Innovative Practices in
Professional Development

Workshop: Innovative Practices in Professional Development.

Facilitator: Ramya Venkataraman, McKinsey

Ramya leads McKinsey’s Education practice in India on a full-time basis, as part of the Firm’s global Social Sector practice. Ramya’s experiences in education cuts across school, higher and vocational education. These include driving system-transformation related efforts, often working closely with governments; serving foundations, non-profits and large institutions (including some institutions of national importance) on their own strategy for having large scale impact; serving private clients building large businesses in this space; helping investors evaluate potential opportunities; and providing inputs for policy frameworks.

Teachers, principals, and trainers are often required to deal with a number of tricky professional situations. These could be situations of conflict management, difficult feedback, or a particular way of coaching. Our response is generally guided by a number of factors like the situation, the person concerned, our own experience in similar situations, and the criticality of the situation. We end up forming a personal pattern and deal with most situations with a fixed set of solutions. This is our professional personality and it has been built up from our experiences, interactions, past results, and lessons. Although this becomes instinctive, it might not be the best way to react in most cases.

A great guideline for handling any particular situation is the skill/will matrix. It is like this:

  • On the skill/will matrix a person can be on any one of the four quadrants and our support to them must depend on the combination of their skill/will level

    • Level

    Person

    Response

    Comments

    Low skill-low will

    Struggling

    Directing

    Start by giving small tasks in a controlled space to build up basic skills and confidence

    Low skill-high will

    Motivated but doesn’t have the skills

    Guiding

    Needs guidance on the technical side

    High skill-low will

    Has the ability to do the work but low motivation

    Supporting

    Needs support and motivation, build confidence

    High skill-high will

    Ideal mix

    Delegating

    Needs to be constantly engaged and challenged, give more responsibility
  • The important thing to note is that we must not permanently box people into these categories. This is very situation-dependent and a person may be in one quadrant in one situation and in a different quadrant in a different situation.
  • The ideal way of using this is to apply it to a person in a particular context, provide the required solution, and then start with a clean slate for the next situation.

The facilitator also shared some observations of McKinsey on the education field:

6 big trends  in education seen over the last few years

Before

Now

Focus on enrolment and attendance

Focus on learning

Innovations in pedagogy were sought after

Now the focus is on delivery at scale

“We should not measure costs in education”

Ultra low cost models are now coming up

NGOs were the only ones on the ground apart from government

Now for-profits are also coming up

People came because of the ‘ goodness of their heart’

Now people are coming because they see a long term career in education

Independent efforts

Public-private partnerships

India is good in access and enrolment, but poor in quality of learning, retention, and equity