We need to work tirelessly towards providing our students with quality education
If the 21st Century is truly the age of metamorphous change and creativity, then nothing less than a paradigm shift in the education system will do. The archaic 19th Century model of rote-based learning, the 'chalk-and-talk' system, has discouraged questioning, discovery, experimentation and application in the school classroom.
It is said, “The greatest device for more creativity and innovation…is a curious mind”. The classroom is the original cultivator of true learning and the green house that nurtures talent and creativity. By revolutionising the teacher-student dynamics, a great teacher can transcend the brick-and-mortar confinement and take students on a journey of pure learning.
While technology increasingly will play a major role in disrupting legacy education models, it will equally place heightened emphasis on human beings’ capacity to create and innovate in the face of rapid change and complexity. This will require the resurgence and burnishing of human creativity and the skills that express it, namely questioning and curiosity, awareness, observation, discovery and experimentation, association, application and networking.
Sadly though, modernisation has become synonymous with westernisation, and school leaders feel that emulating the foreign concepts will revolutionise education overnight and bring about a sea of change. However, the truth is far from this notion.
No doubt, we need a dynamic educational framework, an ever-evolving mechanism, but not ephemeral like a meteor that illuminates the sky momentarily and fades away as soon as it appears; but more like a sturdy Banyan Tree, its roots strongly grounded and founded in the earth, and its far-reaching branches reaching out towards the infinite sky.
We need to work tirelessly towards providing our students with quality education, deep learning and hands-on knowledge. Besides the curriculum, we ought to offer a platform to groom the qualities of the head and the hand, in addition to cultivating a sound heart and a charitable soul to ensure overall holistic growth of a child’s personality.
The various innovations and the creative endeavors of the teachers are making classrooms zones of great activity and intellectual rigor; and the future holds promises of a rich and holistic learning space. Remember, serendipity happens to those who plan in advance!
Every student should have access to a repository of resources that enable them to learn independently and meaningfully. New teaching-learning methods have been introduced and instilled to trigger important shifts in thinking and behaviour. These include:
- Flip classroom: This technique, to put simply, is to roll the responsibility of learning towards the students and make them active participants in the learning process. When given responsibility, students take more interest, immerse themselves in the project, and deliver much better. Flip methodology promotes greater student involvement in the learning process and lays down the foundation of independent learning. Students take the centre stage of gathering concepts, constructing knowledge, and drawing inferences.
- Collaboration: Collaboration is an essential life skill in a globalised environment, the driving force of all enterprises. In an educational institution, this skill can best be fostered in the classroom by allowing students to work in groups. Educators are planting the seed of a collaborative mind as early as primary school, where young children are motivated to create, plan, and organise group presentations of stories, skits, or poems. Throughout, teachers help students chalk out their plans, provide them key points, supervise their work, and build team spirit.
- Engaging a child from just saying “yes”, to learning to ask “why?”: Children must be encouraged to be curious and ask innumerable whys and why nots. Can we recognise a child not only for the answers she or he gives in an exam but for the quality of questions that he or she asks?
- Teaching children not just to look, but to observe: Keen observation of the environment has caused many breakthroughs in science and medicine and in the social and business worlds. Children must be taught and encouraged to observe deeply, to look beyond the obvious.
- Shifting from passive learning to hands-on experiential learning and exploration: Hands-on practical experiments, which engage the child’s senses of touch, feel, smell, sight and sound, are extremely effective in helping them to grasp, explain and retain otherwise difficult concepts.
- Shifting from fear to confidence: By encouraging curiosity and creativity, we train children to become independent, thinking individuals who discover and solve problems on their own, thus nurturing their confidence and self-belief. Peer-to-peer teaching is a powerful way to spark and foster confidence among children.
- Going beyond the classroom: Education should make children aware of the world and themselves, widen their perspective, and make them seek the truth. Schools are embracing the trend of taking children outside the classroom. Whether on a nature trail, or visiting cottage industry, students now directly interact with what they read about in books. Children gain more knowledge when they see and experience history in museums than being taught the same in the class.
- Peer teaching: It is one of the most effective strategies to even up the learning curve of a class. It offers a platform of knowledge sharing among students, besides harbouring healthy competition. The interesting aspect of peer teaching is that students tend to respond more actively when one of them dons the mantle of the teacher. The class becomes attentive and interactive in a bid to challenge each other in a constructive manner. With regular peer teaching sessions, students start to develop better grasp of the concepts, display maturity, tend to be more disciplined, and also develop better communication skills.
The list is endless. And, the good news is that none of the above requires an expensive school lab or a huge investment in infrastructure. Much of the aforementioned desired shifts in thinking and behaviour can be achieved through low-cost everyday materials. In fact, the lack of resources is one of the greatest spurs to creativity. How much money do you need to observe and learn from nature, the source of many breakthroughs in science and technology? You are creative not because you have everything at your disposal but because you don’t!
I would like to conclude with a quote: “Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”
Dr Nisha Peshin is the Director of Public Schools and DAV College Managing Committee. Views expressed are personal.