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Adhyayan Asia gets introspective

Adhyayan Asia is a strong believer in looking inwards to understand oneself better. The very word ‘Adhyayan’ means, deep, rigorous study of a reader-transforming text.

The Adhyayan Quality Standard is based on an inclusive model of assessment in which all the stakeholders of a school come together to evaluate their school. This helps create a realistic portrayal of the school and enables school leadership to bring about effective change.

So obviously we are completely “with it” when someone comes to Adhyayan and asks us to turn the lens of enquiry on ourselves!

ATMA is a non-profit organisation that provides intensive support to education non-profits and social enterprises, helping them meet their daily operational challenges and plan for their future growth.

Last week, ATMA’s Lisa Rodricks, Jithin ‘Jr.’ Krishnan and Beatrice Crestini spent most of Saturday morning with the Adhyayan team, conducting a fun, energetic and thought provoking workshop that asked us to introspect about the Adhyayan DNA.

 

An ice breaker got the core team thinking about how well we knew each other before moving on to a series of activities that had us attempt to set the record for most number of post its used in Wadala (more on that later!).

ATMA asked the Adhyayan team to reflect on “who we are”. Questions touched upon what we stood for and what we hoped to achieve as an organisation, to understanding who our stakeholders are and how we are changing their lives.

The workshop kept us on our toes as we trooped up to the office white boards and “slammed” our post-its on them. The idea was to come up with as many answers as possible in the time given (and hence set the world record for most number of post-its used in Wadala) and then review and filter them.

The workshop started the wheels and cogs in our brains turning with respect to how we see ourselves which feeds in to how the rest of the world sees us. We were happy to see ‘passion’. ‘collaboration’, ‘active listening’, ‘flexible’, ‘dependable’ and ‘fun loving’ describe our change making image of ourselves!

Since we bring self-review into everything we do, Adhyayan Activators (that’s us) saw the experience as something that fed our motivation, made us concious of how we project ourselves and bring a common vocabulary of words that give us power. It would have been even better if we could have had more whiteboards to bang on!

We look forward to working closely with ATMA in the future. We’ve already bought more post-it notes.