Ashish Sharma (bottom left in the image) joined the Teacher Leaders Program as a facilitator in 2024 and led a learning community for teachers in Mumbai. A year later, he began leading a group of facilitators from across the country. Pictured above is this very group!
In this interview, Ashish talks about his journey of facilitating and building a community, highlighting the people and practices that helped him grow into a confident facilitator.
Excerpts from the interview
Ashish, how did you first come to be part of the Teacher Leaders Program, and what were your first impressions of the offsite in Rishikesh?
My Senior Director, Jayshree Oberoi, introduced me to Creatnet Education’s Teacher Leaders Program and encouraged folks from our organisation to participate. I was hesitant. I thought to myself, “What could this program be? Should I even go?”.
I did go. That was April 2024. I was one of 38 teachers who joined the program and travelled to Rishikesh for our first TLP offsite, a 3-day facilitator development to kick off the program. We were from all over the country with different levels of experience, so I was quite nervous about whether I’d get along with everyone. But the way our facilitator developers created a safe space for us slowly made us feel like a family! Then, when we formed our groups, we connected well with each other.
My biggest learnings during the offsite were the competencies involved in facilitating a group’s learning. I wasn’t aware of them earlier. Every day, two of us would practice two facilitation competencies, like listening and asking questions, while facilitating a small group learning session. This way, we built a fair understanding of the competencies. But of course, complete understanding neither happens overnight, nor even after 3 days.
Going back to Nagpur, I took these new learnings with me. I was going to build and lead a teacher community of my own!
What helped you build confidence as a facilitator, especially when you started working with a new teacher community?
Since summer vacations had started, I couldn’t work with the teachers in our schools. Nidhi from Creatnet helped me a lot by putting me in touch with teachers from DBM India in Mumbai. Again, I found myself feeling nervous. I thought to myself, “I’m from a small city called Gadarwara in MP, and I had to lead a group of teachers from Mumbai!” A simple reminder and some motivation from Nidhi and Mohita helped: “Just practise the facilitation competencies you’ve learnt. We’re here to support you!” I cleared my doubts, built up my confidence and began working with my new community!
Session by session, my confidence and my connection with my teachers kept growing. I practised building a connection with them, listening, the art of asking questions to create learning and emergence from within them, managing the session and its objectives tightly within an hour (making mental time calculations and managing attention). As for the final facilitation competency—synthesis—it took me 6 months (the full duration of TLP) to synthesise the learnings of my community by putting them into context and making them actionable for us all.
The bond that I continue to share with them is strong. I no longer think of them as teachers from a big city or as PhD holders, and of myself as someone from a small town in Madhya Pradesh who’s leading them. We’re continuing to work together. The community we’ve built is well-connected even now, after the program. We’re connected to our cause and continue discussing our challenges and striving to bring out solutions for them.
Looking back, how has the experience of leading a learning community shaped you as a facilitator and those around you?
One of the teachers in my group, Sarbhjeet sir, told me how he used to be judgmental of himself, his colleagues and children’s parents too. When he started practising what we learnt—how to connect, create a safe space for others—and understood why these were important, he made changes.
He told me, “Ashish, I used to tell parents to not come in the way or that they had to strongly discipline their children. I’ve understood the value of the safe space we’ve created for ourselves and I’ve now created the same for my children and their parents too. They come to me in a timely way to share their challenges and I talk about how I can contribute to their children’s learning journey.” The way he’s both understood the value of a safe space and then created it for his students and their parents is beautiful.
Sarbhjeet Singh (top-left) attending a TLP session for community teachers led by Ashish. Both Sarbhjeet and Priyanka (top-right) joined the 6th cohort of TLP in May 2025 to become facilitators themselves!
I’m continuing to work with Creatnet, as a facilitator developer! I still feel like I have much to learn. What my experience so far has taught me is to joyfully accept something new that comes my way and to not stop myself from learning by staying within my comfort zone. I’ve learnt that it’s when we get out of our comfort zones that we give ourselves more courage and more inspiration, and we’re able to learn new things from new people.
Simply put, I feel TLP is a learning journey where we join with our community and better ourselves and each other. Connected by a common cause, we learn together so that our children experience a better education.
Ashish Sharma, has been a Teacher Leaders Program (TLP) facilitator since 2024 and is the most energetic leader the community has seen! At the Akanksha Foundation, Nagpur, Ashish works closely with headmasters across 81 schools through Project Setu.