On 15th January 2023, Mr Parnab Mukherjee, debate resource person conducted a workshop for the teachers of The Indian School. The title of the workshop was The Teachers Toolbox. The purpose of the workshop was to provide the teachers with concrete tools which can be utilised for classroom teaching to co-create a more enriching, expansive and creative learning environment.
The initial part of the workshop foregrounded the fact that despite evolution and transitions across the world in multiple domains, the lessons in our textbooks continue to remain static, as is their dissemination. As societies evolve and shift, classroom teaching continues to stick to theory and is focused on the same when we are assessing students. This limits their vision.
Through various metaphors and anecdotes, Mr Mukherjee captivated his audience by motivating it to embrace the attitude and role of a facilitator. If it is creative and expansive, the students also approach learning with more interest, and if it continues to be a mechanical exercise of input, output and re-creating text on paper, the same lack of interest is mirrored in the students.
To move towards a more holistic way of teaching and helping the students learn, Mr Mukherjee proposed the following strategies:
1) To make use of five contemporary pointers in order to make a topic interesting – He elucidated this with an example. Most English textbooks carry the poem, ‘Daffodils’. While much of the emphasis remains on literary analysis, we often fail to tell our students that daffodil gardens scarcely exist in Europe as climate change has hurt them. This links the past to the present and creates a continuity within the classroom environment.
2) Analysing newspapers and using them as text – newspaper reading needs to be inculcated as a habit, but while most schools possess this, linking the news articles to what is being taught in the class makes the learning holistic.
3) Three-word summary – Another creative classroom exercise is to take any three significant words that reflect the larger themes of a lesson. For example, if a teacher is facilitating a class on the topic of the Cold War, three words which capture its essence can include – i) Embargo ii) Decolonisation iii) Blocks. These words can be linked to the lesson and help the student build a more nuanced vocabulary around the concept, idea or topic.
4) Linking the lesson to a personality – Mr Mukherjee spoke about how theories and theorems are often done in classes, but text is rarely tied to examples of people excelling in that particular discipline. We fleetingly touch upon Ramanujan in Math but how many of us integrate his story into the classroom while teaching an equation or theorem? This also limits the child’s vision of what a subject can transform into, as a profession. Nobel prize winners, and examples of contemporary people who are successful in their respective professions, also builds an imagination of the diverse professions that students can strive for, instead of the same set of options that careers are often boiled down to. For this, educators too first need to expand their lenses by reading.
5) To provide the URL for reading, but not links – Students often fail to open the links which they are given as resources. Instead of YouTube videos and links to articles, he encouraged the teachers to give specific lines and page numbers so that the student makes the effort to read the paper.
In addition to these five pointers, he also gave the example of a premium institution called ‘Rejio’ which specializes in the early years. Their teaching pedagogy enables small children to become very good observers, In his session, Mr Mukherjee tied this inculcation of early observation to the skillful acquisition of more abstract concepts as children move higher up.
Through a poignant example of how babies begin with curiosity and questioning, to the death of questions by the end of schooling years, Mr Mukherjee poetically wove all these complex ideas with the metaphor of finding forty ways to do the same chapter over a span of forty years. A good teacher can make a boring textbook come alive if he or she can find a way to ‘play’ with the textbooks too, and likewise, a teacher who is merely focused on the completion of syllabus, could rob a good textbook of its creativity.
The workshop highlighted the importance of the teacher as a significant stakeholder in a post pandemic world, where a gap has emerged between the teachers and students. Laptops and technology can still not replace this human touch of a teacher, which informs the lifeworld of a student.
Ms Meghna
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