It was heartening to note educators from across the world appreciating the depth of School Cinema and the fact that it was not relegated to being a mere research paper. It was a live programme benefitting several thousand students. The conference got me in touch with some amazing research that is happening in the space of education across the world. Most research was hard core work being done by educators. From 'Testing for gender differences in learning' to 'Meta competence or Critical-thinkers, what do we make our children?' to 'Challenging the Unexamined Epistemic Assumptions of the Teacher Educator Learner through Transformative Learning Theory' to 'The Way of Tea: Paradigm for Life-Long Learning'.

I must confess that the attention to detail that needs to be given to education is missing sorely in India. It is extremely good to try out new things and newer systems in education, but if it is not studied before being implemented en-masse it could lead to undesirable results. What we as educators need to do is, be brave and experiment but also be sensible to figure out the impact of our changes. Understand and evaluating the impact on our children or teachers or on the systems is vital.

For example, if a school decides to have children evaluating teacher's performance, it is very important to try it out as a pilot in a particular class or section. Collect feedback from children and teachers and see how it is impacting the overall performance of the school. Is it having the desired positive impact or is it leading to negative repercussion? If done in a controlled environment and then qualitative and quantitative data is analysed it gives a new learning to move ahead.

One of the biggest challenges Principals and School Leaders face is to convince the management or teachers about the new changes they want to bring. They normally find them rigid about changes they want to bring in. The management cannot understand emotions or feeling they go by facts, so you give them facts. Here is one practical suggestion for you, the next time you want to make a change do a pilot and go to the management with facts; it is always easy to convince people when you show them the facts.

Maybe you want to change the uniform next year or introduce film based learning in your schools or want to have a regular teachers training programme, convince the management and teachers scientifically, go to them with data. Tell them the percentage of students who will benefit from the change; why, how and what impact will be created by the change. You will see that you will become a lot more effective as a leader when you approach in a scientific and research based approach.