Posts Tagged ‘students’


July 22nd, 2009

The Animal School

I found this incredible write-up/poem about an imaginary animal school. Did I say imaginary? The setting may be imaginary, but the characteristics highlighted are widely prevalent.

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Once upon a time the animals decided they must do something decisive to meet the increasing complexity of their society. They held a meeting and finally decided to organize a school.

The curriculum consisted of running, climbing, swimming and flying. Since these were the basic behaviours of most animals, they decided that all the students should take all the subjects.

The duck proved to be an excellent swimmer, better in fact, than his teacher. He also did well in flying. But he proved to be very poor in running. Since he was poor in this subject, he was made to stay after school to practice it and even had to drop swimming in order to get more time in which to practice running. He was kept at his poorest subject until his webbed feet were badly damaged that he became only average in swimming. But average was acceptable in the school, so nobody worried about that-except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of her class in running, but finally had a nervous breakdown because of so much make up time in swimming – a subject she hated.

The squirrel was excellent at climbing until he developed a psychological block in flying class, when the teacher insisted he started from the ground instead of from the tops of trees. He was kept at attempting to fly until he became muscle-bound and received a C in climbing and a D in running.

The eagle was the school’s worst discipline problem; in climbing class, she beat all of the others to the top of the tree used for examination purposes in this subject, but she insisted on using her own method of getting there.

The gophers, of course, stayed out of school and fought the tax levied on education because digging was not included in the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to the badger and later joined the groundhogs and eventually started a private school offering alternative education.

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PS: I would love to know whose figment of fantastic imagination this piece is !

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Posted in Education, Learner centric teaching, Poem | 2 Comments »

June 19th, 2009

Knowledge creation – a hostage of our education system

A few days ago I was reading an article by an eminent Indian educationist and came across a reference to a 1991 report “Learning without Burden” and its conclusion that “the problem of curricular load is rooted in the system’s inability to distinguish between information and knowledge”.

An analysis of this statement reveals its various components (Note that the analysis is based on the above statement alone, and not on the original document. I can barely wait to lay my hands on the report and read it cover-to-cover

The malaise: Curricular load of the Indian student is high

The source: Inability to distinguish between information and knowledge

The breadth: System-wide

What intrigued me about the statement was the insinuation that the nearly the entire population of India (constituents of this system – policy makers, the schools, teachers, curriculum designers, examiners, parents and students; past and present) has failed to do something (in this case distinguish between information and knowledge). Quite a LARGE problem, I would say!!

The other issue that struck me was the source of the problem itself – our inability to distinguish between information and knowledge. This is a life skill that we practice every day if not at every conscious moment, and therefore should be the one skill that we are most proficient in. What troubles me more is that this deficiency is aggravated at the very institutions which should be responsible for honing a child’s skill to master this competency. If we are not teaching our children to gather and organise and analyse data into information and skills to make informed and competent decisions (knowledge), then what exactly are we teaching our children?

While acknowledging the fact that a considerable proportion of us (including people in the workforce) do give more weightage to the data and information rather than the conclusions / interpretations that can be drawn from the information, I do not think that this is the main cause of the problem being faced by Indian education. At best, it is a manifestation of other more severe issues that should be addressed on an urgent basis.

I think that one of the biggest issues facing teaching learning in Indian education is the excessive emphasis on 2 events is a student’s life, to the absolute exclusion of all other events and achievements- the 10th and 12th class board examinations. Schools / parents / teachers and community at large recognise the importance of these two milestones in a child’s life and have developed processes that would maximise the probability of scoring big in these exams.

* Parents are known to discourage all activities that would impinge upon study time which would result in a compromise of even one mark. The period before the board exams are one of the most strenuous for most parents, I personally know of parents who stay awake late at night with their kids administering regular doses of tannins and caffeine to induce insomnia in extend the hours of study.

* Most teachers also are resistant adopting alternative teaching practices. In a fact finding interview, on teaching practices and the development of creative skills in students, some teachers replied that “they have never felt the need to acquire such skill” and that they did “not think that there was any relevance of promoting creativity in a classroom in so far as performance in the examination was concerned”.

My observations, while may be a bit simplistic, provide clear direction on where the problem lies and the vice like grip it has on the choices of the various stakeholders of the Indian education system.

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May 11th, 2009

Good pedagogy – a perspective on Finland’s Education

I recently had the privilege of reading about Finland’s Education system and was amazed to learn about its success in making Finland’s teenagers the smartest & brightest in the world. According to the article, Finland’s success is centred on the application of good teaching practices within a good education system.

Finland’s high-school students rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing of students and few parents who agonize over their kid’s college education. In Finland, kids don’t start school until age 7.

Despite the perceived lack of vigour, Finnish schools won global attention with their performances in triennial tests (Programme for International Student Assessment or “PISA”) sponsored by the OECD. In tests conducted in late 2007 (taken by 400,000 students aged 15 years from 57 countries) and released in early 2008, Finland’s students were placed first in science and near the top in math and reading, ranking them among the smartest and brightest in the world. The test scores highlighted another interesting fact – that the gap between Finland’s best and worst performing schools was the smallest of all the schools from the participating countries.

In recent years, the academic prowess of Finland’s students has lured educators from more than 50 countries to study their education system and to learn from them. What they find is well-trained teachers using good teaching practices instilling in students ownership of learning.

Finnish children do not begin formal schooling until at age 7 – much later than children in most other countries. Instead, Finland sponsors a high-quality government funded preschool program where the focus is on self-reflection and social behaviour. This focus makes children reflective and responsible about their learning and conforms to the German Educator Friedrich Froebel’s original theory of kindergarten (1837) – meaning a “children’s garden”- a place and time where children could learn through structured and random play. Reading, particularly in the Finnish language, is emphasised with all sincerity from a very early age. The system is ever so dynamic that it adopts and contextualizes good practices from other systems of pre-schooling.

Finnish schools have a no-frills curriculum, with no classes for the gifted; with the quicker students often helping their lagging peers. Finnish educators believe they get better overall results by concentrating on weaker students rather than by pushing gifted students ahead of everyone else. This kind of peer learning has positive implications both within the school and within the society at large.

In a school illustrated in one of the articles (The Norssi School), visitors and teacher trainees can peek from a viewing balcony perched over a classroom to see the teachers and students at work. The school is run like a teaching hospital and uses about 800 teacher trainees each year. Finnish teachers enjoy a great deal of freedom and pick books, customize lessons to fit their student’s needs as they shape students to national standards. According to Mr. Schleicher of the Paris-based OECD which administers the PISA test, “In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs”.

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