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Choithram School North Campus

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Choithram School North Campus
Context
Our school is a co-educational institution located in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India, catering to learners from ages 3+ to 18 years, spanning across Grades Nursery to 12. Our students come from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds, and we are committed to providing an inclusive learning environment for all. As a progressive secondary school, we focus on holistic development and believe in integrating 21st-century skills into the core of our teaching and learning process. The school follows a child-centric approach, blending academic excellence with co-curricular activities and values-based education. Over the years, we have worked consistently towards developing students’ communication, collaboration, and critical thinking abilities through an integrated academic curriculum with various in-house programs, club activities, and project-based learning initiatives.
Overall impact
Before enrolling in the Skills Builder Programme, our school had already begun incorporating life skills in areas such as public speaking, teamwork, and problem-solving through structured morning assemblies, class presentations, and inter-class activities. However, we recognized the need for a more intentional, measurable, and progressive framework that could support skill development across all levels and enable us to track growth. The Skills Builder Programme, introduced in the past academic year, aligned well with our vision. It provided a structured and consistent approach to building eight essential skills among students, which we embedded into both academic lessons and co-curricular planning. Our teachers underwent orientation and used the programme resources to integrate skill-building into daily lessons, helping students reflect on and apply their learning in real-life contexts.
Keep it simple
To ensure a common language and understanding amongst our teachers we conducted teacher training sessions with Skills Builder on the Universal Framework and the HUB platform. We used our grade and class assembly time to introduce essential skills to our students and created visual displays in many classrooms to help learners to recall the essential skills. We also used mobile stands that could be moved to various areas throughout the school. Our teachers also used Essential Skill Certificates and verbal praise to reinforce essential skills with learners.
Start early, keep going
We decided to involve all our learners in this year’s programme and therefore trained all teachers to build essential skills across all grades.
Measure it
We made an initial plan to assign all 8 essential skills across the academic year and suggested an essential skill and step level guide for each grade. Supported by teacher training on the HUB platform we then asked class teachers to record a baseline step level for their class. We then asked teachers to update this assessment to track the progress of their students. We also asked students to reflect on how they had used their essential skills in various activities, recording their ideas verbally and using a written student self reflection record. The assessment allowed teachers to clearly see the impact of essential skills on their students and clearly track their progress.
Focus tightly
Class teachers use their assessment to decide on the essential skill and a suitable step level and teach their students the strategies in a 30 minute lesson once per week. We included this lesson into our grade timetables to allow teachers time for this lesson. The majority of our teachers use short lessons or resources from the HUB to plan these 30 minute lessons.
Keep practising
To give our students opportunities to practice the skills they had learnt in their lessons we mapped our extra curricular clubs to essential skills across the year. In other subject areas we asked teachers to include at least one essential skill and skill step into their planning. This ensured that each class in each subject was also practising a skill and step level that helped them in the subject.
Bring it to life
We use field trips, festivals and community service to give students opportunities to practice their essential skills in activities outside of the classroom. We encourage reflective discussions with students about these experiences.
What's next
We will continue to build the essential skills of our students to ensure that they are developing important life skills and that we are teaching this using an intentional, measurable, and progressive framework that enables us to track growth.
India