Physical infrastructure development being just one part of improving public school education in the State, the State Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) has charted a number of initiatives focussing on the critical aspect of improving academic standards.
A significant component of these is the Learning Enhancement Programme that aims at addressing academic challenges through various strategies.
The priority is to ensure that academically weak students, initially in the lower primary category, have grasped the fundamentals of Malayalam, English, Hindi, and Mathematics by the end of the school year.
Besides the recently launched Hello English programme to improve English proficiency in lower primary schools, there will be ‘Ente Malayalam’ for improving Malayalam proficiency and a project for making learning of Maths easy. This will be expanded to the upper primary section next year.
Critical thinking
Specific programmes have been drawn up to raise standards of Mathematics and Science. Biodiversity gardens in primary schools will help develop an inclination for science and scientific processes and spur their critical thinking. This will be integrated with classroom teaching.
Medicinal garden, flower garden, vegetable farming, planting of trees, and preparation of biodiversity register will be taken up. Study tours to forests, seas, waste treatment plants, cottage industries and other such places will be held for science club members.
The SSA will also train its attention on the education of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe students. Besides educating teachers about the language and culture of tribal children, it will prepare a dialect dictionary, and conduct leadership training and theatre camps for students.
For migrants’ children
Steps will be taken to attract to schools children of migrant workers and of those who move from place to place. Workshops will be held at the panchayat level to ensure that girl students do not suffer from any discrimination. A programme has also been drawn up to introduce to students the art, culture, and literature of religious and linguistic minorities.
To ensure that differently abled children studying in such schools are part of the mainstream, model activities, group games, camps where they will get to interact with other children, and teacher training will be held.
Training for teachers
Teachers who want to expand their knowledge further will be grouped together, and classes, workshops, blogs and so on will help them towards this end.
The SSA will reach out to the people to include them in the school development process. Conventions and workshops will be held from the district to the school level. Innovative activities will be undertaken in association with local self-government institutions. Parent-teacher associations will be strengthened, and cluster centres in all panchayats will be turned into resource centres.
