Vice principal again. Near family.Vice principal again. Near family.

A school that grew to 250.

Harpreet Gujral started as a pre-primary teacher in a small school in her locality. She wanted to be independent and to give something to society, she says, and teaching children was how she chose to do it. She became a primary teacher, then headmistress of a school. It had 100 students when she joined and 250 when she left, and she had to add sections. “The parents felt very connected with me,” she says. She says proudly that she brought in a lot of changes among her teachers, towards what she calls skill-based teaching.

For her the best teacher award is not only something handed over by a third party. “If you win the heart of the parents and the children, nobody can stop you to get the medal of the best teacher,” she says. She also taught in a college as an assistant professor. When she resigned, her BBA students made her a card, a certificate of their own applauding her as the best teacher. Small children can still be steered, she says, but college students “will only speak what they want to”.

A new posting every three years.

Her husband serves in defence, and every three years the family is supposed to move on. “So designation was one thing I definitely compromised on,” she says. “Whatever I got, I took it because I took it as an opportunity of being at different places.” At one posting she worked as vice principal. She introduced a reading day and other activities meant to create a love for learning among the students, and put emphasis on their communication skills, “because if you are able to communicate rightly with right words, half the battle is won”.

One compromise, not two.

When her husband was posted to a new city, she was serving in another, and she wanted work close enough to reach her family. A teacher who wants to switch finds a job easily, she says. For a vice principal or a principal, “the vacancies are very limited and few”. She applied on her own as well as through Suraasa. Some schools asked her to come as a primary teacher. Others offered academic coordinator, a step down in designation. She was willing to bend on one thing at a time. If the title was lower, her salary had to be protected. “That was my only, only requirement,” she says.

A member of the Suraasa team picked her CV out of the pool for a vice principal post. What she describes is the follow-up. After each conversation with the school she was told what had been said and what the next round would be, and when the school called her directly she updated him in turn. When the school asked for her salary expectation, she asked him what the market looked like before she quoted. “Quoting the right amount is also an art,” she says. At no point, she says, did she feel she was being deceived.

Meeting the teachers one by one.

She recorded her account in her first days at the new school. The campus, the management, the teachers and the students are, in her words, “absolutely wonderful”. She also knows that a new leader has to be accepted. “Acceptance of new things, it does give some challenges to you,” she says. So she has been meeting her teachers one on one, to explain her philosophy and the rationale behind what she shares with them.

What she tells them is what she has told her teachers wherever she has been vice principal: “I don’t doubt your knowledge because you are a teacher. I’m sure you are a wonderful teacher.” The work, she says, is to build up skills and polish themselves. The other side is the children, “because for them also I am new”. She has always believed that respect “cannot be demanded or commanded. It can only come from within.”