Educational philosophy

After being in the field of education for over 2 decades and having worked in multiple roles in India and the US I am more assured than ever before that the burning need for today’s schools and education is to cultivate skills and habits of mind that will help students thrive in the real world despite its tensions, stressors and challenges. I had the opportunity to envisage my “ideal”school when I was in my early twenties. After much contemplation I had summed it up in three words; love compassion and wisdom. Those words still remain with me. It is in the quest to find the right education and learning that can be centered around these values that brought me back to school at Teachers College, Columbia University. 

I met and got the opportunity to learn from passionate educators (60 leaders in education in the US) about contemplative practices, mindfulness, social and emotional learning and equity in a year long program called Transformational Education Leadership (TEL) while at Teachers College. It gave me an opportunity to learn from practitioners who were actually implementing these practices in different states in the US. 

 

While the seeds of contemplative education were laid much earlier, in my career, in India when I was introduced to Vipassana meditation and volunteered with an ambitious government program to implement the meditation in each school of the state (4 million students), it was not until my time with the TEL community that I knew what this education would like.

 

This idea has further matured with my research on the Compassionate Systems Framework (CSF) and guidance from Peter Senge and Mette Boell at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). CSF was an idea that evolved from Peter Senge and Daniel Golemans’s book, The Triple focus which talked about the importance of SEL and Systems thinking in school. The International Baccalaureate supported the development of the framework in a quest to enrich its own framework to build internationally minded caring citizens. They wanted to facilitate ‘compassionate integrity’ where students  could align their thoughts feelings and actions. This framework is now being prototyped in different sites around the world and both IB and non IB schools are using it.  As a master practitioner I am training educators in India and abroad to growth this approach in their work and personal lives,