How to Be Flexible and Adapt to Changes?

Rani Innes, UK and India

Rani Innes is the senior partner and lead trainer of Link Communications, a specialized communications skills company based in the UK with offices in Malaysia and India. She has regularly delivered courses and training workshops for private and public business sectors as well as students and teachers in the UK, Belgium, Malaysia, Japan and India. With a background in English language and literature, Rani draws on 30 years’ experience as an English language teacher and teacher trainer. She has been active in theatre for 30 years and was the director of Canterbury Players in Kent for eight years.
E-mail: raninnes@aol.com

“Can you give us a specific example of a situation that needed you to be flexible and adapt to changes?”was the one of the STAR questions in the interview for the current assignment that brought me to Qatar on a teacher training project.

I had to smile as the work I was doing then was itself an example of adjustment and flexibility - more than any work I’ve done in thirty years of teaching adults and children, university students and housewives, corporates and government offices both in Asia and Europe. From the board room of multinational corporates in the UK and Europe, from interactive whiteboards, from suits and ties and coffees and luncheons to sitting in faded jeans on the floors or on plastic stools and using, for the first time in over thirty years, black boards and pieces of chalk needed a bit of adapting.

And it is my work as a teacher trainer with Parkrma Foundation in Bangalore that I want to share with you here. In my next article, I will show some of the methodology and activities we did as part of the training.

Parikrma Foundation is a nonprofit organization in Bangalore, India, that does amazing work nurturing underprivileged children. This means feeding, educating and bringing up underprivileged children, including the local slum children. The parents are involved, where possible, and it is a joint effort on the part of the founders, sponsors, teachers, parents and volunteers – both local and international. I feel privileged to be a small part of what is being achieved there, and feel, after thirty two years away from the land of my birth, perhaps all my years in education was leading me back to such work.

Shukla Bose is the visionary founder of this organisation that runs four schools. She gave up a lucrative corporate job as a highly-paid CEO eight years ago and started a small school for about forty underprivileged children. Today, there are four schools and over a thousand children. The facilities like furniture may be basic, but they use modern learning resources in teaching and are quite high-tech, thanks to kind sponsors. Apart from resources like computers and teaching materials, the teachers also receive periodic training from organizations like the British Council. In Shukla’s words, "Education of children is at the core of our aim to transform poor communities into self-sustaining ones.”

The word Parikrma means circumambulation or circling a sacred object. It, however, has deeper meaning in the religious space. In Hindu thought, it is characteristic of completeness yet continuity, fulfillment and quest. (These orbital revolutions also appear in much-loved legends from the Hindu scriptures as when Lord Ganesha when asked to circumambulate the universe chose to do so his parents instead - elevating the parents in Hindu ethos to the same status as God.) A very apt name, therefore, for an organization that builds an "end-to-end" environment that offers support to children in all their areas and needs of growth and development including food, health-care and family support as well as an all-rounded education which is much more than passive book learning to pass exams.

Shukla had told me about her hopes and plans for her new project, English First, which recognizes that our children need to be educated in English to a level that will make them, in years to come, independent as professional adult. Her circle of life hope for the children does not end with their education at her schools, but continues in trying to make them self-sufficient and able to get jobs in an environment where English is not just desirable but necessary. This makes training her teachers in English, be they language teachers or of other subjects, of paramount importance. Although they do have sponsors who believe in what Parikrma is doing and offer support, both financial and educational, there can never be enough assistance for a cause like this.

Last year, on a trip to Bangalore, Shukla and I had a discussion about how I could help her teachers. The teachers had been registered for taking the IELTS exam but had no preparation yet. Having been an IELTS trainer and examiner, I made an on-the-spot decision to run some workshops in training them in all the four skills. It was certainly an interesting, if somewhat different, experience for me. Since time was short, it was agreed that the same training would include all the teachers of all the four schools, making it a large group. I said it would be a workshop and not a lecture, and therefore interactive. The teachers would be working in pairs sometimes and groups at others. So they would need to move and change patterns according to the needs of the activities I’d designed. I remember asking if the furniture was fixed. Even heavy free-standing furniture would be difficult to shift and not lend itself to the dynamics I wanted to create. I was told, with a smile, that that would not be a problem as there was no furniture. I felt like an idiot realizing of course that the teachers would be sitting on the floor. But we did have enough room on the floor of the dining area, the teachers could easily move about creating changing patterns and sizes of groups, and we had PowerPoint and a blackboard. Above all, we had a group of teachers wanting and willing to learn in a warm atmosphere. I felt as satisfied and gratified as in any teaching or training experience I’ve had so far.

We ended the sessions knowing this wasn’t the end.

Promising to do what more I could at some stage in the future, I went back to my home in the UK – a very different world with the idyllic Surrey downs as the backdrop, and London a mere 45 minutes away where my work in training corporate clients lay. Luckily, despite recession, my training workshops continued unabated, with additional demand for training including for organizations like the EU in Brussels. Money has a way of trapping you and even dulling the motivation to do other work that you know would make you happier and give you far more satisfaction. Parikrma faded into the background. Then something happened that changed everything.

Coco, our dearest faithful ten-year old German Shepherd who had come to us as a five-week old cute little black ball of fluff, died. She was family, our youngest “child”, our ever constant and loving companion whom we needed just as much as she had needed us. One day she was chasing sticks happily, the next she was gone. Cancer of the heart and we did not even know. Holding her still warm and beautiful but so still body jolted me into thinking how short our life was. It also made me think of how I wanted to live the rest of my life. It hit me that if we wanted to do something, dreamt of doing something, talked about doing something, we didn’t wait. We just did it. To give back something and make a difference sounds a cliché, but that is what I felt I must do. I decided to go back to the land of my birth where there was unfinished business, and Parikrma was one such.

I have rarely worked in an environment that has given me more satisfaction as a teacher and a teacher trainer. The basic, sometimes even uncomfortable environment, is quickly forgotten when a teacher/trainer gets what they want most from trainees - hunger to learn and good cheer always. The teachers I trained were highly motivated and very grateful for what they were getting.  And they, in their work, were giving children what I believe is every child’s birthright – education. But for them and organizations like Parikrma, these children would never see the inside of a classroom. I was welcomed and made to feel worthy in every school. It was a humbling experience. There was so much affection as well that lasting bonds were quickly made.

The children themselves are bright, beautiful and brimming with confidence. They appreciate what they are given, They always seem to wear a smile and welcome all visitors - I have to say, very different from morose and non-communicative students one finds in so many other well-to-do schools. My English husband was taken aback at being shaken by the hand and called “Tony anna” (Tony elder brother) by the children. They call all the teachers, including Shukla, “akka” (elder sister). Truly, it is a family that works in harmony for a common goal. My contribution was miniscule, but I repeat, it was a privilege to be a part of this family. I hope to go back to a second phase where, having looked at language use, we can work on methodology and approaches.

I went there hoping to make a difference. Simply put, it was a changing experience - except the person who learnt and changed the most was me.

How the Motivate your Students course can be viewed here
The Basic IT in the Classroom can be viewed here