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Permalink Reply by Rajeeb Ghose on August 26, 2013 at 5:53pm

For our search we evaluated Kuns and visited them.

What they are doing is something called as ability based grouping. Which almost all IB schools and some experiential schools do. But the way they are doing through their KED is unnecessarily complex and cumbersome. To this end they are planning to use IT/technology where kids can download appropriate worksheets.

I had few major issues with this entire thing; first how will this dovetail in end with CBSE curriculum? Because at the end student has to take CBSE exams and they will not be bothered about your KED level? So if a student is at 13 in English, 9 on Hindi, 11 on Maths, 12 in Science etc.. how he or she will take CBSE exams. Are you going to hold the student, till he or she reaches at level 13 in all subjects? What about supporting and helping the student to upgrade, specially those kids who might be struggling in one or two subjects? They are all focusing on jumping the student to next level? What about providing more subject depth at the same level?

Do you think a kid/student will feel comfortable once he or she comes to know that she belongs to a lower ability class and every morning she has to go and attend that lower ability class. Think about psychological implications. The other schools also do ability based grouping, but they do it smartly. The kids stays in the same class and made to sit in group of kids with similar ability. But they are sitting in same class and teachers are closely monitoring them. The IB-PYP has very clearly defined do's and dont's of ability based grouping. So why not I let my kid join a PYP based school.

Second, I am not able to follow this downloading the worksheets from intranet? If student has to download, then why go to school, one can let the kid join and follow any home-school program. They can download the worksheets and submit the work etc everything online. Why do I need spend so much of money. Kids go to school to have teacher interaction, not to download worksheets.

Third and interesting thing, this KED will not be implemented by them for next 1 or 2 years, reason they need to settle down? So if you are not going to implement now, why talk about it now?

My take, I think overall their concept may be good, but by fitting it into CBSE they are going to mess up the entire schooling experience. By this force fitting, in my opinion, you are not even going to get benefits of their KED nor going to achieve rigor required for CBSE.

So like Sarabjeet, No negative thought/feeling, somehow we weren't convinced to consider them further.