Embrace an introvert friendly learning space

We are currently in an ecosystem where there is continuous effort being taken at home front as well as in  schools to promote and nurture the benefits of team work and collaboration. These are being addressed with earnest thoughts to promote the surrounding and to enable methods that would facilitate the ‘shy’ student and the ‘bold’ to work together as a team.

Possibility of revolutionary ideas that might spark when multiple brains of two extremes work in collaboration. The best of innovative thoughts as an outcome of such practices in given works space or at schools.

Terms like Cooperative learning and Collaborative work has taken over the vocabulary ‘group work’ at Schools.

Methodically, to involve students in to a practice of co-existing with team members has found its place in recent decades. With all the efforts being taken towards bringing out the cumulative efforts to emerge and make every one part of success and accomplishment, the chances that of the lot, few may remain less attracted towards these group achievements.

A cluster of students in every class who may not find satisfaction internally in the group’s success. A handful of students who may observe, focus and progress but might not want to project it.

The same variety might not find engagement in group work or collaboration as their desired style over working independently.

These introverts are often times unnoticed, invariably, as louder and bolder group tends to sweep the attention in a typical class environment.

There has been a guaranteed applaud and claps to the extrovert children as against the introverts.

An effort is required in a planned way to recognize and appreciate the introverts.

In this fast paced world, at schools, at work space and at homes are we there yet to have recognized them?

Have we identified and acknowledged them for what they are and in the manner they portray themselves in crowd?

Do we label them as shy and brush aside their true colours and efficacy?

As a teacher, personally, I have come across resistance to group work arising out of a cluster of students. I have encountered issues out of group work as one tends to dominate the rest.

I have observed that the whispers from a child is actually the utterance of good observations and answers to the queries posed during discussions.

Some parents mentioning in personal meetings about the nature and the preference of their child on any given day being inclined towards independent working.

It is a practical situation found everywhere and it is ideal and fair to accept that in any given space there are extroverts and introverts existing.

We need to make them co-exist  without their identity and preferred style of learning being unaltered.

It is also fair as educators, we accept and cultivate an atmosphere, one that would unconditionally accept introverts as a significant part of growth as much as extroverts do by being out going and expressive.

How do we embrace an introvert friendly atmosphere?

Do’s

• An effective classroom management practice that assures every child is heard
• A practice of quiet reading hour as a cultivated habit in classrooms
• A conscious effort in lessons plans to include independent reading/working that ensures quiet child being noticed and acknowledged
• An appreciation of work in coherence and yet in silence
• An observation of non-verbal communication days at school that would also expose the extroverts to yet another way of communicating besides being outgoing and expressive always!
• A well laid success criteria of group work that facilitates participation of introverts
• A practice of giving slips of paper to those few in class who may be good at putting down in writing than verbally saying it aloud.
• A chance and a choice MUST be facilitated by the teacher in class as a conscious practice.

Don’ts

• A teacher to refrain from defining what kind of student is successful in class. E.g . ‘If you raise hand and answer then you get a star else not!’.. Kind of remarks to be avoided

We need to remember introverts may not want to gain attention but still they        have a valid point to contribute.

• Do not thrust the idea that only by being social he/she is accepted in society or in school. This may put them off forever. And, we are at loss of that significant portion an introvert may contribute towards wellness of humanity.

Any  teacher, at the sight of the children in class and within a few minutes of interaction can easily get an idea of the mix and the nature of students in class.

An introspection of the self and the known around , in our own work space and in the family, will elucidate the fact that the World has space for all kinds.

It’s time we embrace the varieties consciously and whole heartedly and exploit the potential of ‘Introverts’ too!

 

 

 

Do watch this Ted talk by Susan Cain to have more insight in to this topic of my blog.

https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts

 

Practice Math Using Pictures

This article is about “Teaching Math Using Pictures”

Random pictures from your daily life can be a catalyst for thinking!
Pictures have always been an excellent visual aid for building literacy and vocabulary skills…What Math can you teach using pictures?

Lets explore!  Make Math more engaging sessions from now on…

Quite apparent that some topics in math like Data handling needs pictures or images to build the concept concretely. I personally feel, there is a necessity to involve more pictures in every other session of Math.Find below some of my ideas.

Please feel free to try them out in you classroom as well.I have attached few photographs that are from our daily life.Let’s see how Math can be taught and practiced at primary level using these as resources in Math sessions. 

1.This picture was taken in Zac’s Zumba class last Saturday.Which child has created an acute angle using his hand and trunk of his body? Identify and circle him.

 2.In the collection of 3D shapes packet sold in Toys R Us ,which other 3D shapes did the shop keeper forgot to place in?

3. Anu’s daddy bought this new open shelf to stack formal shoes,sports shoes and organize them.If every slot can have three pairs, how many pairs can this open-shelf accommodate?

4. This is the picture of Mr. Remo’s house. How many triangles can you spot and how many rectangles can you spot? Turn and Talk to your partner.

Well, I strongly believe by using pictures or ideas from real life Math teaching and solving problems based on them is going to be fun.

                           Pictures might turn out to be a motivation factor too!

Please click on the link for more images and the concepts that can be taught using them.

questions-for-math-using-pictures

Hope you try them and share your thoughts and experiences too!

Awaiting your responses…

Sudha Mahesh,Primary teacher

The Journey or the Destination

In this article I am sharing my thoughts and experiences on “A student driven session“- delivering what you planned for them takes a shift and moves on to “What They want to learn”!!! Do we have to anticipate it all the time…or it just occurs 🙂

When a teacher turns in to a facilitator  he /she facilitates sessions driven by students.

In the initial stages of teaching, Lesson plan acts as a back bone for our sessions. It’s is like a Google navigator which would display every small curve we would possibly encounter in our travel. This is to ensure we direct the session carefully and purposefully.

In my initial years, when I had just started planning using Skill Knowledge and Understanding as base for every session, it took two hours of planning time for every one hour session plan. Checking on resources took a major time, anticipating what the replies would come from the students for every question you pose was mind-boggling. Actually it still is!

Every teacher starts to realise (must realise!!!) as years pass by that the plan which is made for one set of learners will not be the same next time. Apparently, the questions you pose might remain unchanged but definitely replies will change.

We must get comfortable with  situations like …

While using Lesson plan as a navigator remains unchanged in teaching practice, but things that get refined over years would be, more time allocated on reflection in our sessions.

Most importantly, teacher starts allowing the side trip during the main trip.  When you travel, sometimes getting to your destination is the most important consideration. Sometimes the interests of the other people in your car are most important, and you stop to see sights that they’re interested in. There are even times when the ultimate destination becomes incidental to the trip itself.

I mean, depending on the factors like grade we handle, topics we introduce or deliver, students would expect us to stop by at every extra detail that can be discussed, while the main route remains undeterred.

A need arises, we sense the pulse of class and try to go for short trips around the main topic but ensure the main aim is achieved affirmatively. There is more scope for a silent spectator or a passive participant to emerge out and add on to the topic and surprise us.

Ignoring all of the steps from the early lesson plans is not advisable, but we need to internalize them. Out of planning, practice, reflection and review we become so familiar with the various routes for this particular destination that we seldom need a navigator any longer.

Here is when we start looking for many “Aa-ha!” moments and get more open to learn with learners. There would be more occasions where we would not hesitate to say, “Let me get back to you on this.”

I have personally had many such sessions and I am sure many of my readers would also have had too. Here’s when we actually are involving students taking the owner ship and accountability for what they want to learn.

Recently, in one my session in Science for grade one, one of my session plan was to do a survey on waste around in the immediate neighbourhood and sort the waste in categories. Post the outdoor activity we( My students and myself) tried linking it to Math Data Handling and made a bar graph with all groups’ inputs.

As I was trying to ask questions to check inference an idea struck me and I encouraged learners to frame their own question and pose those questions to their peers based on data collected. I realized the session was moving from Lower order thinking of understanding and comprehension to the higher order of Analysing and Create.

While they started using the questioning words (Language Arts skill –applied) appropriately to frame question, I was left wondering Was this a science session?

Students showed complete engagement in framing questions and asked each other. Session of science connected to Math and ended with Language Arts skills. Although the initial starting point was decided by me as a teacher, it took the short trip on the way with the display of students’ own skill, knowledge and understanding.

I remained a facilitator which was more productive than the former role.

This realization in us allows us to travel the path -student driven session.

Be systematic, enjoy the small curves and pleasures that will definitely keep us on our toes resulting on meaningful transactions in classroom.

Let the teaching learning sessions be not like this…

 acknowledgements: Pics  google images

Differentiation-It Needs To Be Embedded

It dates back to 2012 when I was pursuing my studies (Professional Diploma in teaching, CIE), I came across this word “Differentiation” for the first time in one of the sample assignment that was shared with me. I was doing my module one where I had to write a lesson plan to conduct one session accounting every minute of the session and every learner of the class. The moment I read that word I mistook it to be “How a teacher can show partiality among her students?” “Isn’t it unfair?” Believe me most of the teachers in my study batch also took it in the similar way.

With more and more examples analysed about how students learn in class, the more profound was my quest to research on this. The attitude to try and employ the “differentiation” added meaning to my teaching job.

Let’s look in to what is this all about.

First of all ‘differentiation’ is not a teaching strategy! Uh oh did I make it complicated now?

A strategy is defined as planned actions to achieve your goal. Whereas, differentiation popularly termed as DI is an approach in teaching practice.

Every strategy used in teaching can be differentiated to make the learning effective.

Differentiation, in lay man terms, a lens that a teacher should use to diagnose students and to identify which best tool can be used to enrich their learning experiences. ‘Giving choice’ is a powerful differentiation tool.

Differentiation can be well understood with examples and by demystifying some misconceptions.

A few of real life examples…

This advertisement is often found in women magazines! The salad and green tea that your friend eats makes her loose lot of pounds whereas it doesn’t do the same magic to youJ

To quote one more example that we come across, one person stays fit doing power yoga while another cannot afford to have that stamina. One gets a lot of calorie burnt just by taking his dog for a walk while another spends an hour and half in gym workout!!!

I hope these simple examples give you an idea on what I am trying to explain as ‘differentiation’.

We need customized plans for substantial learning outcome. It need not be always special and individual plan to address one at a time. Similar to personalised training work out and diet plans for individual or a group of people, even in a classroom scenario DI is inevitable. DI can be employed for small groups or large groups by finding a common pattern in their style.

Some popular DI’s

When a teacher uses different tone and different pace while explaining her content it falls under differentiation by dialogue. Here the role of the teacher is vital. This is one of the most widely and unconsciously used approach by the teachers in almost all classrooms. She facilitates the learner by identifying through her experiences, whoever may need detailed explanation, which learner needs sophisticated language and which set of learners may need simple steps etc. This is purely achieved through experience in classroom transactions.

The second most popular differentiation used widely in almost all classrooms is by grouping learners. Although it remains a bitter truth that many teachers do not follow a plan to group, due to which the outcome of learning doesn’t get maximized. Still to a larger extent grouping learners, is an effective DI.

It is a myth that DI means only individualized teaching. DI is an approach to address larger group of learners. It is purely based on LEARNER READINESS to absorb the concept.

There could be some assumption that by practising DI in your classroom you may leave a child behind while the rest are scaling up. But DI is actually based on the idea of “Keep Up” while “Catching up”. DI bridges the gap between basic skills and advanced skills.

The most important fact, DI is not Multiple Intelligences. ( MI by Howard Gardner)

In this field of education as theories keep piling up due to researches, as teachers in practice we need to somehow and somewhere catch up with latest topics of discussions.

Few DI’s that can be employed in classrooms:-

Differentiation by task: This is one of the core methods in DI. By this method teacher sets up different tasks for different learners with main objective being grasping concepts from basic to advanced. The teacher needs to plan different worksheet, activities, group work to assess learning. If the teachers feels burn out for setting this it can also be done as same worksheet or activity where the level of difficulty slowly grades up. As advanced learners may progress and move faster towards later part of worksheet easily while some learners are using their own time to concentrate and complete the basics.

Differentiation by resources: Some learners may need simple resources like books and reference material. Some may need sophisticated resources like apps. Some learners may need multiple materials to work on with. Learners may feel comfortable with visual aids, word wall and sample work display also as a support. Resources used for one year may or may not be the same with next batch of students. DI is always based on underlying principle called LEARNER READINESS. To learn about learners style of learning look in to my previous article Teaching style->Learning style->Student attainment

Differentiation by content: Content comprises of knowledge, skill and concepts. A teacher can share this by any means such as using videos, picture books, printed material, non-fiction texts and even in audio form. This is at teachers’ discretion to decide how she may want to present it to her learners. The font size used in texts can also be a differentiation.

Differentiation in learning outcome: This is again the core of DI. Now you may have a doubt how to differentiate the output as there is expected milestone to be achieved by all learners in a given time frame. Here is where Formative assessment and on-going assessments come in handy. When we have used the lens to identify the advancement and short comings in any set of learners through experience we need to plan and accommodate several ways of assessing the learner for the same objective.

For e. g concepts of geometry in identifying the angle can be assessed in multiple ways such as

1. Printed pictures on sheet which is 2D
2. Going around in classroom and asking students to look for right angled objects or objects with acute angles.
3. Provide resources to construct something in 3D and explain the different angles found in that model

Their learning outcome can be verbal or written form. Finally the learner has given you evidence on his/her understanding of angles in geometry.

The main benefit in doing DI in learning outcome is, a teacher does it systematically at regular intervals until the topic is completely covered and she has enough evidence though various forms that her learner has got the concept right.

DI by learning outcome is based on the on-going Formative assessment and not on the end of unit Summative assessment.

Well DI is by itself a broader area of discussion. The DI’s can be shared with one another but it is up to the teacher to use appropriate and suitable ones that will benefit his/her set of learners.

DI will continue in my next article too. I will share some examples of DI that I employ in my practice and few lesson plans where DI has been embedded.

Differentiation is nothing but regardless of a learner’s ability an approach used in teaching which provides a learner multiple avenues to showcase their learning.

Teaching style->Learning style->Student attainment

The multiple intelligence and it’s influence

As I started writing this post, a thought loomed…will the readers be hooked on to reading this article till the end?

May be few of you will look for images associated to the topic, while others might look for some video link related to my post and a few might look for catchy phrases highlighted in bold words to obtain the main idea of this article. Some of you may scroll down to see if I have included any activity that would interest your students. I think, I should even explore the idea of including an audio version of this content.

Why should I consider all these possibilities? Well, this explains the theory of multiple intelligence and the learning style of every reader who reads this article.

I would like to begin this week’s article with a virtual handshake to each and every teacher out there in the field. I look up on teachers’ as …

Talented,

Enthusiastic,

Ambitious,

Charismatic,

Holistic,

Energetic and a

 Resourceful person who makes a difference in students’ life

With all these qualities inbuilt in them, over a period of time through experiences and knowledge gain, there is always a vacuum some where in the heart and mind that doesn’t  allow them to completely take the credit of the value add they do through teaching.

If only I knew how to make him understand that multiplication is just repeated addition!

If only I knew how to make that girl focus during this video session?

If only I knew how to help her in learning to balance that chemical equation?

Often a teacher feels guilty of not being able to figure out, why some children can’t attain maximum potential. When will these children reach the threshold of self- learning?

Let me digress to another scene which is just like our own class room the only difference being we listen and some one else conducts that session. Yes, it’s nothing but the teacher training workshop that we attend as a part of professional development programme.

(Anna university teachers at ‘dealing with stress’ workshop)

Have you ever wondered when we attend an in-service workshop conducted at school or elsewhere, there is a standard flow of events during the course of the workshop.

• A talk by renowned personality
• PPT with visual clips and /or audio
• There is a group discussion and presentation, it could be a group presentation or individual the choice is given to the attendees,
• Finally, there is feedback or brainstorming on how this could be applicable in our classrooms

An adult workshop is planned so carefully keeping in mind that, in a huge crowd of teachers there could be people with different learning styles. Some will verbally read and learn newer things, some pick cues from visual aids, a few who will participate only during group discussions( and are not comfortable to speak in the crowd) and last but not the least there are individuals who may take away the crux only towards the end of workshop during the summation.

It is apparent that “Each of us do learn, in one way or the other”. “Each of us possess one or more intelligence as innate quality”

Well I am sure you can link this with our own student group too!

To represent this pictorially,

As teachers, we need do a bit of self analyzing of our own learning style first to maximize the learning outcome of students.There is a valid reason behind this. It is obvious that the way we are comfortable in learning, influences to a greater extent in our lesson planning too.If you can associate yourself to any one of these styles given above, you know how most of your sessions are going to be.You could even share the lesson plan you make with your colleague to check if there are variety in approaches and in testing.

Some tips that can help you maximize your learner’s learning is to work in collaboration with other teachers. It can be planned as,teachers who handle other subject areas for same grade or teachers who handle same subject area in other sections. By allowing other teacher of same subject expertise to take few of your sessions, students will benefit from different teaching styles.This idea of exchanging sessions can be done either at the introduction stage of the new topic or towards the end while revisiting(revising) the topic . In my experiences I have seen students come up with some points that you may not have taught them.They even mention how and when they learnt it.This implies there was another method from where the student learnt it.

You could be an expert in content delivery (linguistic/verbal intelligence), well your peer could be excellent in conducting a quiz or a game based on the concept(kinesthetic or logical intelligence).An art teacher who has the artistic intelligence can motivate a child to illustrate their understanding based on the academic topic where as an English teacher who has linguistic intelligence may help with framing sentences for definitions or give a better choice of words for explanations. An art teacher can even motivate children to include comic strips and cartoons in a creative writing session.This might interest student to write. I am only suggesting few changes here and there which we tend to over look or even assume its not our zone of teaching.

It’s a community of students, so we too must attend to them as community of teachers and not as an individual who is solely responsible for his/her growth.

When we as an individual possess one or more intelligence by nature, it is inevitable in an organisation like school where there are thousands of children, with different intelligence pooled together, I suggest that we initiate a different learning process for that child, tapping the right intelligence.

It is true that children blossom at different pace and to go by the saying,’ One Size Doesn’t Fit All’, let there be enough scope for various approaches in our teaching style.

Too much of play-way method will not satisfy a logic-smart student and repetitive problem solving methods  may not interest an art-smart student.

There is so much of thinking that happens and effort that goes in to every teacher’s session plans. A teacher must be conscious while making lesson plans, to provide scope for teaching the same concept in different styles to maximize that ZPD.

Though the underlying principle is same when it comes to MI and different learning styles there is a difference conceptually.

Please check the following link to get more insight in to Multiple intelligence Vs Learning style.

http://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-research

All these research, established hypothesis are to support the teachers to be more successful in her/his aim of reaching students with ease.

My suggestion to teachers would be to plan their  formative assessment and every day task providing scope for MI concept. This will enable teachers to actually get proof of their student’s learning on whether they actually got the idea behind the lesson.

• Are they good in concept ?
• Is it only their ‘writing/presentation’ problem?
• Can they represent it in flow chart or an illustration?
• Will they explain it verbally in an organised fashion?
• Can they depict their learning in a chart?
• Will they be able to use concrete objects to express their understanding?
• Will he remember the math tables if I encourage him/her to recite it?

Also think about collaborating with other teachers to share the sessions so that the different teaching & learning styles are considered.

Above all, “A teacher who teaches the student is preferred than a teacher who teaches the curriculum”.

Be smart. Be efficient. Be a continuous learner.