Ms. Ritu is a self-directed, and self-motivated life-long learner, who is passionate about inquiry-based education, focused on conceptual understanding and aimed at developing mindsets, and skill-sets among the young budding minds that would help them to evolve and be instruments of change at local and global levels.
With more than 18+ years of experience in the field of education, she brings along a wealth of international educational expertise spanning Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. A Council of International Schools (CIS) Evaluator and Accreditation Schools Visiting Team member since 2018, she has been involved in CIS’s school evaluation and accreditation visits in Europe. She has worked extensively with International Baccalaureate (IB), and IB World schools in a range of roles of a subject teacher (MYP & DP), a middle school leader (Head of Department, Modern foreign languages, ATL coordinator), and most recently, in her last school’s Staff leadership Team (SLT), serving in the capacity of High School Principal & an IBDP coordinator.
Aside from a number of the IB Leadership certifications, Ms Ritu’s academic antecedents include a Masters in Organic Chemistry (1995) from her hometown University of Bhopal, India before going on to obtain a double master’s in the teaching of French as a Foreign language (2005), University of Rouen, France and Masters in French (1998) from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) New Delhi. She first started her teaching journey from French at Alliance Française de Bhopal, India in 1992 as a part-time French teacher while still completing her formal education to obtain a Master’s in Science in 1998. She later returned to Alliance Francaise once again to teach the language until 2007. Her stint with International education began in 2007, when Ritu joined an IB World School in Mumbai, as a French and TOK teacher, followed by her move to the United Arab Emirates in 2014 to work at a full IB continuum school running all 4 programmes of IB in Dubai till June 2017. She has also tried her hands-on teaching a Language development course in the IB career (IBCC) programme for a year at the school, in Dubai.
She feels determined to work towards fostering student agency, and to nurture and support the development of the 21st-century readiness skills and mindset, among our young learners, enabling them to thrive in these contemporary times. In Ms. Ritu’s own words, “I endeavour to make a difference in other lives, to breathe the success mantra given by Ralph Waldo Emerson – To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” Her personal and non-negotiable core values include compassion, respect, integrity, determination, trust, honesty, kindness and service.
She tries to strike an inner and outer balance through spiritual practices, exercising devotional yoga, reading, walking, travelling, volunteering for NGOs, cooking and writing. She has travelled around 35+ countries and loves to learn about diverse cultures and people. She has also participated in street teaching of children from a modest background in India, has recorded syllabi in English and Hindi, for visually impaired children in different states, for a Bhopal-based NGO, has participated in Relay for life (raising funds for cancer patients) night walks, has been a volunteer for ‘Habitat for Humanity’ for building homes at Pondicherry, and a volunteer for collecting food for the homeless under the banner of Food Bank, in Estonia.