Mind Mapping

1. Challenge

As a volunteer in a social organization assisting in education sector, one of the challenges that I  (and my team) faced in a government school was the structural and regulatory inefficiency in  the teaching process by the teachers due to lack of funds, resources and motivation as well as  the lack of involvement and engagement by the junior class students due to lack of interest and  large student classrooms. So in brief the challenge in front of our team was “to improve the  engagement and the performance of the students”.     The ‘scope of this problem’ included majorly three (3) aspects: the teaching and administrative  system, the students themselves and finally an external factor their family and their family’s  financial conditions.  Finally the ‘constraints’ of this challenge for us was the lack of resources and funds as well as  large class groups due to infrastructural limitations of the school.

2. Selection

After analyzing the situation, its scope and the constraints we chose ‘Mind Mapping’ as an  appropriate tool. Now, as Mind Mapping process is one, which is used to i) generate insights  from exploration activities and ii) using those to create design criteria; given the problem at  hand, the process of exploring the real issues in depth from the different perspectives of the  students, the teachers and the parents, we could develop insights through use of innovative  tools and drive our focus towards the outline of the real pain points, i.e., ‘The Design Criteria or  The Explicit Goals’ seems to be the logical way forward.

3. Application

The process of application for ‘Mind Mapping’ in order to initially generate insights from  exploration activities was segmented into 2 parts -

I.  The Wish Note Game – The purpose of the ‘Wish Note’ was to understand what are  the expectations of the students from their teachers and what changes do they think  can help in their performance improvement, then teachers’ expectations from the  students which they think can help them stay motivated and enthusiastic, and finally  the parents and their views regarding what they expect from the school.

II.  The Group Discussion – The Wish Note game was followed by the ‘Group Discussion’  wherein the Notes which were appropriate and met the expectations of all sides

were put forward to discuss for all the stakeholders’ understanding & opinions and  to move forward to provide insights from approved expectations for design criteria.

Finally the second part of the process was to create the ‘Design Criteria’ or the ‘Explicit Goals’ that  needs to be focused by all the stakeholders and create a systematic and structural approach after  applying the experimental and exploratory designs to achieve the same keeping in mind their feasibility  and being achieved within the constraints. The whole process was being planned as well as applied  smoothly and effectively.

4. Insights

By following the above mentioned process and moving forward within the guidelines, we were  able to generate some mind boggling insights.  We were able to identify:

I.  The students look forward to put more focus on real outdoor experiments, activities  and games which could help them boost up and get more involved and excited about  those activities.

II.  The students also highlighted that they would be able to focus more if they would know  the real life application and utility of those subjects.

III.  The teachers on the other hand expressed that the classroom environment is focus  more on a one way communication rather than students asking or engaging and  comprised of ‘large student groups’ which made them demotivated to teach or  experiment. Also they limit their perception of activities and experiment to lack of funds  and believe lack of funds is a serious problem.

IV.  It was found that many of the parents were short sighted as they felt that studies did  not provide their families’ financial condition any return while engagement of these  students to assist their families can prove to be more fruitful. It was also verified that  the family has been the most crucial factor in supporting or discouraging the students.

5. Approach

Given that our current approach of ‘Mind Mapping’ has provided us with a very efficiently  executed process that has also helped us to gain some crucial insights which has assisted us  into narrowing our focus area from multiple dimensions towards the major points like the two  way communication and outdoor activities which can be collaborated, the family factor which is  the catalyst of the whole situation even after not being a direct part of the whole teaching  process.   This narrowing down of the issue will always help to i) clear our mind and remove  uncertainties and ii) move forward with more confidence.

Hence I would generally prefer using the same approach in similar conditions. The only little  tweaks that could be applied in the future in such problems would be utilizing a mix of more  exploratory methods or different ones to try a more functionally efficient and insightful process.

