watis

'Wipro Applying Thought In Schools' (WATIS) is Wipro's social initiative to create on the ground capacity for educational reforms. It believes in the social vision of democracy where each citizen sees the ethic of equity, the essentiality of diversity, the ethos of justice and is thus driven to social action. It believes that education is the fundamental enabler of such a society. The promise of democracy can be realised by helping children develop into critical, creative, and caring citizens. Wipro helps build an ecosystem of social organizations that work in education reform, develop a deeper understanding of education reform and advocate the cause of good education. As part of this initiative, it works with more than 30 social organizations across the country in school reform experiments. The programs include holistic school engagement with individual schools and government school systems to support them in improving the quality of education. These interventions are small, deep and for long periods in time. WATIS also works in curricular research, experiments to understand specific subject learning, assessment based research studies and various other projects to help understand the possibilities for good education, besides focusing on documenting the innovative work and experiences in the education space across country and creating a system to disseminate the same across organizations and people. All these efforts consider the school system as a basic unit of change. Thus, WATIS helps the schools initiate and sustain efforts to transform school philosophy, culture and competence.

You can learn more about the work of the project and available online resources by visiting the project’s website at www.wiproapplyingthoughtinschools.com.

Systems Thinking in Schools, A Waters Foundation Project, began integrating systems thinking and dynamic modeling (ST/DM) within one middle school in 1990. With the support of the Waters Foundation, a private, charitable foundation founded in 1957, this work continues through a network of educators who develop the capacity of K-12 educators to apply ST/DM within classroom instruction and organizational learning. The mission of project is to increase the capacity of educators to deliver student academic and lifetime benefits through the effective application of systems thinking concepts, habits and tools in classroom instruction and school improvement. To that end, the project offers in-person workshops, resources including downloadable lessons, and online learning experiences for both students and adults.

Disha India Centre for Learning and Waters foundation are conducting a train-the-trainer program for school educators in India in Januray 2010. It’s a first step towards the long-term collaboration for capacity development of educators to apply systems thinking concepts and tools in classroom instructions and school improvement.

You can learn more about the work of the project and available online resources by visiting the project’s website at www.watersfoundation.org.