor) is giving a departing speech

and in that speech,

he mentions that dear students, we have already taught you what we were expected to

but now you will need to go away from the Gurukul (the school/college) and work in various streams of life

and you will face new challenges, and will have to learn new things and then you should remember

स्वाध्याय प्रवचनं च  

means when ever a new challenge comes, you will be expected

स्वाध्याय Swadhyaya = swa (self) + adhyaya (study)

So the first thing is to learn it on your own,

but then the Kulapati mentions further and Cha means ‘and’

 प्रवचनं च

means after you have learned it with swadhyaya, you also need to do the pravachanam (i.e teach it to other people)

I recently did a pilot project in a school and when I found that the performance of children improved like never before.

When I realised the students from the bottom strata started performing at the top

I decided to share all my learnings and hosted a full day workshop for school Leaders (Owners, Principals, Coordinators) and shared it all.

And you can have a look at the testimonials that these school leaders gave. It certainly made me believe more in my content.

and now I am building a course based on this content so that any school leader sitting anywhere can learn about School Innovation Pentagon Framework.

So, I am walking the talk.

I believe, with this simple learning strategy,

a school leader, an educator or a parent can teach young kids the practice of Swadhyaya Pravachanam Cha

But ironically, our schools depends upon adhyapan and not swadhyaya, children are not being asked to learn on their own,

without exception, every student is being taught lessons and no one is being asked to self study and ask question

Can you commit to join hands with us to write a SOP on how a school can implement this 2 step learning strategy in their classroom?

Now let’s explore what is mentioned in the next strategy

#2 - Three step of Learning

This strategy I learned long ago may be from a YouTube Video by someone, or may be in some conference (eventually I do not recall the source, but the learning stayed with me)

and I now call it Circle of Learning, because it is essentially a loop

Here the three steps are

• Swadhyaya

• Chintan

• Sangati

So you may notice, the first step again is Swadhyaya here, ‘self study’,

but then in here they talk about Chintan, means ‘Think about it’

and when you have studied it and you have thought about it, you must know what you know and what you do not know about it

and so you must now discuss it with other people, it can be an individual or a group

and then you might get some new queries

and again you follow

• Swadhyaya

• Chintan

• Sangati

and you keep doing that till you are done with that topic.

As a school leader, have you given a space to Sangati in your Pedagogy?

Will you try making one?

Make a comment now to affirm your committment. Do you have the courage?

Leave a comment

and now I am going to tell about the third strategy

I was introduced to this very recently by Dr Umesh Vashishtha and I do not have words to share my happiness.

Suddenly, after knowing about this 4 step learning, now it is way more clear to me and from here onwards, I am going to teach it in all my programs

Are you ready to learn about it too?

Then you should remember the first step, you do not just need to self study, you need to pravachan (teach) it too.

Do you agree to make a committment to yourself ‘Yes, I will learn about these ideas and If I like them, I will teach it to others’ in the following 2 or more ways

• You may put a comment on this article

  Leave a comment

• You may share this article on your social Media

  Thanks for reading The EdMonks Newsletter! This post is public so feel free to share it.

  Share

• You may also just learn it and teach it to at least 10 people

• You will share this article in your whatsapp groups/email lists of school leaders/parents/educators

  Share The EdMonks Newsletter

• you may also give this article a link from your website/newsletter

  Share

#3 - Four Kall of Learning

In the Vyakaran Mahabhashya by Maharishi Patanjali, you can read about the 4 kaal (time zones) of learning

Here are the 4

• Agam Kaal

• Swadhyaya Kaal

• Pravachan Kaal

• Vyavhaar Kaal

The first one, the Agam Kaal, is when you are introduced to a thing. It is where you made up your mind, whether you want to learn it or not. It is where someone inspires you or someone guides you.

For example, right now I am introducing you to Learning Strategies. This is an Agam Kaal for this topic for you.

Not every reader will further choose to work on it, but probably you will and if you actually start exploring these strategies that will become your swadhyaya kaal.

and if you see it at my end, when Dr Umesh Vashishtha was introducing it to me, that was the Agam Kaal for me, and then I started exploring it, checking it on my earlier knowledge

and right now, I am trying to tell people about it, so for me now it is my Pravachan Kaal, I am talking about it, I am teaching it.

And then, when I start executing it in my day to day life, or lets say I became the expert on Learning Strategies and just talk about it, I live and breathe these strategies, do you think I will no better about these strategies.

No doubt on that.

Do you think I will know more about it, But of course.

Do you think you can learn better using these strategies? ‘Hell Yes’

Do let me know, how do you like these strategies and how do you plan to teach it to your students/children?

How do you plan to execute it on your own self?

Will you do Pravachan on whatever you know?

Key Takeaway on Learning Strategies

If you notice, in all 3 places, never you lost sight on ‘Swadhyaya - the Self-Study’, try executing a plan on it.

Would you care to partner with us to build a SOP in a school to deploy ‘Swadhyaya’?

We see the three strategies as here below

• Swadhyaya + Pravachanam

• Swadhyaya + Chintan + Sangati

• Agam + Swadhyaya + Pravachanam + Vyavhar

So technicaly the one by Maharishi Patanjali is a wholesome picture of the learning strategy, there are many more nuance in it, like when to deploy which strategy?

Anyways, I hope you liked this article and in the next one on next Friday 9 AM Indian Standard Time, I will be releasing, our next topic, where I will talk about why do we need to change schools? What can be some Disruptive Innovation Ideas that we should deploy in schools?

Should we remove schools? or is it some new structure, a new mechanism, that we should explore?

Until then, do not forget to comment and share, this will help us reach more like minded people.

See you next Friday.

Before everything else, we want to talk about how a term coined by American Navy Seals is impacting one of our weekly theme?

VUCA is a term coined by American Navy Seals to define the nature of their missions which were Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.

Later in 2016 at Davos, Klaus Schwab, the founder of World Economic Forum, used this term to define the nature of future, the VUCA future.

and the term VUCA, became popular.

In the previous edition I told you about the internet experiment that I did and how VUCA became so connected with me

As this newsletter is evolving, our name, our themes, our topic selection, everything is changing as we are determined to improve our content, we have created four themes

The theme for the first week of the month is ‘The VUCA School’

And in this we talk about preparing students with futuristic skills

The VUCA School is very much inspired by the VUCA future.

As I am building this newsletter for School Leaders, one of the skill I want them to develop is to influence parents

and for that they themselves need to know a lot of things

But in the daily hustle bustle, most school leaders do not find time to explore and learn new things

And that is why, I want this newsletter to be a learning source for them

where every week in just 5-10 minutes School Leaders can learn a thing of substance.

and I thought, a challenge would be the best mechanism

Can I expect that out of 456 current subscribers, at least one school leader would be willing to try a hand on the following challenge?

Are you the one?

Can you stop surrendering to the status quo of the mighty curriculum and get ready to teach something to yourself that may not be in the school books but is the need of the hour?

Every month in the first week, the challenge would be to learn about one of the skills that is necessary to get ready for the future of the workplace.

I want that at least 5 school leader should try a hand in creating a mechanism that can help their students to explore Data Analytics.

From Web Analyst to Data Analyst, Data Scientist, Data Engineer, Business Intelligence Analyst, Business Analyst, all these jobs are based on Analytics.

But ironically, in our schools, most teachers cannot differentiate Analysis from Analytics

In a laymen perspective,

Analysis is usually related to explore data to understand what happened in the past

while Analytics is to explore data to understand trends and to make sense of the future.

You may explore this wonderful article by Coursera 12 Data Analytics Books for Beginners: A 2025 Reading List

or you may also go through this video or any other similar video to understand the basics

and remember I said Basics and not Fundamentals,

You can learn basics just like that but to learn fundamentals, it may take months and years.

Anyways

I want at least one innovative school leader, out of my entire audience, to come forward to explore the possibilities of teaching data analytics at middle school.

I plan to build a small team of 5 experts (including one School Leader) to create a full document on this idea.

Will you be that school leader?

Will your name be published on this doc?

Would you take this challenge?

• You may either create a concept of a school club around data analytics

• or an interesting activity for math /reasoning class,

• you may also create a series of co-curricular activity,

• or you may design it as a project at home,

whatever way you think is good, make it.

and propose it to us through contact@edmonks.com maximum by Sunday night March 12th, 2025.

I will talk to all those, who will apply for it with some idea and one of them will be invited to participate and share thoughts with our team to build this doc on Teaching Anaytics at School.

Please note that the job of the educator is not to make things tough, their job is to make things easy, so we are not looking for very difficult projects, we want some very simple things that are appropriate for middle school students, very very simple.

Are you the one who would try?

I once had a LinkedIn account with more than 10,000 connections/followers

I used to teach people how to grow on LinkedIn

I did a lot of experimentation on LinkedIn

But then one day, I deleted it.

Why I deleted it, is a story for another day

but right now my focus is to share my learning from one of my experiment

Stay tuned to explore it with me

By the way, now I have again opened a new LinkedIn account and soon I am planning to start writing on it.

The name of the experiment aka the LinkedIn Newsletter was ‘The VUCA School

The Pre Story - How I reached to this experiment?

So in my early career, I was selling engineering products in national and international markets.

But then one day, I was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug

as I started building an open source tech company to build a credit card size device (Box0) that can help science explorers.

It even reached in the top 10 list of Hackaday Prize in 2016

But again, this is also a story for another day.

Right now I wanted to talk about the fact that I was building an education product and I was not having any experience in education

So I decided to learn about education.

As I knew that joining a community is the fastest way to learn about a thing, I wanted to join a community on futuristic education.

And since I could not find one, I launched my own community in fag end of 2014 and by the end 2016, it was a 3000 people strong community that hosted the who is who of education as speakers.

But yet again, making of this community is also a story of another day.

I want to focus about the thing that I developed due to this community and which later gave me a reason to do this experiment in 2024.

What is the Fad?

So the fad for me, was ‘The Education for The Future’.

We were hosting small events almost every month in this community

and since we had almost 3000 people in the community, we were able to invite the best of speakers

The talks in the community led me to develop a curiosity about how our next generation will actually be able to prepare for the VUCA future.

And by then I knew, schools are not the answer, as a matter of fact, they are the bottle neck and we need to identify a new way to prepare our children for the future of work.

Some sorts of Bhavishya Vidyalayam or The VUCA School

The Experiment

Fast forward to 2024, I decided to check If it was just a fad

or do I really have serious possibilities

I decided to write a daily newsletter for the next 100 days

where every day I will write one full newsletter on LinkedIn, almost a 1000 words, about one topic that the schools of future must teach

I wanted to write this letter daily to check do I really have enough number of topics that we need to teach to our children that we are not offering at current school, but are indispensable to prepare for the future of work.

Earlier I wrote a Learning Needs Framework for the future of work and this came handy to keep writing this newsletter daily for straight 100 days.

Let me share a few topics here to give you a glimpse

For example, there is enough data on the internet to tell that the conventional jobs are depleting and the work is shifting towards the gig economy.

Similar is the story on Ethical Hacking

There is a lot of hue and cry about Cyber Security and Safety, but how many people are really working in this space, the start has to happen in early times, school should be a place to get started.

Likewise, despite the huge demand in job markets for Analytics, you will not find many in schools who would be able to tell you the difference in Analysis and Analytics

And I think these are the topics that should be our subjects and not the conventional and very generic Computer Science, I mean you go and check the curriculum of computers and you will still find that they are teaching applications that are already outdated.

Why we are not teaching Computational Thinking instead?

So after writing such a newsletter for 100 days, which reached to more than 3000 subscribers and got international fans from 3 different continents

What was my biggest learning

Yes, the biggest learning I was able to gather was that most parents do not know about how the work and the workplace is changing.

So I could see that the subscribers to this newsletter were overwhelmed and thankful for this content

Some were even responding daily

The biggest learning was this only

that we should have programs to teach parents first else they will keep buying the wrong stuff for their children and will keep ignoring the right stuff.

I still see a lot of schools trying to teach

• Robotics & Coding

• Entrepreneurship

• Personal Finance

and other similar types of subjects.

Now they really need to learn, these are not the right subjects.

You cannot teach them coding without teaching them Computational Thinking aka Pattern Recognition, Abstraction and Algorithms

You cannot teach entrepreneurship without teaching them gap identification, critical thinking, persistence, grit, design, negotiation and 20 other such topics

You cannot teach them personal finance without teaching them the value of money. If they can buy anything, if they can eat whatever they want to eat, why would they be willing to listen to your lessons on savings when they are living in abundance.

They will not.

But can you teach them negotiation, can you teach them Rhetoric, can you teach them control.

Yes you can,

but then each one of them has an inbuilt negative connotation.

The Pilot Project in a classroom

So I realised, there was a clear gap that neither parents not education system is willing to solve.

From international reports to the local ones, every report was telling us that the average reading levels are in shambles, children do not know the simple arithmatic at their grade level

And I was thinking, can we really do something about it

and then towards the end of 2024, in November, we did a pilot project at a school

So we took one section of grade 6 of that school.

and we distributed the whole class at 4 levels

• Greens - Absolutely top performers (around 8)

• Yellows - Not the top performers but the next league

• Reds - Absolutely low academic performance

• Oranges - A little above Reds but below Yellows

Now they were just 2 weeks in the pilot and the smog hit made a compulsory Government pushed holidays of more than a week,

and now it was the last week of November and these children took the 3rd periodic test

and Voila!!

When the result came, the teachers came running to us, telling that we have not done anything but the performance of Reds has sort of sky rocketed.

Out of 6 Reds, one remained in Reds, 2 moved to Oranges, and a whopping 3 moved to Yellows.

Yes, children who were not getting even 10s out of 20s, they were now getting marks in the range of 17, 18, and 19s.

The girl who were already in Yellow level, were now complaining, how can this girl from Reds was now dominating their space.

I can still recall, when I invited their parents to speak about this experience, how all of them had tears in their eyes and one of them said, “We never thought, that we would be invited to a stage to talk about the performance of our child”

There were many learning that now we wanted to share with schools

and we decided to do it in the following 3 ways

1. We hosted a School Innovation Pentagon Framework Workshop (a very economic one) in Ambala that was joined by 30 school leaders and we shared everything about that pilot and much more in that workshop.

   

   and we now want to host such workshops in other cities as well and are looking for partners.

2. A lot of school leaders who were far from Ambala asked us for an online telecast, but we were not having arrangement for that. So now we are planning to develop an online course to deliver School Innovation Pentagon Framework

3. But you see, this is not enough, we wanted to also directly work with students

   And we want to do it with those who have not been to perform in the current education system. The Reds and The Oranges

   In case you know some students at middle school level, who looks good on their brains but still do not perform well, guide their parents to try this one year online pilot project with us.

And we believe, we will transform the performance of these children in a year (as if they were never in the reds).

A school can also contact us to help some of their students participate in this cohort. We are sure that we will not disappoint you.

One more thing

The above mentioned thing is just supportive and not futuristic and we also wish to run a pilot with a set of 8 children of progressive parents where we want to run a Bhavishya Vidyalayam aka The VUCA School theme.

These students must be from any of the colour levels, here the criteria would be the willingness of parents to let the child try an alternative education.

In this program, we will not teach contemporary schoo, education and we do not want to enroll those children who want it as an add on to school education, we want those who dare to think beyond conventional.

Although, we do not have high hopes in finding such students, but will be delighted, if we could find some.

The idea of our Tribe

• The WHY behind

• Who should join the Tribe?

• Mechanisms to Participate

The ‘WHY’ behind

We have seen this time and time again in schools that Innovative School Leaders struggle the most in School System

Why, because

• they are trying to implement changes,

• they challenge the status quo,

• they allow new ideas to pour in

and that shakes the monotony of the system

but the conventional owners of the contemporary education system, do not want a change.

Even a large number of parents do not want that change to occur

No one wants to enable thinking in children because then they ask questions that might challenge the unnecessary authority of adults

and the system persists.

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And if this continues, the innovation will gradually disappear from school education and our next generation will not forgive us for this.

We have seen this happening for decades and we decided

We believe that it is a large and complex problem and only a community can find answers to challenge the status quo.

Do you want to join us in this quest?

Do you have the mettle in you?

Who should join the Tribe?

This January, we started focusing on building this newsletter for innovative school leaders (School Owners, School Principals, Coordinators, etc)

Initially we started sharing our thoughts, our experience, our ideas, and then we also started inviting people to contribute their ideas and some education leaders came forward to share those.

But we do not need just the contributors, we wanted more than that,

we wanted people who believe in us, who are our supporters

we wanted our advocates, who would be willing to connect with right people

and we were lucky to get people like Mrs Rakhi Gibrani, Mrs Uma Sharma, Mrs Lata Jagdeesh respectively

these are the education leaders who are really running that extra mile for us,

who really understand what we are trying to do and are taking efforts to support us without any personal motives.

To build this community, we need more of such people.

I would especially like to thank Mrs Uma Sharma, for hosting our first School Innovation Pentagon Framework Workshop at her school and invited 30 school leaders from nearby schools so that we can share our ideas with all of them.

Think of it as these invitees could have also be seen by her as competitors and why should she help them, but she is an empowered school leader who dare to challenge the status quo.

and that is why, she is special for us and this is the feature we are trying to find out to be able to join the doers community.

Because our tribe members will not be threatened by their vicinity, they will rather lead them to innovate

For us she is the mascot of an ideal tribe member for EdMonks.

Mechanisms to participate

So there are 2 key ways to involve people in the community,

the first one is School Innovation Pentagon Framework Workshop and the second one is EdMonks Conversations

So, we already know about the workshop through our previous edition, now we should try understanding, what is EdMonks Conversation

So the analytics of the last 30 days suggests that the average open rate for our newsletter is a little above 25%

whereas 21% is the industry average for a newsletter open rate, that means we are performing above average

But we wanted to be among the toppers and they perform at 40 to 50% range.

So around 2 weeks ago we started finding a way to improve our content and once we got the idea, now we want to test this new content idea

We plan to implement this transition in our newsletter content by April

So what will change?

First and foremost, the type of content will change and if this new content is liked by audience, then we might also change the design, the outlook and even the name of this newsletter

So what is the change? What is this new content?

At EdMonks, we stand to improve and impact school education by collecting and sharing school innovation ideas.

Now, for every edition, we will first identify a topic and we would invite 5 panel members (educator, practitioner, and experts) to a panel discussion through an online video meet.

And based on this first discussion, we start writing a dedicated edition on that topic.

Then we will host the second meet, and share our findings and challenges with our panel members.

Here they may give us further feedback on this content, and then we finally release the content.

The names of all the participants, who were really able to give some worthy inputs, will be published in that newsletter edition.

With this process, we believe, we will be able to create much better content.

Do you also believe what we believe?

What are the topics

We are sharing a few topics here (and we want your help to make a list of 12 topics to start with, we look forward for your suggestions through email or in the comments)

• reinventing computer education at preparatory level (3rd, 4th & 5th standard)

• improving reading skills at preparatory level

• how schools can help children at middle school to improve their expression like public speaking, storytelling, writing etc

• how to build confidence at kindergarten level

• how to improve teachers who want to improve

• how schools can help their ace teachers

• what technology are we using in a classroom?

• how do innovative schools do what they do?

• magic of science education at kindergarten

• solving the challenge of slow learners in the school

The above topics are indicative and may change. If you know any experts on these topics, or can suggest some topics, plz do connect with us

By when this new change will be implemented

Tentatively, we will start releasing this new content by April but it really depends, if we are able to find worthy people a little early, we might try releasing this content within second half of March.

Let’s start hosting these 90 min video conversations that we call EdMonks Conversations.

You may also help us in any one or more of the following ways

1. Share this newsletter with more school Innovation Enthusiasts (and ask them to subscribe)

   Share

2. Connect us with those institutions that may become the venue partner.

3. Help us join the communities/whatsapp groups of school leaders.

4. Connect us with innovative businesses that are serving school education. We plan to introduce genuine businesses with innovative school leaders.

5. Connect me with those school leaders, who can spare 60 to 90 minutes of their precious time to teach me about school innovation so that we can learn and share it in our upcoming workshops.

   Write to us at contact@edmonks.com

School Innovation Pentagon Framework

If you are willing to join our next School Innovation Pentagon Framework, a full day workshop, you may please share your contact details here. From wherever, we will receive more interested candidates, we will try hosting it there first.

PreBook your Seat

Explore more about us

• We collect innovative ideas on school innovation and share it with our audience. Feel free to explore our

Instagram

or

YouTube

• We are looking for schools as hosting partners (in tier 2 or tier 3 cities anywhere in India) for our School Innovation Pentagon Framework, a 3 hour (half day) session for school leaders.

To help us improve our services and solutions, please do respond to the following poll

Do not forget to invite friends and get featured on the Leaderboard on our newsletter website.

Share The EdMonks Edit

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

Get app

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

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• Feature Story - Mrs Taruna Kapoor and the international student exchange

• Main Story - Our workshop in collaboration with PKR Jain Vatika Sr Sec School, Ambala

• Opportunity - Host our workshop

Imagine this . .

An engineering graduate turned marketeer after selling industrial engineering products for almost 14 years in national and international markets, decided to leave the space to create an impact in school education.

Everything goes good but then the pandemic hit and he moves to the startup space, works there for almost 4 years and then an epiphany happens and here he is back to work in school education space

This is my story

Around 3 and a half months ago, a close entrepreneur friend, who just finished her MBA, questioned, “Why did you close EdMonks?’

I rep[lied, “Well most schools want to get numbers, but are not willing to change their education delivery. With my communication skills, they were able to impact their admission numbers, but I could not see the same impact on education delivery, So I moved on”

And my friend after listening to all my stories, one by one, suggested, “NO, I think, it is about your cost, they were not able to afford you, If you could serve them with an economic solution, they will still love to work with you”

I instantly said, “But we cannot make it economic”

“Yes you can, just think, how” she replied.

and a series of conversations made me realise, probably she is right, probably it is worth trying to create an impact in a large number of schools, If I can create an economic alternative to my services.

and to test this, I designed a very economic (almost Free) but very effective workshop for school leaders.

and requested my friend Mrs Uma Sharma, Principal PKR Jain Vatika Sr Sec School, Ambala, to help me on this.

And the management of the school was benevolent enough to become the venue partner for School Innovation Pentagon Framework. and as a true friend, Mrs Uma Sharma, who is passionate about school innovation, left no stones unturned to inform all the possible school leaders who might leverage this workshop.

Around 30 participants joined in and guess what, they just loved it.

I am tempted to share all the testimonials here, but that might break the flow.

So, please take a look at this one (by Mrs Ruchika Bhutani, Principal - S.A. JAIN VIJAY VALLABH PUBLIC SCHOOL) that may share the mood of the audience with you. I will share the rest of the testimonials in the upcoming edition of this newsletter.

So after such testimonials by the attendees, I knew that this economic workshop is a good mechanism to introduce practical innovation to schools and carve a larger impact on school education.

And now like PKR Jain Vatika did, I am looking for more Institutions (Universities, colleges, and Schools) to become a venue partner for our upcoming workshops with larger audience.

To become a venue partner, an institution should have an auditorium (minimum 150 seats), and you should be willing to arrange the food for the audience who would be School Owners, Principals, Headmaster/headmistress , coordinators and other similar leadership positions.

So, If you are an institution, an entrepreneur, or a School Leader, please do write to us to participate in our movement to improve school education.

You may help us in any one or more of the following ways

1. Share this newsletter with more school Innovation Enthusiasts (and ask them to subscribe)

   Share

2. Connect us with those institutions that may become the venue partner.

3. Help us join the communities/whatsapp groups of school leaders.

4. Connect us with innovative businesses that are serving school education. We plan to introduce genuine businesses with innovative school leaders.

5. Connect me with those school leaders, who can spare 60 to 90 minutes of their precious time to teach me about school innovation so that we can learn and share it in our upcoming workshops.

   Write to us at contact@edmonks.com

School Innovation Pentagon Framework

If you are willing to join our next School Innovation Pentagon Framework, a full day workshop, you may please share your contact details here. From wherever, we will receive more interested candidates, we will try hosting it there first.

PreBook your Seat

Story of the week

Where there is a will there is a way

The first thing that I teach in my workshops is that Innovation is not about Ideas, it is all about Execution and we can learn that from Mrs Taruna Kapoor

So, In 2017, while she was working with Allen House Public School, Ghaziabad, she decided to host an international student exchange.

Without any prior experience in it, not many would have dared

But Taruna is different, she is a go getter.

So she started with an internet search and then she gradually started talking to several school leaders in various countries using internet technologies.

Initially she did internet based culture dialogue exchange things and gradually she decided to do her first global exchange program with a school in Kandy, Sri Lanka, a beautiful scenic place.

The project was not a cake walk, there were many challenges and apprehensions but she win them all over one by one.

Be it parents concern or Visa approvals, she recall how unavailability of simple consent letter from parents and the students created a ruckus at the airport. but it was her who solved everything and an amazing experience for students was created.

Where her students visited Sri Lanka and the students from Vidyartha College, Kandy visited their school.

Cultural events were hosted, trips for important places were organised, local communities were involved.

All in all, the students got an unforgettable experience for life

At EdMonks, we celebrate such brave heart school leaders, do comment on this post, if you would be willing to listen to her about this experience. She is a very open minded person and I am sure we can invite her for a google meet with our subscribers.

Leave a comment

(Talk to us to get your story featured here in this section - contact@edmonks.com)

Explore more about us

• We collect innovative ideas on school innovation and share it with our audience. Feel free to explore our

Instagram

or

YouTube

• We are looking for schools as hosting partners (in tier 2 or tier 3 cities anywhere in India) for our School Innovation Pentagon Framework, a 3 hour (half day) session for school leaders.

Our Past Contributors

To help us improve our services and solutions, please do respond to the following poll

Do not forget to invite friends and get featured on the Leaderboard on our newsletter website.

At EdMonks, we are all about Innovation at School level education to prepare children for the VUCA future.

Thanks for reading The EdMonks Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share EdMonks Newsletter

In just 5 minutes every week, you might get astonishingly simple yet actionable ideas to improve your school

School Innovation Story Topic

In this edition, we will talk about finding a creative solution to introduce bio diversity to kindergarten students (Featuring Mrs Lata Jagdeesh)

Updates - School Innovation at your doorstep (in your mailbox)

Around 3 weeks ago, when I started focusing here, on this newsletter, I did not had a clue that our viewership will increase every passing week.

We gained 36 subscribers in the last 3 weeks which is like

and we also hosted a free online session on Innovation led school growth.

and the way participants appreciated this small session, we decided to design a full day workshop

School Innovation Pentagon Framework

and now School Innovation Pentagon Framework, a full day workshop for school leaders is being hosted in Ambala, and if you are a school owner, principal, vice principal, counselor, school coordinator or working in other similar position, we welcome you to book a seat now

Book a Seat

Story of the week

Use your Creativity to innovate

And we can learn that from Mrs Lata Jagdeesh

IIT Bombay established a kindergarten school in its premises where children of its all employees (from faculty members to support staff) can study for early education.

and Lata mam spent 22 years as the principal to keep the legacy of this school high.

In 2010 a faculty parent requested for a project to be prepared on the theme of bio-diversity with the little kids of the school!

She wanted this to be presented to the then Minister of Environment at a global conference where he was the Chief Guest! This event was suppose to be held at the Teen Murti Bhavan, New Delhi

Now it was quite a challenge for Lata madam.

A synonym to hard work and creativity that she is, she went on a hunt to find an idea.

And soon she decided to create a dictionary for young kids

Not an ordinary dictionary, but an A3 size dictionary, where on each page, there would be a scatch on an exhaustic animal, that are on the verge of extinction.

and children were supposed to fill this external perferri with Pulses, pencil rind and other similar waste to best type material.

They were also suggested to try a hand at spray painting, vegetable/leaf printing, finger/thumb printing, collage etc

and Ta Da

A beautiful dictionary came out that each student and parent loved and guess what, a trip to delhi was sposnored for her and Lata mam and her students presented this dictionary to the then Industry Minster Shri Jairam Ramesh (in 2010).

We have got a few other ideas from her as well that will be covered in the coming editions.

By the way, now we want to increase the number of stories per edition, please contact us to share your ideas that you executed in some school with us and we will include these ideas in our upcoming editions.

Are you using your creativity?

share your thoughts in the comments.

Leave a comment

(Talk to us to get your story featured here in this section - contact@edmonks.com)

Explore more about us

• We collect innovative ideas on school innovation and share it with our audience. Feel free to explore our

Instagram

or

YouTube

• We are looking for schools as hosting partners (in tier 2 or tier 3 cities anywhere in India) for our School Innovation Pentagon Framework, a 3 hour (half day) session for school leaders.

Our Past Contributors

To help us improve our services and solutions, please do respond to the following poll

and do not forget to invite friends and get featured on the Leaderboard on our newsletter website.

At EdMonks, we are all about Innovation driven School Growth.

Thanks for reading EdMonks Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.