Page 259 – Teacher Plus

Keeping the questions alive

Nimesh Ved A recent trip to Rishi Valley School (Andhra Pradesh) presented an opportunity to interact with students in different classes on divergent topics. During the trip I enjoyed being with the students and partially succeeded in soaking in their energies, enthusiasm and knowledge. But, it was their eagerness to know more that left me stunned and pleased at the same time and in no small measure. As Eugene Ionesco put it: “It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” My interactions with the sociology and ecology students I shared my experiences at Baghmara (South Garo Hills, Meghalaya) and Saiha (Mizoram) with the two sets of students. For my interactions with the sociology class I decided to focus on my experiences in South Garo Hills – of starting a fresh base, undertaking surveys, setting-up an office, interacting with the villagers and with the government authorities. While talking about my experiences I did not use any photographs or PowerPoint. In the ecology class I talked about jhum (shifting-cultivation) using images and asked and answered questions. Jhum, once a widely prevalent form of cultivation, has people cultivating on different plots each year after the forests on the plots are burnt down. Intricately linked to culture, today, jhum faces a slow death. Snippets of what I shared in the sociology class I arrived at Baghmara in May 2004 after the initial surveys had been undertaken. My role was to set up our office and home. Two of us had gone to do the job with two bags each. We selected a few villages for our elephant conservation programme but had to take permission from the Nokma before we began our intervention. The Nokma is the head of the clan that owns the village. It took a while to figure out when and where best to meet people. Six in the morning at the different tea stalls seemed the ideal time and place to begin our interactions with the locals. Tea stalls were places where people socialized; they also served as pickup and drop points for public transport. This meant that in a day we sometimes ended up gulping 10–12 cups of tea. A forest department officer had warned us that people often came, conducted their research and went away (earned fame and money) without bothering to even share the reports of their surveys causing even the line-departments to be wary of sharing information. People took time to open up, but the more they saw of us

Healing with play

Dr. Shakila Naidu Play therapy or play counselling should be as much a part of the school as are its other activities. While a lot of schools offer counselling to their students, recent research has proved the significance of using play therapy as well in schools. We have now accepted that children learn in different ways and device ways to teach them using play, audio-visuals, and outdoor activities. It is time that we also understood that all children may not respond to a talk only counselling session. This is why play therapy is important in schools. “Deep meaning lies often in childish play”. – Johann Friedrich von Schille The constraints of modern day living have substantially decreased opportunities that children have for exploring, interacting, and playing on their own. The benefits of unstructured play for children are far greater than what is commonly understood. Apart from fostering overall development and learning, play reduces stress, encourages creativity, imagination, and spontaneity while nurturing physical, cognitive, social, and emotional competencies. ‘PLAY‘ an edited book by Shubhada Maitra and Shekhar Seshadri is an excellent compilation of literature and research on play-based innovations in the Indian context. It brings together theory, practice methods and interventions in child development, psycho-social and mental health contexts. With 15 chapters, this book broadly divides into two key sections: theoretical concepts and intervention strategies. The contributors, who are academicians and practitioners, give rich insights into breaking through, healing, and recovery in children who have experienced trauma, violence, death and loss, socio-economic deprivation and sexual abuse in their young lives. The authors, coming from diverse disciplines such as psychology, social work, psychiatry, law and art, create a rich mosaic of ideas and perspectives to cover the entire spectrum of play techniques including art forms such as theatre, dance, music, puppetry, and storytelling. The complexity and lack of consensus in operationally defining play leads to some ambiguity in what constitutes the scope of play. With its myriad dimensions, play has been differently categorized as directive/non-directive, activities organized as unstructured play, creative play or cultural play and interventions grouped as free play/educational play, or therapeutic play. The important distinction that has been made however, is that ‘play has to be freely chosen’ to qualify as play. The chapter on unstructured play and mental health by Lata Shenava is by far the best exposition on the significance of free play. In the current urban scene, children are coerced into structured activities for learning, in the name of play. The

Hold that judgment

Geetha Durairajan I was coming back to Hyderabad from a seminar and I had booked a call taxi to pick me up at the airport. I saw the missed calls from the driver and took the call as soon as I landed. The taxi driver’s voice was slurred and a little unclear! I immediately assumed the worst! I told myself: “Gosh! It is late in the evening and I am in trouble! Either this must be a very old man, or he must be drunk or must be a chewer of tobacco or paan.” I resigned myself to my fate, sent up a few prayers and told myself: “Let me hope and pray I don’t have problems on the way and that I get home in one piece!” All this without even having met the poor man! With these thoughts I walked out of the airport and reached the place where the driver could pick me up. When I met him I realized how wrong I had been in my judgment and felt terrible and full of remorse. Luckily, I had not said a word to the driver except to tell him that I would meet him at a particular point, and that I was wearing a sari, and had two suitcases (to help identify me). All my ‘hope I reach home in one piece’ had remained a dialogue with myself. My driver was a healthy robust man in his late 40s, very considerate and helpful. When I reached my flat (I live on the first floor and there is no lift) he even carried my two suitcases up the flight of stairs and then left with a smile for the tip I gave him for being helpful. His slur, or rather, slightly inarticulate speech was because he had a cleft palate. He could not articulate certain sounds properly, that was all! The man was neither old, nor drunk, nor addicted to paan! Why had I assumed the worst? Why do we work with suspicion first and then move to trust? Does it change depending on whether we know the person? All these thoughts kept going through my mind and I felt more and more miserable about the huge error in judgment! According to law even a criminal is innocent until proved guilty and that too, beyond reasonable doubt! But I realized that this kind of acceptance of ‘innocence’ seems to be applied only to our relatives and friends. We do not give the benefit

The power of peer learning

Chintan Girish Modi In the first half of June 2014, I was invited by Snow Leopard Adventures and Ananta Aspen Centre to co-facilitate a programme called Planet Harmony in Rishikesh with a group of 32 high school students from Delhi, Manipur, Meghalaya, Kashmir, and Chhattisgarh. The idea was to bring together young people from parts of India that are disconnected from each other, not just geographically but also politically and culturally. Through team building activities, leadership opportunities and dialogue-based sessions, the focus was on building self-awareness and also creating friendships that would last beyond the 10 day camp and sustain each individual’s effort to make positive contributions to their communities. “What did you teach them?” a friend of mine asked after I returned from the camp. “I didn’t teach them much. They learnt from each other,” I said. “Oh! That’s strange! Then why did they call you?” he asked. The question came from the assumption that an adult in a learning space has to play the role of an expert; someone who knows more than the other people present, and is therefore in a position to determine what each one should learn. Instead, our job as facilitators was to design activities and create learning situations where the students would be able to forage inside for their own wisdom, and also feel safe enough to speak their hearts and minds without feeling judged or embarrassed. I am a big believer in the power of peer learning, and I was thrilled to see it come alive at the camp. It was affirming to witness how leadership emerged when students were given problem-solving tasks that were filled with obstacles and intentionally so. In the absence of adult assistance, they were able to come up with creative solutions by conferring with each other, and through trial and error. Deciding to stay in the background can be difficult for adults, especially for those who feel that they are being unfair to the students by not helping them out. It is sometimes difficult to realize when stepping away is actually the best way of supporting. The students were from different backgrounds, not only in terms of the regions they had grown up in but also in terms of class, language, religion, cultural expectations, gender norms, etc. Despite this, they were able to find ways of reaching out to each other. Of course, this did not happen overnight. It took time, effort, encouragement, persistence even, and a lot of love. Those who

Redefining roles

Amit Deshwal At Centre for Learning (CFL), a small alternative education centre where I work, we often talk about how in schools and colleges, we have varied, well-defined roles; and how people start to identify themselves so dearly with their roles – teacher, one who is supposed to only teach, a student, one who is supposed to only learn. We talk about how we keep fitting ourselves into these little boxes – a box called nation within which we try to confine the essence of humanity; little boxes called schools and colleges, within the four walls of which, we are supposed to teach and learn; boxes that give us our identity and yet in the process ruefully separate us from the rest. Peer learning is one thing that helps us look outside the boxes we have built for ourselves. It helps us acknowledge the gifts all of us have and are here to share, to acknowledge the freedom all of us have to learn from each other. One of the things we talk to children about is how teachers are not some special people to be found only in schools and colleges. They are all around us. We are surrounded by many interesting people with wonderful gifts, people who are not only doing interesting things but would be more than happy to teach us the same. They are not all old. Some could be of our age or even younger. And we constantly learn from them, from each other and from ourselves. Leo Tolstoy says, “Education is the tendency of one man to make another just like him. Education is a compulsory, forcible action of one person upon another… Culture is the free relation of people.” Peer learning, I believe, helps us relate to people around us, to the process of learning, differently, a little more freely for sure. Last year at CFL, we started holding weekly workshops for children. During these workshops different people were invited to hold sessions for the children and us. The idea was to expose the children to other teachers apart from those present at CFL. A few parents also participated sometimes as teachers, sometimes as learners. As the year passed some children showed interest in holding workshops for others. The evolution was organic and it led to all children holding classes teaching others something new and interesting they had learnt themselves. Just changing the equation as to how the peers interacted with each other – in this case from

Learning about life the lateral way

Himani Tyagi A generation ago, families imparted life skills and value education to their children. In India, the extended family and community also played an active role. Today, with nuclear families prevailing, busy parents rely on schools to impart life skills and value education to their children. Schools have integrated life skills education in their curriculum now, which has made it possible to find creative ways to communicate the importance of values to our children. Coaching is a powerful process that leads people to gain insights, break out of unproductive habits and achieve goals. It involves partnering with the coachee (person being coached) in a thought-provoking, creative process to maximize his/her potential. Coaching is a collaborative, solution focused, result-orientated and systematic process in which the coach facilitates the enhancement of performance, life experience, self-directed learning and personal growth of the coachee. The coach offers supports by listening, asking powerful questions, challenging the status quo, assisting in creating an action plan, motivating and being there for the coachee without advising, mentoring, or tutoring. Coaching has gained immense popularity in the corporate sector. With a lot of corporate schools in the field now, this concept of coaching didn’t take long to be imbued into the school system. Peer coaching involves students coaching each other. This can be a very effective way of teaching life skills to adolescents. Since they are beginning to develop a strong sense of self, working towards their chosen goal on their own with peer support boosts their self-confidence. Peer coaching positively structures the interaction between teenagers such that they engage in mutually enhancing conversations. They get an opportunity to learn from real life situations. A life skills project based on peer coaching was envisaged for an eighth grade classroom to foster the spirit of cooperation and good will. A small report on the experience follows. The buddy system The coaching process was demonstrated to the students in the classroom before initiating the project. In the demonstration classes, a student was coached by the teacher-coach regarding an issue for 30 minutes and the other students observed and learnt. Thirty-eight students participated in the study. The average age of the students was 14 years. The duration of the project was six months. Essentially, students were paired with other students and each pair was called ‘Buddies’. One student was to coach the other towards achieving a goal. The pair was to connect with each other for an hour every week, either virtually or in person. The

The peer advantage

Sharayu Kamath As a child, I grew up in an extended family with several cousins and friends my age or slightly younger or older. Schooling was in a large, all girls convent, with over 3000 students marching to the rhythm of strict discipline set by nuns. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s was an era awash with information and knowledge ‘handed down’ by the adults in our lives – teachers, parents, uncles, and aunts. Children rarely opined. Self-esteem had not started being bandied about as it is today! Love was not verbally articulated as much as shown through distinct and indistinct means such as birthday treats, special occasion dinners, holidays, even pocket money! We understood we were loved. However, there was a distinct, unspoken yet accepted distance between parents and children. It wasn’t tactile, but neither was it fraught with a need to change the status quo. However, the heart carried within it thoughts and feelings that needed to be shared and for that we had classmates, friends and best friends! Our small world was full of best friends and favourite cousins with whom handed over information by adults and newly discovered information from books (this was the pre 24 hour TV explosion) would be endlessly discussed, dissected, debated, laughed over, cried over, fought for – while hopping playing hopscotch, shuttling around playing badminton, morning walks and after dinner walks, in hushed corners of our homes, away from adult ears, snuggled in sheets, whispering into the wee hours of the morning, dragging our feet between classes in school, literally trying to stretch time to match our slow shuffles – to just talk and discuss. This was our initial learning ground – not what teachers taught us or what our parents instructed us, but what our friends shared with us. Now we call it peer learning. Of course, I fully realize that my description of fond childhood memories is an oversimplification of the importance and significance of peer learning; however, it does have its roots in the influence exerted by our peers, at every age and stage of our lives. Now I am a single parent, raising a single child who has very few cousins in far off places, who is also being partially homeschooled and attends an alternative learning centre with eight children. Life could not be more different for her as a child and me as a parent. In a world that has increasingly become more nuclear and competitive, which means children are

When everyone’s a learner and teacher

Divya Choudary You’ve been through this. You wrack your brains over a particular concept or problem and still find the solution elusive. And then, a friend comes by, and over a cup of coffee explains it to you and you find yourself having an “Aha!” moment. Simply put, this is peer learning – an effective means to gain deeper understanding of concepts through informal and formal means. Sometimes, a peer’s explanation is just easier to understand. The peer can use examples drawing from real life experiences that you’ve shared and can understand better where the doubts lie based on their own similar experiences. It is no different with students. Aditya, a student of class 6, says, “Sometimes, when I haven’t understood what the teacher has said, I just ask my friend. He helps me with maths and I teach him science.” Aditya also ‘coaches’ his friends on the football field. “Because I go for football training, in school I also teach my friends what I’ve learned from my coach.” Children often ask their classmates questions after the class so as not to draw attention to themselves by disturbing the class and asking the teacher. “My class teacher is very open to questions and when we miss classes she takes the time to help us catch up. But sometimes our doubts are small, and it is just easier to ask a friend. And if they don’t have the solution either, then we ask the teacher to go over the concept again. Often though, the smart students in class have the answers and help me figure it out,” says Sanjana, a student in class 9 at an international school in Hyderabad. “How does it feel to ask a friend a doubt?” I ask. She replies with a smile, “Well at times, they tease you about not understanding something so simple, but after that they explain it, you find it simple too!” And does she teach her friends? “I make sure my notes are up-to-date and I make note of all the key points and mark the areas that I’d had doubts. So my friends come to me for notes, especially before the exams.” Madhumati had studied ‘Special education in visual impairment’ to be able to teach her son Sai Teja at home. With her personal experience and her degree, she began teaching in a school for children with visual impairment. “My students have fun learning when Sai Teja visits. They talk to him about topics that they

Learning from one another

Meeta Sengupta “When children teach each other, they learn better.” I remember hearing this from a teacher in a simple school in a small town. Then I heard the same last year from Vicky Colbert, WISE Laureate. Indeed this is what transformed education in Colombia via the Escola Neuva system. Through difficult terrain, poor communities, scarce resources, here was a power to be harnessed – the peer. Learning from each other is a natural way of picking up knowledge and skills. As children and as adults we learn by watching each other, even more so by copying each other’s actions. The next stage is trying it out – learning by doing. There is an old saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” But there is one more step. A recent study of retention in learning marked out a pyramid where ‘learning by teaching’ showed a retention rate of 90 per cent, compared to a 5 per cent retention rate for a lecture or a 30 per cent retention rate for a demonstration. What does that look like in a classroom? A class full of teachers will be chaotic surely? If all the students are teaching each other, then what is the role of the teacher? The role of the teacher evolves to being so much more than a passive fount of knowledge. A peer learning class needs to be arranged differently. They are given challenges, tasks, and resources. They share their learning journey, nudged and directed by the teacher till all the students have reached basic competence in that learning module. This means that the style of teaching must be very different. Not only is it more participative but also engages the teacher in different ways. The learning resources become important but what is more important is the question asked by the teacher that sets the children off on the adventure. Too wide and there is chaos. Too narrow and they are merely parroting lines to each other, even copying from each other mindlessly. This is a trap the teacher must avoid. The point of peer learning in classrooms is to encourage students to think and engage with learning. Not just copy from each other or the board. Designing the question, organizing the class, managing the range, channelling energy constructively – the teacher’s focus moves to these in peer learning classes. And learning levels go up – not only has each

EducaTED Talks!

The TED talks can be really inspiring especially when the ideas are innovative. Here are a few talks on re-imagining education that we share with you.

Keeping the questions alive

Healing with play

Hold that judgment

The power of peer learning

Redefining roles

Learning about life the lateral way

The peer advantage

When everyone’s a learner and teacher

Learning from one another

EducaTED Talks!

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