Global Teacher Prize Award beckons city educationist

Hyderabad: Meghana Musunuri, founder-chairperson of Fountainhead Global School and Junior College is the first person to be part of Google's ‘Women Entrepreneurs on the Web’ and who has completed all five circles of the program.

Winning the Global Teacher Prize Award is akin to a Nobel Prize for her.

“Teachers are extremely passionate but the recognition that they get is limited. It is very important to be out there and tell the world what all you are doing and that makes the difference,” she said in an interview with Deccan Chronicle. Excerpts:

How did you get into teaching?

On returning to India from London, I started the school as I was very passionate about teaching. Moreover, my roots are here. That is what made me to come back and integrate new-age technology and teaching. It was experimentation, so to say. With Google, we developed teaching tools and started using them from 2012 onwards. I have been operating my administration on Google, which was new then. We trained our teachers, staff and blended technology with education to bring out the best in us. Last year, when the pandemic forced a shift from offline to online classrooms, we hardly faced any difficulty in the transition as we were using these tools for long. I had teachers and educators from other schools who wanted to know how we did it and they are learning from our experience."

Did the Global Teacher Prize Award take this initiative into account?

The award looks at your overall contribution to society. It takes into account how you have made education interesting for students and also how it has helped them in real life. There were lots of rounds and lots of parameters before they closed in on 50 teachers. The school has worked towards reviving the Meedi Kunta Lake and that contribution is very important. Apart from contributions from me and my faculty, children used money meant to celebrate their birthdays for saving the lake. These real-life aspects have enriched the experience of teaching. We believe that locally we must make an impact and our efforts towards that helped in reviving the lake.

You teach social studies, English and maths. These are three different subjects. How do you manage?

Social studies as a subject is labelled ‘dry’ and often children wonder what they would do by learning history. The onus is on teachers to make it interesting and create a learning curve that can help shape one’s future. We have created tools, samples and also practical models to make it interesting.

Similarly, children fear maths but our effort has been to mix maths and art. This has produced amazing results. I strongly believe that a teacher should strive to handle multiple subjects. In fact, I encourage all my teachers to teach different subjects as it evolves their respective teaching abilities.

Are you looking forward to more interviews for the Global Teacher Prize Award?

Yes. There are more interviews lined up and I am looking forward to it. Next in the line is a round for the top 10 category globally.