Maya is the Founder Director of The Teacher Foundaton. Since 2021, she has led The Teacher Foundation as the Glossary Anchoring Partner of the Life Skills Collaborative. She has been in the field of education for 4 decades. Her areas of professional experience include conceptualizing, designing and implementing a wide range of school and teacher-related projects and services. These include the Wipro Applying Thought in Schools Teacher Empowerment Project initiated in 2001 and Safe & Sensitive Schools initiated in 2009. Since 2012, she has also worked on the development of the Indian Social and Emotional Learning Framework (ISELF); an age-banded set of standards for Social & Emotional Learning for Indian schools. ISELF is the only researched and contextualised SEL Framework existing in India.
Her professional interests and expertise include school effectiveness research and whole school improvement, whole school well-being, teacher development, collaborative approaches to teaching and learning, interpersonal communication in the classroom, leadership and strategic management of schools.
She has been a full-time teacher trainer since 1996, conducting professional development programmes for heads and teachers of schools across India and abroad. She has trained several thousand teachers across the past 25 years. She has presented at leading education conferences both nationally and internationally.
She is an Accredited Teacher Trainer for Jenny Mosley Consultancies (UK) for training teachers on Whole School Quality Circle Time (QCT) across schools in India. QCT is an ecosystemic model for fostering SEL amongst children and teachers alike.
"The educational systems should rely on three solid foundations: enhancing values, life skills, and formal educational curriculum. Each of these bases completes the other, none of them can stand on its own. "