Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child wins award to create training centers in India

The Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child at the University of Notre Dame has received a $600,000 award from Porticus, a global philanthropic organization, to create whole child development (WCD) training centers in India. 

The Global Center will serve as the anchor organization for a multi-year project with the Telangana Social/Tribal Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Societies — called the Society. The Society, a government office that uses residential education to improve educational outcomes for students of historically marginalized caste backgrounds, will work with the Global Center to implement training that integrates whole child development and social emotional learning skills in their classrooms and creates safe and inclusive residential school environments. 

“This award comes at a crucial time to leverage the momentum the Society and the Global Center have built through their whole child development framework,” said Neil Boothby, the founding director of the Global Center. “This is an opportunity to equip Society trainers with whole child development knowledge and training skills so, ultimately, we can expand to service the broader teaching population and impact more classrooms across Telangana.”

The Global Center has worked with the Society over the last two years to build and operate a whole child development model for education in Telangana. Society leadership has implemented a contextualized WCD approach and asked the Global Center to support the expansion of teacher and school leadership training over the next four years. The Global Center will develop a teaching and research center to increase teachers’ capacity and evaluate the program’s effectiveness.

Over the course of the training sessions, teachers will receive virtual support, school visits and mentoring and will participate in peer-learning groups facilitated by the Global Center. This new sequential training and coaching model is designed to build out the Society’s capacity for teacher training and improve the way it equips and trains teachers. The program will gradually be integrated into a two-year bachelor of education program taught at Osmania University in Telangana. 

Part of the University's Institute for Educational Initiatives, the Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child works toward its mission to create pathways out of adversity for the world’s most vulnerable children, leveraging science-based innovations and a whole child development approach. The center has research to action initiatives in 26 countries around the globe.