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On February 8, Gurgaon based Vega Schools – a pioneer in reinventing the Indian primary education sector – announced its plans to revolutionise the Indian primary education vertical in association with Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Sharing his thoughts on the collaboration, Christopher Williams, doctorate of Education Learship Programme, Harvard University said, “Aaron Jennings, (Harvard Graduate School of Education), Himanshu Joshi (Columbia University Teachers College) and I have proposed a partnership with Vega School. After visiting, Aaron and I was struck by the similarities between the PBL approach at Vega and some of the primary tenets and authors being studied in the Doctorate of Education Leadership Programme (EdLD) at Harvard. Moreover, Vega’s approach to hiring and training staff is exceedingly similar to the approach of many Deliberately Developmental Organisations, and the description of Adult Development put forth by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, both of Harvard.”

As a first step, Williams and Jennings visited Vega Schools in Gurgaon to discuss and deliberate on the widening skill-job gap in India. Additionally, they took note of the unique open classroom approach adopted by the school to imbed ‘real life’ skills in its students. They also lauded the school’s commitment towards connecting the Indian education system with the global knowledge economy.

Extensive research in progressive schools across the world have concluded that confined learning is not effective. The real world is far more ambiguous and rigid structures that impose extrinsic discipline are, in fact, not equipping to learners to develop intrinsic discipline to deal with the world, manage their own time and schedule, or even set their own goals and paths.

Commenting on the development, Sandy Hooda, co-founder, Vega Schools said, “It comes as no surprise to us that our teaching techniques, infrastructure and classroom culture are getting the desired positive response from both Christopher and Aaron. It gives us immense pride to associate ourselves with the Harvard Graduate School of Education, to collaborate and raise the benchmark for the Indian primary education vertical. The research team will have members from both Vega Schools and HGSE and will aim to study new paradigms, which could possibly solve problems such as mass global unemployment and creating a new kind of workforce for the 21st century knowledge economy. We are optimistic, that the research will shed new light on how India can become an education hub and a human capital resource pool for the world, by 2020.”