The Teachers Training program takes off

In the modern era of syllabus oriented schooling there is a wide gap in communicating the concepts between the teachers and the students. On the one hand the teachers express inability to adhere to the dictum of the curriculum the students struggle to absorb the content.

The present workshop tries to address these issues and tries to bridge the gap between the teacher and the student in the rote system.

Inaugurating the workshop Smt. Padmini T expressed her anguish towards the rote method of teaching which makes the child use representational thinking/ learning without having concrete experiences. Further she said that this situation might lead to the failure of student in achieving abstract thinking. Now-a-days children are made to use symbolic representation of numbers without understanding their meaning. For example children of kindergarten level write number 2 that symbolizes two objects but do not understand the actual meaning of it, she said. Further, she mentioned how in kindergarten charts the size of an elephant and the rat are depicted in a one inch square box without correlating their actual sizes in real life.

She quoted Piaget’s famous theory of concrete to abstract cognitive learning which is essential for the right way of learning even in high school level. She also mentioned the importance of Nature component in effective dissemination of learning content. She appreciated Hasiru Hejje’e initiative in taking the children out doors and connecting them back to Nature.

This session was followed by a guided tour of the Museum for the participants that aimed to enable them to impart students with real facts about evolution. There were activities like ‘Who am I?’, ‘Fish Bowl’ and web of Life.

In the post lunch session, there was a presentation of importance of activities in curriculum with emphasis on CCE. The day ended with a film show Surviving Progress followed by a discussion.