Two worksheets. One boy, catching up.Two worksheets. One boy, catching up.

A class she dreaded.

Vaishali had years of teaching behind her when one pupil made her afraid of her own classroom. She spent seven years as an assistant professor in a college, then took a B.Ed in mathematics and taught for three years in Chennai schools. She didn’t know what to do with a boy who was still on addition while the rest of the class had moved on to algebra.

“I used to be scared to go to the class because I don’t know what to do with the kid,” she says. He sat through lessons he couldn’t follow, and she knew it. “It was not good from my part. It was not fair.”

Twenty minutes that never stayed twenty.

A colleague had told her about PgCTL, but she put it off, sure the modules and skill evidences would eat time she didn’t have. When she enrolled in 2023 she was working and studying for a Cambridge diploma in teaching and learning. She told her counsellor not to be confident on her behalf: “I’m working, and it’s going to be very, very difficult for me.”

Her answer was a timetable. Two days a week went to the diploma, three to PgCTL, and weekends to planning the school week ahead. The programme asks for twenty minutes a day. She rarely stopped there. “If I see one video, I will not stop there … I’ll go to the next video.” The theory from her first module went straight into her diploma evidence, and the reflection, summary and action plan at the end of every module made her think.

Two worksheets, every lesson.

Differentiation was new to her. “Nothing I knew,” she says. Then she began walking into class with two worksheets for the boy, set at his level. He moved from addition to multiplication, and she introduced division. By then the others had finished integers and algebra. He hadn’t caught up with them. He had moved, though, and that was the point.

“At least from his stage he has gone to the next level,” she says. “Just sitting in the class idle doesn’t make sense.”

It reminded her of her own school days. “No one even thought like, what are you learning? Is it OK for you? Do you understand?” From then on, she says, “I made sure each and every class of mine is a differentiated class.”

Assessment was another thing she loved taking from PgCTL and trying in her class. She lists think-pair-share and plenary triangles among the types she learnt. She turned a simple 2D and 3D sorting activity into an ongoing assessment, with a rubric she wrote herself.

The interview that went differently.

She had already sat two or three interviews for schools in the UAE. GEMS Legacy School was the first she attended after the programme’s employability module, and it hired her.

“Before, when I sat for an interview, I just read about myself,” she says. This time she studied the school’s website and worked out how she could contribute. She learnt when to extend an answer and when to cut it short. Suraasa also ran a 15-minute mock interview with her before the real one.

Next, on her own visa.

Her husband works in the US, and he offered to bring her over on a dependent visa. She said no, because she couldn’t work on one. “I’ll make sure I come on my own visa and I work there. That’s my aim.”

Her suggestion to teachers weighing the workload is borrowed from the kitchen: “When you have to sit and eat something which is delicious, you will have to give time to prepare it, right?”