Education is another social sector in addition to healthcare, in which ECHO India has created many vibrant learning communities in collaboration with its partners.
Programmes run by ECHO partners facilitate the professional development of educators and expose them to experiential learning strategies and innovative pedagogical approaches. This in turn enables them to drive better learning outcomes in students. ECHO India's Education sector interventions have been pioneered by Mrs Anuradha Rai, an eminent educationist and Director of Ambience Public School.
With both public and private sector educational institutions partnering with ECHO in this effort, there’s a broad diversity of participants ensuring an enriched “All Teach All Learn” experience for learners.
ECHO is facilitating education programmes to cover a broad range of topics spanning early childhood education, school leadership, mindfulness as well as building teaching competence in specific subjects. Early childhood education programmes focus on ways to promote the healthy development of a child’s cognitive and motor skills through activities like storytelling.
In the era of virtual knowledge sharing, many institutions in the education sector are looking to address the knowledge gap within their local communities. This has resulted in the ECHO model being identified as one of the platforms that enable capacity building for experts in the education sector. The ECHO model aims to bring a paradigm shift in the field of education, including the way the teachers and students engage and learn, through a practical learning approach. This will encourage the teachers to experiment with practical teaching methods in the real classroom environment.
To achieve this, ECHO India regularly conducts Education Immersion for new partners to increase their understanding of ECHO and provide an avenue to evaluate how they can plug the ECHO model into their existing work.
So far, ECHO India has successfully reached 7,000+ teachers, 220+ school leaders, and over 2,80,000 children through various educational initiatives, and expects to impact close to 4 lakh children in the coming year.
Some of the existing partners in the education sector of ECHO India include Samagra Shiksha Assam, thiMk, Muktangan Education Trust, Bharti Foundation, Malabar Cancer Centre, Samait Shala, Delhi Society for Promotion of Rational Use of Drugs (DSPRUD) and GramUrja Foundation.
A snapshot of ECHO India’s transformative journey in the field of education
“We are a rural Maharashtra-based organisation working on educational issues. Our major challenge during this pandemic is to train our volunteers to make our intervention effective. It was difficult for our volunteers and experts to travel and reach the training venues.
The ECHO model was very useful to us in planning sessions and delivering the content effectively. Also, case-based learning made a lot of difference in learning new practices and resolving the day-to-day problems that our volunteers face in our education initiatives.
Thank you ECHO India team for supporting us in making our ‘Teaching at Right Level ECHO’ successful.”
*- Dadasaheb Gaikwad, Director, GramUrja Foundation *