The Facilitating Excellence in Effective Leadership (FEEL) Programme — designed for charting a new course for students on the verge of shaping their professional careers and for teachers to make their job more pleasurable — is making waves among the teaching community and the students, particularly in engineering and management colleges.
The FEEL programme is the brain child of Sunney Tharappan, Director of the College for Leadership and HRD (CLHRD) established in Mangalore way back in 1991. Incidentally, CLHRD was the first college in the entire country which offered an undergraduate course in Human Resource Development in 1999, providing new avenues of learning and employment to the students.
“It is a revealing experience to go through the three-day session of the FEEL Programme……this has enriched my knowledge and provided me the confidence to face any interview,” said Naveen and his classmate Priyanka, sixth semester students of engineering courses in the local Poojya Doddappa Appa College of Engineering.
During the three-day training spread over 12 sessions, the students are fine-tuned in human resources development, leadership, building self-esteem, improving communication skills, facing group discussions with confidence, accepting positive criticism, team building, self-evaluation, and how to write a biodata and an application for a job.
Better communicationProf. Tharappan, who has a teaching experience of nearly three decades, said that the main aim of the FEEL Employable programme was to teach students how to become leaders through better communication and perfecting the art of effective communication. “We concentrate mainly on the non-academic activities and provide the necessary tools to build capacity, develop competence, engineer a situation to win over, turning small successes into big achievements, identifying good qualities and developing them.” He said that the students are also taught how to concentrate on the positives within themselves and feel proud of them and avoid low self-esteem and build a strong self-esteem. “During the group discussions it is necessary for the students to have a good ear, identify arguments and refute whenever it is needed.”
Wide reachThe Feel programme has travelled the length and breadth of the country. Experts from the CLHRD led by Prof. Tharappan had visited more than 550 colleges in different States so far and trained more than 84,000 students to “FEEL employable” and trained more than 15,000 teachers for an attitude change, in converting their classrooms into interesting places where the teachers and students interacted on the finer points of the subject to understand it in a more powerful manner.
Prof. Tharappan hailed the competence and quality levels of students of the Hyderabad-Karnataka region when compared to educationally developed regions.
