The Lawrence School, Sanawar 59er’s Teachers Excellence Award

The ‘Teachers Excellence Award’ has been initiated and sponsored by the class of 1959 in appreciation and gratitude to the School and the Staff for having imparted excellent education, values and espirit de corps to its students. It is felt that invariably all academic incentives and awards are aimed towards motivating students to excel whereas teachers, who are the real motivators and impart knowledge to them are generally ignored. Hence, to correct this anomaly, the class of ’59 have taken a small step towards this and initiated this award. The aim of the award is to create a keen competitive spirit amongst the teachers to strive and excel in imparting instructions to the students. The final aim being to so motivate the students to bring out the best in them thereby enabling them to smoothly gain admissions to the best colleges in the country.

To make this award monetarily attractive, we the class of ’59 have raised a corpus of over Rupees Nine Lakh amongst ourselves with a mandate that this would be invested by the School in bank fixed deposit instruments. Out of the annual interest so earned two thirds would be given as the award and balance merged with the corpus and reinvested so that over a period of time the award can be enhanced. The first award shall be awarded for the academic year 2009 – 10 with the winner’s purse of Rupees Forty Thousand.

The award shall be open to all subject teachers teaching class XII only. This being the crucial year this award has been deliberately restricted to this faculty. The award shall include all subjects being taught in class XII. However, Art, Physical Education and Sculpture have been excluded since they have disproportionate subjective practical marks being awarded locally and also have no weightage in admissions to colleges.

The award shall be awarded to the subject teacher who, in comparison to others, produces maximum improvement in his students over his previous year’s class XII students in the CBSE Board examination results in terms of percentile improvement. The Teachers Excellence Award would be measured by the percentile results of the class in a particular subject in the class XII Board exam as that is an evaluation of how the Sanawar students measure up on a national level. The teacher that shows the maximum improvement would be given the award. The criteria will not be the subject that gets the highest percentile (this would tend to give the Maths and Sciences the edge over Liberal Arts) but would be which subject made the maximum ‘Improvement’ over the previous year's results of the same teacher. This would have the following advantages:-

(a) It will be a healthy competition between the teachers.
(b) It will be a good incentive for the teacher to try to help pull up the students that need the extra attention to improve their grades with a little help.
(c) It will make the teacher challenge the brighter students to excel further.
(d) It will help foster a partnership between the students and the teacher to work as a team to achieve a goal.
(e) It will encourage the teachers to invest some time in retraining to improve and refresh their teaching skills.

There shall only be one award every year. In addition to the monetary amount, an appropriately worded scroll shall also be presented and the name of the awardee will be inscribed on an honour board prominently displayed at a suitable place in the school. For wider recognition and appreciation of the teacher, the declaration of the winner and the presentation of the monetary award and scroll shall be at a ceremony during Founder’s every year. As already mentioned above, the first such award shall be presented during Founder’s 2010 for the awardee of the academic year 2009 – 10. A suitable document giving detailed rules and procedures to assess this award and handling of the corpus has been given to the School to implement.

It is hoped that with this incentive, over the period of time teachers will endeavour and strive to motivate and challenge their students to so excel and that the School will reclaim its lost glory and pride of place at the top amongst all such educational institutes in India and once again become “The Best School of All”.