CONVERTING SCHOOL INTO A HUB OF INDEPENDENT LEARNING CLUSTERS
January 1, 2012 1 Comment
The paper describes some of the serious problems of channelizing the youth energy into the right direction since childhood by using school setting as a platform. Schools find it difficult to keep both high and low achievers meaningfully engaged in lessons designed for the whole class. Hence there is a widespread recognition of the need to create opportunities for special enrichment and remedial classes for the above categories of students in a school. The positive personal experience of the author in conducting enrichment classes in mathematics for elementary students in schools and out of school settings, when shared with classroom teachers, principals and parents, convinced most of them of the need to institutionalize the newly created school based special learning opportunities. Some schools have made efforts to integrate this initiative with the “subject clubs” or “pull-out” class. Some schools have found it easier to organize these special classes outside school hours with additional resources mobilized with the partnership with parents. These initiatives to create multiple learning “tracks” for different “clusters” of students in the same school seem to be the manifestation of an overall twenty first century global trend of change in school education.
Problem Definition: As the national curriculum as it is designed keeps the cognitive abilities of an average student in mind, then those who are above and below set average standards finds themselves a misfit for the present education system. As the time passes they start thinking that they don’t fit into the system which results in two things. The first is that they, start losing interest and the other is they take a back seat and start taking things for granted. This in the long term is not a good sign for our system, as the potential of these students remains underutilized. Not only students from above mentioned category but most of the students are losing interest and have started seeing education as a burden. What is it that makes them loose their interest in education? One of the answers I believe is lack of challenge. There is no sense of achievement that “Yes I have done it”, because most of the times students are spoon fed and there is nothing left for them to struggle. However, have we ever heard of any parent hiring tutor for teaching video games to their children, but still the student is willing to learn it independently and ready to put in hours just to cross one level. The reason is that responsibility is on the shoulder of the student, there is struggle and afterwards there is a sense of achievement. Why can’t we put the same struggle in our education system? Why are we trying to make it easy for students every day? Aren’t we underestimating our students or we don’t have enough competent teachers to materialize this struggle in the syllabus? I will leave this question here for you to think? “As said by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile”. For a student this moment can be a struggle to solving a problem forgetting everything around him/her and afterwards having experienced the joy of understanding. For a teacher it can be playing role of a mentor and providing opportunity to students to struggle with a problem or a concept. Unless we prepare children to go through the tough path of learning to develop their foundation we are somewhere not doing justice towards our responsibilities.
The assessment standards set in school and boards are very low, which are again a main reason for students not to struggle and learn. If the assessment level will go up, overall scores of the students will come down; the parents will not like it. Hence there will be a question mark on the performance of the school? Why can’t we use relative grading system? Can’t we set the paper hard enough; involve higher order thinking in the curriculum. We all know that the board exams are very much devalued today. The good institutions are setting up their own entrance examinations. The bigger problem arises when, instead of raising the level of the assessment in school we are trying to pull down the assessment level of the top notch institution of the country. As a result in the institutions like IIT’s the number of students entering and failing the courses inside are increasing and to prevent that again the assessment level inside IITs has gone down. So overall where are we heading?
Possible Solution: From my experience in conducting classes in a school, one possible solution to this problem of dying interest can be provided by converting classroom into small learning groups called clusters. These independent clusters will serve as platform for nurturing the talent of the high achievers and finishing the backlogs of the low achievers. The role of a teacher would be more of a guide where a particular cluster will engage with the teacher for a period of 5-10 min to discuss the problems they are facing. These clusters can be a platform to provide rigorous training to these students in a particular field they are good at. Students performing well should be pushed to the next level. Then still we will have some students who will be willing to go to the next higher level of the subject or skill of their interest. For them small independent Clubs in the schools can be created which will act as a platform to stretch their potential and go beyond the set boundaries of the curriculum. Developing such kind of need based curriculum for these clusters/clubs will not be an easy task and will require lots of research and efforts to be put in. Then grooming of the passionate teachers and the new ones will create in house resources for the school to run these cluster based classrooms and clubs regularly without making a special effort. This will help us convert students into independent learners and thinkers.
Implementation:
How to start: To start such independent clusters and clubs all the stake holders like parents, students, schools and school teachers need to see some incentive. Preparing students for the talent search tests is one such incentive and is of growing interest in India. As institution, schools feel that their prestige depends on the results of these tests. There are three reasons for it; it recognizes the fact that board exams are not the only way of judging the talent. It also shows that the school is interested in students’ development by exposing them to these types of tests. School is providing an opportunity to the above average children to utilize their maximum potential.
For Parents it will be an added value and recognition for their child. For students it will be an appreciation and nurturing of their talent. The teacher or the trainer will be the catalyst for the change while developing their skills at the same time. This creates a win-win situation for all the stake holders and thus serves as a perfect blend to launch such clusters in different fields. Preparing a group of children using textbooks of higher level or simply exposing them to different types of questions from the previous papers doesn’t solve the problem. It requires an overall different approach and mindset for both the teacher and the students with a detailed analysis of the various areas of intellectual development that are being tested in these tests. Lateral and creative thinking, problem solving, language comprehension of higher order, understanding complex problems, logically sequencing the steps and similar other cognitive strategies are all very important in developing the new habits of the mind. Critical thinking leading to specific strategies for solving different problems called as cognitive strategies could be imbibed by the students only when the instructors observe the students in actions. The instructor should also reflect on their work before arriving at effective strategies for solving a problem through a collaboration of loud thinking process.
Running such kind of training programmes in school will slowly convert school into a hub of independent learning clusters.
Now the biggest question is how these clusters will function and what will be their role in nurturing the talent of the students? As we can see this small cluster model already exists in many schools and it is functioning, but a major drawback that is seen is that these clusters are focused on very short term goals and the disconnect with the research going around the world. So after achieving the short term goals, WHAT NEXT is the biggest question? The motive of these clusters/clubs should be nurturing the talent of the students continuously and help them maximize their learning potential. If seen carefully a child is with a school for some 14 odd years, If we focus on devoting 1 hour everyday for developing these students on a particular field it gives us approximately 5000 hours with every child to work on nurturing their interest and this will help them gain a good insight of the subject.
Curriculum development: The school may offer need and aptitude based learning activities for improving the pace and the quality of learning depending upon the need of the clusters and preferences made by the students. In order to offer such learning opportunities in a school adequate preparation has to be made by the school to develop interest, motivation and professional competence of the classroom teachers who could be chosen as the initiators of such new opportunities. Higher order thinking should be introduced within the scope of the national curriculum to enrich the understanding of the students. We also need to think upon long duration projects where students will be using different skill sets from various areas and come up with something interesting. Through such projects they would learn something new and create something original rather than copying and pasting from Google or other such sources. Curriculum development can be a continuous process and we don’t need to make curriculum for all the years in one go. First we can make curriculum for one or two years and then while this curriculum will be implemented the teachers and the trainers will get time to refine the previous curriculum and to make the new curriculum for the coming years.
Identification of the students: But to start this thing we need to focus on each and every child since beginning and teachers need to identify their interest and skills. Till class V, we can identify the interest and skill set of the children. Then onwards we can start dividing the class into need based clusters. Then the other part is to implement need based and supplementary curriculum for these clusters and clubs. Starting at this early age will also help the school system to mould these students according to the need and demand of the clusters/clubs and many supplementary things along with the national curriculum can be taught. So if we can identify the students from a very early age, it will give the focused work an edge over the distractions and will make a positive impact on the students’ mind. It will further help the school system by making this training job easier for them as the students will be aligned to their goal.
Identification of Teachers/Trainers: Teachers in the school should be identified who have passion, skill and enthusiasm to initiate these clubs/clusters. If the level of expertise is not available in the school then the school should hire special trainers for developing such skills of the students. One teacher should be attached with the trainer, so that the teacher can also get trained and become capable of taking that group further. This will in turn generate in house recourses for the school and will give teachers an appreciation and sense of responsibility. This appreciation will act as a catalyst for the teacher and the other teachers in the school to work in the same direction. For this to be feasible these teachers should be comparatively free from other responsibilities. Hence they will be able to focus on research for development of these clusters/clubs. The school will need to hire 20-30% more teachers for fulfilling those responsibilities. For hiring those teachers school will need extra funds. Those extra funds can be adjusted in the fees of the students who are getting the special training and the parents will be more than willing to share the cost, if they will see the development in their child.
Wind of change: Once this trend will be started in one field then the same concept can be extended to different areas of interest of students from programming to animation to creative writing to pure sciences to theatre and many more. Once this one club/cluster will get appreciation from school and outside, others will also get motivated and will start moving in the same direction. This will create so many self motivated, independent learning clusters turning school into a hub of interesting and creative activity for the students. Till the time they will be passing out of school, these hubs will help them become expert in their areas of interest and also develop them as a better human being.
At last I would like to thank Prof. Jalaluddin for being there and guiding the project in the right direction. Without his guidance and vision it would not have been possible to initiate this project. I would also like to thank the Principal of “Bluebells School International” for giving me this opportunity to conduct this experiment in her school.