By Jayalakshmi K
Another 15 days and the reading skills of some 75,000 students in 1,400 government schools in Bangalore should have considerably improved. That is the outcome expected from the 45-day programme initially under the aegis of Karnataka learning Partnership.

As reported earlier, most teachers and students have expressed satisfaction about the programme. However, many questions remain. For instance, is one shot of the module all that is required to boost reading skills as low as the zero level?
What about the time this takes from the regular teaching hours? If this is about attractive presentation, why can't our textbooks be made more colorful? Plus, given the focus that this technique places on individual attention, what about schools where there are hardly one or two teachers to teach all the primary classes? Is the interest part of the newness of the technique? Can it be sustained?

Speaking to the Deccan Herald, Director for Primary Education, G. Chandrashekhar, sought to dispel some of the above doubts.

"We are already seeing the progress made by students who were unable to read anything. I am quite sure that the 45 day period is sufficient to do the job as long as the teachers put their mind to it."

But he acknowledges that there could be a tendency towards rote learning which could mask the actual reading progress. "To overcome this, we are advising teachers to make children read from library books as soon as they teach sentence level."

He does not believe that an hour every day for 45 days will affect the regular lessons. "Anyway, what use rushing with the syllabus if the child can't read?" Making textbooks attractive would be a tough task given the numbers and the cost.

Most important for this programme, as also for any, he agrees is the monitoring. That is what can ensure the success of the programme. The director is happy with the monitoring being provided by Akshara Foundation through its resource persons and volunteers.

Once satisfied that the reading programme has helped, plans are on to take it further and implement it at the cluster levels that are shown to be the poorest in performance by the Karnataka School Quality Assessment, says Chandrashekhar. This could approximately cover 400 clusters of 14-15 schools each, across the State.

He is pleased that the programme has seen an increased awareness in teachers regarding the competencies of the students as also a sense of competition among schools. Agreeing with him is BEO Somashekhar A., who vouches for the enthusiasm among the teaching community for the chart method. But will this enthusiasm last once the newness is over? Is there a need to induce fresh blood into our teaching methods? Somashekhar points to the regular meetings held by the cluster resource people where ideas and suggestions are thrashed out with vigour to improve the teaching learning outcome. The partnership is between Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and Akshara Foundation. The accelerated reading programme makes use of 45 colourful charts that use the story-telling method to coax students to read.