on the learning community as a whole because this is a hidden curriculum for all our students as they are watching us every day and absorbing some of our traits subtly and making their own impressions about how they would lead their lives. Leaders of tomorrow cannot be exposed to an environment that is afraid of taking risks or the fear of failing! They must be able to view failure as part of a process in life before they meet with success. They must be able to adapt and understand that failure is just an alternate method that is not suitable for the product envisaged! What are the key challenges that you go through as a Principal/ School Leader and how would you overcome those? I believe a Principal is first among teachers and I am extremely conscious that I am an instructional leader. Here are some of the areas I put my focus on: • Planning: I believe “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” I constantly encourage my teachers to have a clear set of objectives that are actualized on time. We have introduced the concept of ‘timebudgeting’ in order to help teacher plan their lessons well.
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• Impeccable discipline and a sense of accountability among the members. • Innovate with thoughtleadership which looks for means to improve what currently exists. • Building team spirit that will take a school from being good to being great! My interest would be to soar ahead and create educational facilities with cutting-edge technology that adequately addresses the current and future needs of our students. I would like to associate myself with schools that learn continuously to meet the challenges and ensure the delivery of a successful educational programme for the future! What are the activities that students engage in? What is their relevance/ importance in their development? Welham Girls’ School offers a plethora of activities for our young women. Our USP is that we take each individual and groom her to become the best in the skill/s she possesses. There is something for every child here and our teachers are trained to identify and nurture whatever skill the child has. I believe this individual attention goes a long
way in helping the child choose the career she will excel in the most. And excel many of them have. Eminent film director and Oscar nominee Deepa Mehta, activist and politician Brinda Karat, Supreme Court lawyer and activist Malvika Rajkotia, and many more who have all walked out of the portals of Welham Girls’ School. Innovation How has the teaching learning process changed from your times to now or a decade ago to now? How do you/ the school meet the current needs of students? We were like products from an assembly line, where students had to consider the teacher as a repository of information and the access to encyclopedia was a luxury! We did know a lot of facts but our ability to generalize was limited unless you had a nurturing home (which I was fortunate to have)! Today, the teachers cannot afford to give the same kind of education to kids who are bombarded with a sea of information every minute. We cannot teach them in any way that promotes thinking that is convergent. We have to develop divergent thinking. We have to help them develop an inquiring mind that can ask the ‘why’ of
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