Vijay Gupta Let me share with you a typical scenario in our classrooms. The teacher has been teaching the algorithm of division, and then asks students to calculate 212 divided by 2. Rahul gets the answer 16 and excitedly shares it with the teacher. The teacher shuts him down saying he is wrong. Rahul took the risk of sharing his answer and got a snub. Sooner or later Rahul is likely to convince himself that he can’t learn math. In our work with teachers, across India, over more than a decade, we repeatedly come across this kind of classroom interaction. We believe that such a classroom environment is not conducive for deep learning. Making mistakes, and learning from them, is an essential part of the learning journey. This will not happen in a classroom environment where students think twice before sharing their answer, or explore one more way of solving a problem, or engage with one more aspect of a situation. If you agree with me so far, this article will share with you six ways in which we can start creating an environment where students take a risk, where they look at mistakes as one more opportunity for learning, and are not satisfied with one way of attacking a problem, and also engage in finding out the answer rather than wait for the teacher to give the answer. One, when students respond to a question, do not get busy with whether the answer is right or wrong. A better line of thought is to say – “Let us examine this answer”, and encourage the student to share how he went about figuring out the answer. This should be done irrespective of whether the answer is right or wrong. For our earlier division problem, let Rahul share how he applied the division algorithm and encourage him, and the entire class, to think if the answer seems sensible. As you can see, this division problem is a great opportunity to explain how the division algorithm works. In the first step, when we say divide first ‘2’ of 212 by 2 and get 1, actually what we have done is that we have divided 200 by 2 and have got hundred (that is, 1 in the hundredth place). In the second step, we are actually dividing 10 by 2, and should get 5 but the algorithm is so efficient that it figures out that there is a zero in the tenth place and encourages us to divide

Chintan Girish Modi “Son, you are a boy. You should wear your own clothes, not your sister’s.” “But I want to be a fairy! And why do you keep saying I’m a boy when I’m a girl?” “Because you are like your brother, not like your sister. Boys are boys and girls are girls, Guthli.” This conversation is an excerpt from Kanak Shashi’s book Guthli has Wings (2019), published by Tulika Books and recommended for readers above the age of six. If Guthli were a student at your school, how would you interact with her? Knowing that her home environment does not affirm her gender identity or her personal understanding of who she is, what would you do in order to create a safe and welcoming atmosphere for her? The easy and spineless thing to do would be to shut her down, and get her to fall in line. The challenging and humane response would be to listen to what she is going through, ask her about the support she needs, look for useful resources, and work with the students and teachers to get her what she needs to thrive. Uncertainty in the classroom can be a source of moral panic when you are faced with a situation that you are not trained to handle, or one that destabilizes your deeply held beliefs. It can also be an opportunity to admit that there are things you do not know, and that you need to learn about. A pamphlet titled ‘Answers to Your Questions: About Transgender People, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression’ (2014) published by the American Psychological Association states, “Gender identity refers to a person’s internal sense of being male, female, or something else; gender expression refers to the way a person communicates gender identity to others through behaviour, clothing, hairstyles, voice, or body characteristics.” Your gender identity may not coincide with the sex mentioned on your birth certificate. Check out https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/transgender.pdf to learn more about the difference between sex and gender, and to figure out what it means to be transgender, intersex and genderqueer. Guthli identifies as a girl. The author affirms this gender identity by referring to Guthli as a girl, and by using Guthli’s preferred pronoun ‘she’. Guthli’s mother takes a while to come to terms with her daughter’s gender identity. She insists that Guthli is a boy, and her son. Frustrated by the lack of acceptance in her own family, and the constant misgendering, Guthli becomes quiet and withdrawn. She prefers