My name is Ketan Tambe, and I am a teacher coach with CEQUE, an organisation that works on upskilling government school teachers to help bridge the gap in quality education for the rural poor. I was born and raised in Kasheli, a village in Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri district. Presently, I live in Virar, Mumbai, with my wife, daughter, and mother. I joined the organisation in 2020, but I have been working in the education sector for the past 10 years.
When I was a teenager, my sister taught at our local zilla parishad school. I would often sit in on her classes and developed a deep admiration for the work that she did. Additionally, as the class topper in a frequently short-staffed public school, I was often given the responsibility of managing the classroom when no teacher was available. These experiences instilled in me a strong desire to work in the field of education. I subsequently went on to complete my degree in education, moved to Mumbai, and then took on the role of community coordinator at Door Step School, where I worked with children from Adivasi communities. Before joining CEQUE, I also worked with an organisation that provided remedial education to children.
As part of my work at CEQUE, I conduct classroom observations to offer feedback to first- to fifth-grade teachers in government schools. At present, I am working with 48 teachers in government schools across Maharashtra’s Palghar district. Since 2022, most of my work has been mediated through an app called Seekhe Sikhaye. It not only allows users (coaches) to schedule visits for classroom observation sessions but also provides data points such as how long it’s been since a teacher was visited, how many hours of coaching they’ve received, and the suggestions for improvement that were shared with them during the previous visit.
6.00 AM: My wife’s job starts early, so she wakes up before me, prepares the bulk of our meals (such as rotis and sabzi), and is the first one out of the house. Once I wake up, I make some rice in the cooker and wake my child. I then help her through her morning routine, feeding and bathing her. Before I leave, I spend some time going through my schedule for the day. I also call the teachers I am assigned to meet to inform them of my visit and confirm their availability for a classroom observation session.
My mother is elderly now, and my daughter is only 18 months old. Since both my wife and I work, I drop them off at my sister’s house nearby, and she looks after them while we’re away.
8.00 AM: I head to Virar station. I usually take a train and then a rickshaw to reach the schools that I’m allocated to in Palghar. The trains are so crowded in the mornings that I make it a point to stand closer to the door, as there’s a good chance I might miss my stop if I get stuck too far inside the compartment.
During my commute, I use the app to review information on the teachers I am scheduled to visit that day. For instance, my first visit today is a teacher at the Zilla Parishad School in Aagarwadi, which I visited close to five weeks ago. I look up the score, feedback, and suggestions for improvement that I gave them during previous visits. Accessing this information helps me organise my thoughts and tailor my coaching approach to suit the teacher’s needs.
10.00 AM: Once I reach the school, I speak with the teacher and give them some time to prepare for the session. I also ask for their consent to take notes during the observation. However, if they seem anxious or apprehensive, I just make mental notes instead. The first things I look out for during a classroom observation are minutiae such as the students’ seating arrangement, and whether the teacher writes the date or the name of the lesson on the blackboard. I then assess the classroom environment, the teacher’s use of teaching learning materials, and how much they engage with the students during the lesson.
10.30 AM: Immediately after the class, I sit with the teacher to provide feedback on their lesson delivery. Instead of offering a value judgment of what was ‘bad’ or ‘good’ about their performance, I first ask the teacher to reflect on what they think they did well. Subsequently, I offer my own assessment, primarily focusing on the positive aspects. For example, I might note how a teacher manages to offer validation to a student who answered a question incorrectly while helping them arrive at the correct answer.
Before leaving, I encourage the teacher to apply any suggestions I’ve made.
I then move on to sharing my thoughts on areas where there’s room for improvement. Often, this feedback is accompanied by videos hosted on the app that present tips for improving lesson delivery for specific topics. As a result, the teachers have resources that they can revisit as they work on incorporating the feedback into their lesson delivery. The same videos have also been helpful in cases where the teachers approach me for recommendations on specific aspects of teaching. For instance, a teacher recently reported that watching a video on attendance routines helped them improve their attendance-taking approach in class.
After my session with the teacher, I share a feedback link with them through the app. This allows the teacher to provide their own feedback on my helpfulness as a coach. Before leaving, I encourage them to apply any suggestions I’ve made into their teaching and inform them that I will return for another session in 15–20 days.
12.00 PM: Each school has a kendriya pramukh, a government representative responsible for overseeing teacher observation within that school. After completing a session with a teacher, I often meet with the school’s kendriya pramukh to keep them abreast of the teacher’s progress and answer questions about any other teachers under their supervision.
Once my session is over, I check the app to identify the next school I’m supposed to visit.
Once my session is over, I check the app to identify the next school I’m supposed to visit and head there. The five clusters I operate in within Palghar are quite spread out. When I am not able to find a shared auto from one school to the next, I opt to walk instead. This takes me anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour.
There are times when a teacher I am scheduled to work with becomes suddenly unavailable on the day of the visit. In such cases, I work towards organising an unplanned visit with a different teacher. This involves using the app to identify a teacher I could potentially meet immediately, checking their availability, and requesting my district manager to schedule a session with them.
1.00 PM: I replicate the same process in the sessions that follow. While travelling between schools can be time-consuming, the transition from one session to the next is relatively seamless, thanks to the app. When I first joined CEQUE as a teacher coach, the app was still in development. We coaches had to log each session on an Excel sheet, which was a cumbersome process that could only be done on our laptops. Now we have access to various data points on our phones. We know how long it’s been since we last visited a teacher and how many hours of coaching they’ve received. Based on these data points, the district managers and teacher coaches collectively devise a schedule for future visits.
The availability of these data points has also enabled us to field any potential queries from government officials in terms of the frequencies of our visits and the performance of specific teachers. Prior to using the app, we could not provide the same degree of specificity with such immediacy. Ultimately, the clarity and accuracy of the data we are able to access reflects the work that we do in a positive light.
4.00 PM: Although I visit three schools on a typical workday, my schedule looks a bit different today as it is the end of the week. On Fridays, I head to CEQUE’s district office in Palghar in the afternoon. My fellow coaches in the district and I gather there to meet the district manager and discuss our experiences at the schools we’re working in or highlight interesting cases of improvement that we’ve observed. Often, we discuss issues that one or more of us may have encountered at a school and collectively devise solutions. Recently, at one of these meetings, I recalled how a teacher became emotional after I spoke positively about certain aspects of her lesson delivery during our session. She noted that in her 15-year career, she had only been told what to improve rather than what she was doing well. This had gradually eroded her confidence in her ability as a teacher. However, our session was a welcome change for her. Recalling this interaction at the meeting helped the other coaches understand the value of leading with positive feedback when speaking to the teachers they coach.
Over time, we’ve really grown to value these discussions, because there’s so much we’ve been able to learn from one other’s experiences and approaches to the common challenges we face in our sessions.
5.00 PM: It’s usually a two-hour train journey for me to get back home from Palghar. During this time, I convert the rough notes I’ve taken throughout the day into the format that we use to log our sessions on the app. The format requires us to fill in parameters such as classroom engagement, the teacher’s use of the blackboard, and the comprehensiveness of their lesson delivery. Based on my assessment of each of these parameters, it provides a rating for the teacher. This rating is what I log into the app. My wife gets home later than I do, so I pick up my daughter and mother from my sister’s place on my way back.
7.00 PM: After reaching home, I have a few more tasks to wrap up before I’m done with work for the day. First, I log whether I met with a kendriya pramukh that day, and if so, I note what we discussed. Then, I check whether the teachers I met with have filled in their feedback on my session. If they have not, I send them a reminder to do so. Lastly, I call my district manager to apprise them of the sessions I’ve completed throughout the day. Once the app has synced with the server, the day’s work is finished.
Before the app, I’d spend several hours on my laptop after returning home.
Lately, it takes me approximately an hour to complete the tasks. However, I still recall a time before the app when these details had to be logged on an Excel sheet. I’d spend several hours on my laptop after returning home, ensuring that each session was accurately logged and that I knew which schools I needed to visit the next day. Similarly, our district managers would also spend considerable time figuring out which visits to schedule next based on the ones we had logged. The entire process felt much more laborious and time-consuming, a far cry from what it’s like today.
8.00 PM: Before my wife gets home, I complete a few household chores, such as sweeping and washing clothes. I also give my child a snack, cut up vegetables for dinner, and prepare some tea for my wife. Once my wife returns and has her tea, she begins cooking dinner for us.
When I do have free time, I like to spend it with my family. I enjoy playing with my daughter and visiting new places with her. Otherwise, I can be found reading somewhere in my home.
I have been working in education for a long time and have witnessed significant changes throughout my tenure. Although I am currently working with teachers, it is my goal to transition to teaching children myself. To this end, I have cleared the Central Teacher Eligibility Test (CTET) and the Maharashtra Teacher Eligibility Test. I hope to use the opportunities I get to impart my knowledge to the children I work with in a meaningful way, and inspire a generation of children to become teachers themselves.
As told to IDR
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Know more
- Learn about a nonprofit worker who supports children’s social–emotional learning in government schools in Jharkhand.
- Read this article on the urgent need for teacher training reform in India.
