The Progressive Teacher magazine organised The Progressive Teacher Conclave on September 26, 2015 at Kolkata. The Conclave had a key note address, two panel discussions and three presentations. It was attended by over 300 delegates, inclusive of teachers, principals, heads and co-ordinators, educationists and students.
Sister M. Cyril Mooney
Dinesh Jhunjunwala, VC, S.Chand Group; Sister M. Cyril Mooney and Rita Wilson
The event started with the welcome note by Rita Wilson, editor of the magazine. She shared the aim and genesis of the Conclave and expressed hope that it would be seen as a forum to ‘question, share and learn’ where all would ‘trade ideas’ to increase the pool of ideas with each one.
The Key note address was delivered by Sister M. Cyril Mooney who talked on ’Teachers and New Culture of Schooling’ She read out an extract from a book and said the atmosphere of a school – the physical surroundings, human faces, words spoken, attitudes and decisions made by the school impacts people. She explained that school culture seems to be changing towards a competitive environment and a strong technology based approach. ‘The new culture is coming in. Technological devices like the tablet, ipad, ipod, Smartphone, divide us from each other. Technology is very important but it should be used with wisdom.
There is a vast difference between knowledge and wisdom,’ she said. Talking about competition, she further said, ‘We have highly a competitive environment everywhere. Competition in school affects the child. Many of our parents want their children to be at the top. They push their children beyond their capability. All this leads to an unhealthy individual for the future society. Instead of using a competitive system to get ahead, one must consider it to build a caring society.’
Sister Mooney also talked about difference in qualitative and quantitative approach. “Quantity is something which cashes on its results, because in result oriented society progressing is by large number of things over the large number of people.
Quantity is easily quantifiable, and is very easily measured. We need to emphasise on quality in education. But quality is difficult to measure, that’s why the cultural atmosphere of the school,’ she said.
Rita Wilson, Chief Editor, The Progressive Teacher magazine
Himanshu Gupta, JMD, S. Chand Group
Sister Mooney also shared that she is in the process of writing a book ‘Transforming Schools for Social Justice and Enthusiast Schooling’. She added, ‘Our children have to get hands on experience in what we call compassion. They have hands on experience in computers but it cannot teach compassion.
Slowly we need to teach our children about the real problem of our society. For this we need to sit with them and talk about it. There should be priority for children of deprived conditions. And whether we have technology to improve our quality of education, we need to take care of our children with love and there will be no apartheid, no fighting, no violence or no ISIS people.’
There were two panel discussions and three presentations by the group companies. Neenu Puri made the first presentation on the Professional Development Programme for Schools by DS Digital. Neenu discussed what professional development entailed and why it was vital in today’s times. She demonstrated how the Programme by the company focused on ‘doable’ and meaningful strategies and practices.
The second presentation was made by Naveen Rajlani, Business Head, Madhubun Educational Books. He talked about how Madhubun had grown and evolved. It was started in 1976 and today boasts of over 1,000 active titles, a strong authorship, visually appealing content with digital intervention.
Panel 1- ‘New Curriculum and Classroom Culture – Five Ws and H’
Moderator:
John Mason Educationist
Participants: Salony Priya, Director, Ummeed Counselling & Consulting Services, Kolkata; Geeta Verma, Head of International Curriculum, The Heritage School, Gurgaon; Dr. M. P. Rozario, Principal & Secretary, St. Sebastian’s School, Seal Lane, Kolkata; Seema Saproo, Principal, The Heritage School, Kolkata; and Sonali Sen, Principal, Delhi Public School Newtown, Kolkata In his opening remarks, John Mason said that the two events in the last decade – namely the National Curriculum Framework Published in 2005 and the Right to Education Act in 2009 – have in a manner determined the future of education in India.
Sonali Sen, Geeta Verma, John Mason , Dr. M. P. Rozario, Salony Priya and Seema Saproo
The panel focussed on some key points:
Children are over burdened. What should be done to improve education?
Why can’t we move away from learning through rote method? The relation between the textbook and the teachers has to change.
Key points presented by the panellists:
Seema Saproo: ‘It is the classroom culture that determines the outcome of the curriculum that we use. The classroom culture is positively created if children are happy and children and teachers trust each other. If the teacher believes in the students that they can prove themselves and can do well and there is effective time management, it will be a happy classroom. A teacher has to be a teacher by soul. When we talk about subjects, we talk about interdisciplinary learning. Once we start doing interdisciplinary learning, then that is where the actual learning begins and the children learn to appreciate why they are learning what they are learning.
Salony Priya: Empowering the educator is the area of my work. And what deempowers the educator is the curriculum. In curriculum, we talk of two things – ‘Time’ and ‘Numbers’ in the class. The curriculum is something which addresses the social paradigm. And by 2020 a dominant reality which is going to strike most of our educational institutions is, that we will be welcoming children who come from just single child families. And this will and is already impacting on students and their learning and relationships.
Dr. M. P. Rozario: A new curriculum is essentially an interesting and holistically sound system with opportunities to captivate and educate students rather than make them disinterested. The objective of a curriculum is to be progressive, to provide students with the knowledge, skills, values, and the attitudes to be successful in their lives. In unpretentious terms, curriculum is a description of what, why and how student should learn. The vital indicators of a curricular success are the quality achieved by students and then how the students use that learning to their personal development is positive social change.
Ms Geeta Verma: ‘The key aspect of the curriculum or classroom culture is manifested in the Learner Profile. And I am going to refer to the IB programme which I teach. The IB Learner Profile reflects the attributes of the learner that need to be developed, a broad canvas of human capacity and ability, and responsibilities, and goes far beyond academic success. So, what do we create towards lifelong learning? The range of capability or responsibility to create lifelong learning includes: being reflective, being balanced, being organized, being honest, being an enquirer and being knowledgeable communicators. All these are done through various approaches to teaching and learning. So, we have critical thinking, social skills, communication skills and of course the reasoning skill. Thus, if we have to create lifelong learners, we have to create a value based education and that is my appeal to the educators.’
Sonali Sen: Education according to Gandhi is to draw out the best in a child’s body, mind and spirit. School education in India has not been able to achieve this.
Today the curriculum needs to be changed. Rote learning is still given preference. We have to make learning more effective and innovation is the mantra. We have to reach out to the students in their way, not the way we want to teach them. We, as teachers, have to learn first and then teach the children. Today a classroom cannot be restricted by a four walled room. It has to be a broader space, a virtual space; even more than one space at the same time where exchanging ideas has to be the priority. The evaluation and assessment methodology needs to be revamped. It is important that to train our children to think. Students have to be taught applied knowledge and to use that knowledge in day to day life. We need to create employable citizens. A very important aspect of education is to create good citizens and sensitive human beings. This was followed by an interesting Q&A session with the audience.
Then followed a presentation by Vinay Sharma, Business Head, Digital Services, S. Chand Group. Vinay talked about the digital programme by the company and how they enabled interactive, and differentiated learning. The programme helped teachers track student learning and so enabled them to support each student in his/ her learning.
Panel II – Changing the Role of School Leadership
Moderator:
G. Balasubramanian
Former Director Academic of Central Board of Secondary Education
Participants: Lt Col (Retd) A Sekhar , Principal, Atul Vidyalaya, Gujarat; Sharmila Bose, Principal, Shushila Birla Girls School, Kolkata; Sunil Batra, Founder & Director Education, Shikshantar School, Gurgaon and Shiksharth, Delhi; Ashish Garg, Education Futurist and Founder & CEO of the Discover Tomorrow Campaign. G. Balasubramanian: No change can take place without being progressive. Now the situation is changing and changing fast. Changes are fast, whatever change happens, it affects the school. The principal is a DASAWTARA, one who has ten heads and has to perform multiple roles dealing with students, their parents, school management, teachers, general people, relationships, and bearing the change at policy level, management level and others.
The key points discussed by the panel included:
Dominant and informal learning
Managing brand and compaction
Changing social structure and impact
Managing relevance and quality in school
Bridging ‘supply and demand’ in curriculum and pedagogy
Lt Col (Retd) A Sekhar gave a presentation on leadership with quotes of various segments of people working in his school and its environment.
Leadership is something which is mostly intangible. Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked, leadership is defined by results not attributes. Good leaders were once good followers. Henny Miller has said, ‘The real leader has no need to lead; he is content to point the way.
Ashish Garg: Education is going to be next in learning with disruptive innovation. The disruption we have seen so far in education is not even the beginning of the tip of the iceberg. The challenge the school leaders have to face is that the students that are coming to school are also very different from what they were earlier. Today’s school going students are digital natives, online every minute: tweeting, chatting, and thinking. These online digital natives are very confident. These young people are happy to take chances for the community. If they fail they are happy to pull themselves up and start once again. The biggest question today for the educators in the classroom is not about how to educate young people; it is about how to educate enthusiastic, innovative and entrepreneurial young minds. She also focused on experiential learning.
Sharmila Bose: School is now like a company and the principal is like the CEO of the company. It is very important to develop leaders within the school. Distributive leadership is the mantra of today. We need teachers to delegate or distribute leadership. This means that teachers and faculty members who have specific skills and abilities should be made to lead those areas of school operations. The Principal should no longer believe she/he knows everything and so lead in all spheres but promote and groom leaders across various segments. We need to have a ‘task based leadership’.
Sunil Batra: The structure and the practices in our education system are so overpowering and so consuming, that the human element seems to get lost. We need to nurture the human element.
There’s a difference between a leader and an educational leader. An educational leader is not just the principal and the head of the school. The function of educational leaders is administrative, managerial, building team leadership and providing Pedagogical leadership. The panel discussion was followed by another set of interesting Q&A session.