What Atul Pokhriyal teaches about B2B marketing

Instead of jumping to telling the concept, telling what they need to learn during the day, get into some kind of an experimentation with the hands. You could be seeing something, could be doing something, you could be playing with something, could be a role play, could be anything. So tell us about the XSEED way of learning. What is it? And like some of your success stories that you would like to highlight. So the way learning happens across the world when it comes to schooling is that a school is organized around a weekly timetable.

And that weekly timetable has these periods of teaching which are divided across subjects. You multiply the 30 to 35 teaching weeks with the 40 periods you get within a week, you come to close to a 1200 odd periods of teaching and learning. So think of it like this. The kids in the classroom are experiencing learning in those 1200 periods. 1200 times. Right. The battleground is that. Depending on what the teacher is doing, if 1200 times the teacher is going to make the kids memorize something, rote learning, ratta, the world today and the world tomorrow,

which we don't even know about where it is headed, is not going to operate on ratta. This is not going to work. So the call we took, the mission we are on is to change this forever. Okay. And change this by not just removing it, but by replacing it with the right way of teaching and learning. That is what XSEAD is about. Okay. How we do that is that we say that, look, in each of these periods, if the teacher were to start teaching the right way, chances are that it will lead to a change.

There are 1200 times instead of the child memorizing something or writing something down off the board, if the child were to really do something with his own, her own hands, or get an opportunity to speak, to write on their own, chances are that 1200 times you do that, you will start writing on your own. You will start speaking on your own. Chances are you will not be afraid of picking things with your hands and trying them on your own. Right. And from there on, instead of jumping to telling the concept, telling what they need to learn

during the day, get into some kind of an experimentation with the hands. You could be seeing something, could be doing something, you could be playing with something, could be a role play, could be anything. Interesting. Some kind of an experiment and experiments don't just happen in the labs. The experiments all around us, all kinds of experiments. So can we get the kids to experience the concept? And when they experience the concept and they're like really, you know, like into the thick of

things is when you ask them questions about what they're seeing, what they're observing and try to construct knowledge out of that. Right. Connect that with the concept. Then get them to read what is there in the textbook, which is really a reference tool. That is not from where teaching learning needs to happen. Which is how it has been most of our lives. And once all this is done is when you expect the child to apply what they've learned to a real life problem and not memory waste problem.

Not that what was Ram's father's name in that story that you just read. But how was Ram feeling when he heard his father scream at the auto rickshaw driver? Can the child answer a question like that? Ram's father. So one of the biggest debates in education today is that whether it should be a state subject or best left to private hands. What are your thoughts on this? The matter of reach for a country of India's size and for a country of India's density of population cannot be solved if the state is not involved.

While the private school system is a very clear indicator of what good quality can do. I am not saying private school system quality is perfect. That itself has many lacunae that need to be fixed and that is exactly where exceed in a way is operating. But I think private school system has created that opportunity. In a way if I were to quote the Sun Times article from 2017 that talked about how the public school system has been losing kids and the private school system has been gaining kids.

Not to indicate that this flow is going to stay forever but to indicate that there is something that we can learn from the private school system. So in that sense I say that both can remain. At Exceed we do not do much work with the government. We have done work with the government in the past selectively. In fact with countries like Bhutan we have worked at the highest level of policy creation and even implementation. We have also worked with some districts in the country.

But we are right now very focused on the private school space because we believe that if you have to really work with the government then two things need to happen. Intent to implement has to be very clearly there and second the value system needs to match if that has to happen. So how do you use digital platforms for increasing your reach you know at a time when everybody has a device in their hands. How do you do that? Interesting question. But in our context the most of the work that we do today is B2B. Right.

We work with schools directly and that's the primary segment. So our interface and engagement on the digital platform is really about strengthening our position of being a thought leader in this space. We are the thought leaders. We are the innovation leaders in the space. And that is exactly what we do by way of the digital media. But increasingly now in order to reach the parents directly we are realizing the importance of the digital medium and yes in the coming months and years we will see a lot of movement there.