CENTA® TQ/ TPO 2020 Registration Form
Please note that CENTA® TQ is also the first stage of CENTA TPO 2020 (Top 5000 TQ scorers will be invited for the finals of CENTA TPO).
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Featured Teachers: Winners of MyCENTA QuizCon 2
Please note that CENTA® TQ is also the first stage of CENTA TPO 2020 (Top 5000 TQ scorers will be invited for the finals of CENTA TPO).
1. INR 15000 + taxes before the start of the program
2. INR 30000 + taxes within two weeks of the start of the program
3. INR 30000 + taxes within 45 days of the start of the program
4. INR 10000 + taxes within 75 days of the start of the program
Critical Thinking and Communication are recognised worldwide as two of the most important skills that ensure students’ success in the 21-st century workplace. This test is an assessment of teachers’ skills to not only think critically and communicate effectively, but also their understanding of HOW to TEACH them. This assessment is NOT based on any subject and is applicable to teachers of all classes/grades – from Primary School to Ph.D, and beyond.
Recognitions for Ramya’s work in education include:
– Among 30 ‘Women Transforming India’ by NITI Aayog and United Nations.
– Part of Economic Times’ Women Ahead list recognizing 26 business and social leaders.
– Selected as Ashoka Fellow (global network of social entrepreneurs and the foremost global recognition in the social sector), 2016.
– Researched by a Professor from the Institute of Education, UK and profiled in the Peabody Journal of Education in the U.S. as an example of ‘how the network impact catalyzed by an individual can drive system level impact’, 2015.
– Global entrepreneurship award in McKinsey for her contributions to education in India, 2014.
– Invited to author a chapter in ‘World Class’ published by Routledge Education in 2017;
– Profiled by Education World, 2017; quoted by various other media from time to time.
– Profiled by Omidyar Network, as part of ‘honouring, during women’s history month, 25 women entrepreneurs changing education globally’; 2018.
– Several recognitions for CENTA as an organization including ‘Top 60 social enterprise in Asia’,‘Knowledge Partner to NITI Aayog’, member of ‘Global Alliance on Teachers’, etc.
Prior to founding CENTA, Ramya was with McKinsey & Company for 15+ years, including as Leader of Education Practice for the last 5 years. As part of building this practice, Ramya is known for driving pioneering on-the-ground reform efforts in both school education and skills in India:
– Large scale school system reform through public-private partnership (e.g. in Mumbai);
– Helping set up significant national level institutions (e.g. NSDC);
– Supporting the development of several leading foundations and private organizations (e.g. Teach for India, Azim Premji Foundation, etc.)
– Contributing to significant policies especially on public-private partnership.
– Contributor to seminal global publications of McKinsey such as its school systems report in 2010 and employment report in 2013.
Beyond India, Ramya has played smaller roles in education and skills efforts in Bhutan, South East Asia, Middle East and North Africa.
In the first 10 years of her career (1999-2009), Ramya has worked in other industry sectors, especially manufacturing and infrastructure, and several geographies – India, North America, Europe, Asia – and she continues to bring that broad professional experience to bear in her education work.
Ramya holds a B.Tech. from IIT Delhi and an MBA from IIM Calcutta, and has received prestigious awards for leadership at both institutes as well as a Distinguished Alum award from her high school.
Ashish Dhawan is the Founder and CEO of Central Square Foundation (CSF). He worked for twenty years in the investment management business and ran one of India’s leading private equity funds, ChrysCapital. Ashish previously worked in the Risk Arbitrage Group at Goldman Sachs in New York. Prior to that, he worked for a private equity fund in Brazil, GP Investments, and a mid-market US buyout fund, MDC Partners. In 2004, Ashish received the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year award (Startup Category). He later received the Young Super performer Award from Business Today in 2005.
In June 2012, he left his full time role at ChrysCapital to start CSF to pursue his goal of creating social impact via philanthropic investments in the K-12 education space. Ashish is an MBA with distinction from Harvard University and a dual bachelor’s (BS/BA) holder with Magna Cum Laude honours from Yale University. He is on the India Advisory Board of Harvard Business School and a member of Yale’s Development Council.
Ashish serves on the board of several non-profits including Akanksha Foundation, 3.2.1 Education Foundation, Teach For India, Centre for Civil Society, Janaagraha and GiveLife. As Founder and CEO of CSF, Ashish hopes to bring a fresh impact-based approach to philanthropy in India. He was recently recognized as the NextGen Leader in Philanthropy by Forbes India.
Ashish lives in Delhi and is married to Manisha. They have three children, Ayla and Anya and Armaan.
Passionate about building new ventures, Anjali Jain believes that improvement in quality and effectiveness of teaching in the K-12 space is imperative for large-scale transformation in education – with CENTA®; as the catalyst for this transformation. Anjali brings in two decades of experience in business management and operations leadership, during which she has driven large-scale initiatives with a focus on entrepreneurial planning and execution.
Anjali has over 20 years of experience and has held multiple leadership positions in business development and operations in Europe, India and South East Asia. Her last stint prior to CENTA® was in skill development and employability business, where she played a key role in setting up a pan-India, multi-sector job-assured skilling programs for young graduates. She has extensive technology background with almost 15 years of experience in IT Services including Infosys, Wipro and HCL.
Anjali is a Business graduate from Indian Institute of Management (Calcutta) with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Punjab Engineering College (Chandigarh). She speaks English, Hindi and German.
Nalini Haridas is a Product Owner in financial risk regulatory technology at Oracle Financial Services Software Ltd. Over the last 20 years, she has worked in the financial services IT sector in enterprise software development in roles spanning project management and functional architecting.
Nalini is deeply interested in school education and is a former co-founder of CENTA®. At CENTA®, Nalini led and supported various aspects of organization building such as business and operations planning, the design and development of CENTA® Teacher Standards and CENTA® Certification, and setting up and guiding technology needs.
Nalini is an engineering graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and has a certification in financial risk management from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. She currently lives in Philadelphia, USA with her family.
Michael Fernandes heads LeapFrog’s Asia investments, overseeing deal teams in South and South East Asia and leading LeapFrog’s Singapore office. LeapFrog Investments is a specialist investor in emerging markets financial services, and has a “profit-with-purpose” philosophy. Michael was earlier with Malaysian investment fund Khazanah Nasional for close to 5 years, heading the global Healthcare team and the India team, and overseeing investments including IDFC, Apollo Hospitals, IHH Healthcare.
Michael is reputed to be a seasoned investor with strong business acumen combined with a deep understanding of the development space. In addition, Michael has played an in-depth role in the healthcare industry over several years, in both strategy and operations. He built out Nicholas Piramal’s global Custom manufacturing business for 2 years. Prior to these, Michael was a Partner at McKinsey & Company. In his 13 years at McKinsey, his experience spanned across Europe, Israel, S E Asia and India, primarily focused on pharmaceuticals, healthcare and retail. Michael holds an MBA from IIM Calcutta and a B.Sc. in Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata.
Ramesh Srinivasan joined McKinsey & Company in 1994, having spent the first 11 years of his tenure with the firm in India, and the last 11 years in New York. Ramesh is actively involved in education: he is a trustee on the Board of Akanksha—a leading non-profit institution in India that helps provide funding for educational services to underprivileged children—and an advisor to Teach For India.
In addition to leading McKinsey Academy in the Americas, Ramesh has extensive experience working on a broad range of organizational change-related topics in a variety of industries, including high-tech, healthcare, banking, and industrial companies. Ramesh also possesses considerable expertise in merger management, organizational design, talent and leadership development, performance management, and capability building. In addition to serving clients on these topics, Ramesh works closely with McKinsey’s internal leadership and professional development programs. Ramesh is also the Dean of the Bower Forum, McKinsey’s program for CEO learning.
Dr. Linda Rush joined GEMS Education in September 2014 and is currently Senior Vice President of the Institute for Teacher Learning and Leadership for All (TELLAL). TELLAL is a dual provider (Arabic and English) in its own right of internationally accredited and qualifying teacher education and leadership development. In collaboration with a number of world-class educational organisations, it supports the incubating and nurturing of new ideas around learning and teaching. Previous to joining GEMS, Dr. Linda was the Director of Professional Learning and Head of Initial Teacher Education at University of Manchester.
As an educator, educational consultant and researcher Dr. Linda has worked with a wide range of learners including: teachers in schools; dentists; doctors; clinical consultants; lawyers; academics across all disciplines in four universities; and those working in university administration. She was the youngest head teacher in England at the time of her appointment and was appointed Teacher Fellow at two universities and a nominee for UK National Teaching Fellow in recognition of her excellence in teaching. As a researcher she has presented at numerous international conferences and has 12 publications in peer reviewed international journals.
Other research outputs include book chapters and funded research projects. Dr. Linda has been a keynote speaker at the prestigious British Educational Research Association (BERA) conference. In recognition of her knowledge and expertise in the area of ‘partnership learning’ she was also funded to lead on the design and delivery of the equally prestigious Society For Educational Seminar Series (2013) entitled: Experimentation or fragmentation: the future of teacher education? Dr Linda has worked on the Editorial Advisory Board for Teaching Public Administration Journal (SAGE) and has also been an External Reviewer for a number of universities.
Dr. Linda has a PhD and Masters from the University of Liverpool, UK. She has been awarded status of Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK. Currently, she is reflecting on partnership practices in the context of public and private educational organisations in more cosmopolitan and competitive contexts seeking to make the unconventional conventional.
One of the founding partners of AZB & Partners, Bahram N. Vakil is amongst India’s foremost infrastructure and project finance attorneys. Bahram is one of the few infrastructure lawyers in the country who has been involved in five of the eight fast track power projects and has been acknowledged as a leading project finance lawyer by most international publications for over a decade. The World’s Leading Lawyers for Business mentions that Bahram N. Vakil is a gregarious and hard headed lawyer according to clients who value his “smart, reliable and practical advice”. His finesse in negotiations is especially singled out. “He adds value in negotiations, ensuring both parties see the other’s point of view” states Chambers Global.
He has served as an advisor to various infrastructure projects in India in the power, oil and natural gas, telecommunications, mining, airports and port sectors as well as to foreign and domestic sector banks on various financing transactions. In addition, he has advised clients in major corporate acquisitions and merger of companies in India. He has extensive experience in negotiation, drafting of documentation and corporate and foreign exchange related issues. He has also advised and negotiated transactions for various venture capital funds and investor companies, as also in the structuring of offshore and domestic venture capital funds.
Bahram holds an LLM from the Columbia University, and is a member of the New York State Bar.
Dr. James Nicholas Tooley is a Professor of Education Policy at the University of Newcastle, and also Global Head, Low Cost Schools, at GEMS Education. Tooley is best known for his work on low cost private education, a journey of discovery that started in 2000 and led to in-depth research and a range of books and publications, including “The Beautiful Tree: a personal journey into how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves”.
His work has also been profiled in documentaries for the BBC and PBS: for the latter it was featured alongside the work of Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus and Hernando de Soto Polar. For his research on private education for the poor in India, China and Africa, Tooley was awarded the gold prize in the first International Finance Corporation/Financial Times Private Sector Development Competition in September 2006.
He is currently chairman of education companies in Ghana (Omega Schools Franchise Ltd) and India (Empathy Learning Systems Pvt Ltd) creating low cost chains of low cost private schools. He also holds an appointment as an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute and serves on the Advisory Council of the Institute of Economic Affairs as well as on the Academic Advisory Council of Civitas: The Institute for the Study of Civil Society. He also serves on the Board of Visitors of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college in Savannah. Previously he has taught and researched at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester; his first job was a mathematics teacher in Zimbabwe.
Dr. Ganesh Natarajan is Executive Chairman and Founder of 5F World, a platform for Skills, Start-ups and Social Ventures in the country. He is also Chairman of Global Talent Track, a pioneer in Employability Skills Training in Asia.
Ganesh’s industry responsibilities include Chairman of NASSCOM Foundation, President of the Harvard Business School Club of India and a member of the National Council of the CII. Ganesh is a Global Board Director of Social Venture Partners and Convener of SVP Pune.
Ganesh’s industry responsibilities include Chairman of NASSCOM Foundation, President of the Harvard Business School Club of India and a member of the National Council of the CII. Ganesh is a Global Board Director of Social Venture Partners and Convener of SVP Pune.
A well-reputed Bangalore based school had two high potential candidates from whom the School management needed to promote one to the role of the Principal. The Management had their views on strengths and development areas of both candidates but wanted to make an objective decision which would be acceptable to the teachers as well and is not perceived to be biased by anyone in the school – this was very important from the school culture perspective. Also, the Management was sure that the candidate who would not be promoted would leave the school and thus they were very keen to use a selection process which is deemed fair and hence does not cause any issues with the candidates who is not promoted.
The Management sponsored both candidates to undertake two relevant CENTA Micro-Credentials- Classroom Communication (Level 3) and Professional Competencies (Level 3), which are relevant for the role these candidates were expected to take up. Candidates were given the freedom to choose their subjects.
Both the candidates cleared both Micro-Credentials. However, as CENTA provides a detailed competency-wise scorecard along with the results, an analysis of which gave very objective assessment to both the candidates on their respective strength and development areas which was incidentally in line with the Management’s own views. It made the discussions related to promotion more constructive for both candidates. The candidate who got promoted also got valuable feedback for areas which she should leverage to do well in the role as well as areas to build upon. The candidate who did not get promoted also valued the experience and objective nature of the process and decided to continue the service, helping the school retain an outstanding teacher.
A large school group with hundreds of schools across the country wanted to leverage an objective and structured input to select candidates for Principal promotion from its pool of Vice-Principal candidates.
The group offered all is Vice Principals who were interested in taking up the promotion, a chance to undertake two relevant CENTA Micro-Credentials- Classroom Communication (Level 3) and Professional Competencies (Level 3), which are relevant for the role these candidates were expected to take up. Candidates were given the freedom to choose their subjects and the school supported these nominations by reimbursing the fees to all the candidates who completed the process. To make this a positive experience for the teachers, the school did not link the reimbursement to the success of the candidate but to the effort undertaken in completing the process seriously. The results of the Micro-Credential along with the personalized scorecard became a well-accepted input in the Promotion process. The School Management was very well aligned with the results of the Micro-Credential in most cases.
More importantly, in the few cases where results were different from their expectations, they deep-dived and observed those teachers carefully for few months and realized that CENTA Micro-Credential results captured the strengths and development areas more concretely than their earlier observations.
Given the positive experience of the candidates and the school management with the first batch of micro-Credentials, the school took the entire exercise again next year with the new cohort of Vice Principal candidates as well as gave another chance to the previous cohort candidates to complete the Micro-Credentials.
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