My kids’ school, Vidya Valley, has just introduced something they are calling “Tutor groups” in school. A tutor group is a group of 15 to 20 students consisting of a few students from each class from 5th to 10th standard (aka grade). Each tutor group is assigned one teacher (“Guardian Tutor”) whose job it is to ensure the full welfare of the children in this group. Here, “full welfare” specifically refers to non-academic issues, like mental and physical welfare (for example to help with bullying, truancy issues, or special medical attention).
Each student stays in the same tutor group for all the 5 years, and the guardian tutor of the group remains the same throughout. Each year, the students of Std. 10 will obviously pass out and leave the group. At this time, new students from Std. 5 will enter the group. This whole set-up creates a sort of a family unit, where the guardian tutor becomes the surrogate parent, and the other students become surrogate siblings.
The tutor group meets every day for a little time – the school time-tables have been adjusted to allow for this. In addition, they meet once every two weeks for a longer period. These meetings have no agenda. Just hang out and bond and behave like a family.
See this pdf for a more detailed description of the guardian tutor system in Vidya Valley.
It sounds like a very interesting idea, and I have not really heard of anything like this being used in Pune schools (but I could be mistaken). In any case, seems like a neat thing to have. They have introduced it just a few months ago, so it will be interesting to see how it works out in real life.
There is a teaching methodology for low income schools which follows something similar, I read it in Mint once, don’t remember the details though. But that is how they teach primary kids, they don’t have separate classes, rather they have one class, so the elder students help along with the teacher to tutor the younger ones if required.. its a very open curriculum. But apparently the results are really good.
It seems like a good idea, I’d be curious to know how it works out. Keep us posted.
Excellent. Possibilities of extending this could be tried to train the students for leadership qualities, I suppose. Presently the Guardian Tutor takes care of the welfare of the students, but why not give some responsibilities (non-academic) to senior students so that they can experiment their ideas, they feel are best at.