To mark the Silver jubilee of Akshara Matric Higher Secondary School, a symposium on "Setting new trends in the teaching- learning process” was conducted with 60 teachers from half-a-dozen schools in and around Madurai.
A diverse set of speakers from Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Coimbatore and Madurai addressed the audience on wide range of topics relating to the new trends in education that need to be adopted in order to make classrooms the hotspots for development.
"Such workshops are of great help in schools where the majority of students are first generation learners”, says Mrs.Banu, Principal Vedavalli Vidyalaya, Ranipet.
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The symposium was inaugurated by Dr.R. Venkatraman, retired professor of art history at Madurai Kamaraj University who encouraged the participants to keep their mind empty so that it can be filled in everyday with what they learn. The nine sessions that spanned over five days covered topics varying from naughty students and intelligent teachers to the reflective learner and learning to communicate. Teaching beyond textbooks and looking to history for values was reiterated in all the sessions.
Concern was expressed over the marks based education in the country and the lack of focus on conceptual understanding or critical thinking which are the skills demanded by today’s rapidly changing economy.
Speakers rued that language, art and humanities are not given adequate importance and students are taught what to think, rather than how to think leading to a deficit in the core skills of creativity and comprehension of concepts.
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“The entire syllabus followed for years cannot be amended overnight but there can be small changes within”, says Mr. Vinay Chousalkar, founder of 23.4 degrees’ education services. One such change could be the freedom of choice offered to a student in terms of what he/she is passionate about or wants to pursue.
For M.R. Lakshmi from English Department of Jeevana School, the most important take away was to protect what is good. "Even if you can’t create, don’t damage what is already there”, she says.
A case was made out for including topics such as anxiety, depression and mental illness a part of the syllabus and make the teachers responsible for identifying any such symptoms in their students at an early stage. The session conducted by Dr. C. Ramasubramanian, a psychiatrist at the Ahana hospital proved to be of great help to all the teachers, where he highlighted the need to identify a child’s potential and not to give into comparison.
Dr. T. P Srinivasan, managing trustee of Akshara School left everyone open-mouthed with a word to word recitation of a paragraph from Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ as well a Tamil poem, both of which he had been taught to comprehend and understand by his teacher when he was just a school boy. Somewhere between then and now, the Indian education system went askew, shifting the focus to test scores. Teachers being the most important part of the education system, it is crucial that adequate efforts are taken in their improvement
“The goal of this symposium was to impart this knowledge to all teachers, so that students can have a better overall school experience”, says Kausalya Srinivasan, Principal of Akshara School and the brain behind the symposium.