Posts

Showing posts from July, 2016

Making an effective Parents Teachers Meeting in India: Comprehensive ideas to get started

1) Parents Participation : One of the major challenges that need to be overcome is the lesser engagement of parents. Do most parents attend parents teacher meeting? What are the reasons that a parent don't appear in the meeting (in private or govt. schools)? Reasons can be many such as lack of time, uninformed about the meeting because the invitation is not done properly or ignorance towards the education of their children as in the case of govt schools. So how can we deal with it? 2) Meeting Guidelines: In order to make the meeting productive, there needs to be everyone participation. In a usual meeting, parents sit as a passive listener most of the time and  a bunch of teachers give oration about education. But, such situation should be discouraged in the meeting. The meeting is about discussing problems faced by students and even school and how it can be solved by the involvement of parents. So, before we convene a meeting even, a lot of work has to be done about specifics

How can central open schools such as NIOS can make a revolutionary step in the field of Personalized Education?

Most schools are overloaded with students. Usually, a single classroom in popular schools in your locality must be having more than 30 students in a particular class. To give students a personalized experience, it’s all most impossible for these schools. So, students rely on personal tuitions to meet the requirement of the students. All most all parents that have a good income, provide personal tuitions to their children. So, what role NIOS has to play? NIOS can promote mini-schools with 10-20 students in class with laboratory facilities and required teachers. They don't need to have all the classes for Std 1 to 12th. Any particular class for a startup would do, based on teacher availability. But for it, a lot of processes has to be done by NIOS. 1) Designing Curriculum  Design the best curriculum from Class I to Class 12 with book recommendation, training teachers for best practices of teaching that works (with giving complete research and statistical data of its working)

How practicals are done in India? How should it be done through inquiry-based approach?

Image
Practicals in school and colleges are all about writing records. They spend most of the time on writing records, drawing fancy diagrams without even knowing anything about what they are writing/drawing. Teachers also award students whose records are only visually appealing, not on the content/or not whether students have understood what they are doing. e.g. recently I heard from a student that teacher managed to throw the notebook because she was writing in a rough notebook. So, classes are all about writing records that teacher dictates with giving a very little practical knowledge I even don't blame the teacher. He/she does the same thing what she/he has been taught in her/his times of college. So it just a repetition/ritual way of doing things what has been done since the inception of colleges. So, how it should be fixed through inquiry-based approach? It can be fixed by bringing a change in curriculum. Let's look at the syllabus of practical. Just one or two lines

How should teacher selection be done in a transparent manner in India and keep them accountable?

Image
Mostly in the current procedure, a teacher is appointed by entrance exam or a bunch of questionnaires by senior faculties or administrator. (Keeping all different kinds of corruption or lobbying that takes place aside) But this process does not guarantee a good teacher. A modern educator should have many other psychological, pedagogical and leadership skills/features that are not tested in this procedure. The current procedure only tests the amount of subject knowledge/information they have, which can only be used as the first line of defense to get a good teacher. So, instead of selecting a single teacher from the interview, 3 to 5 etc. teachers must be selected and should be given few classes to teach the students. These classes should be recorded, and voting must be done by students, faculty members and experts based upon the questions asked in the voting. The questions can be such as does the lecturer/teacher increases curiosity on the subject, do they understand the subject p

Why do doctors need to conduct research in India and how it can be done?

1) Time A medical student in India spends negligible time in conducting research. And after becoming a doctor, with the burden of overwork to check patients, they find almost no time to conduct research. How can they do a case study, if they don't spend enough time with the patient? 2) Using Lab equipment for research Whole medicine department in India is limited to determining the disease through the medical diagnostic procedure, and then prescribing medicines or surgery for cure. We have all sophisticated medical equipment from MRI scanner to high sensitive blood testing machines for different diseases. But none are used for research purpose. Neither most data produced by the medical department are used in research or statistical analysis due to lack of digitalizing and lack of storing in a central repository. 3) More doctors India being a second largest populated country in the world, the requirement of doctors, should be second largest to have a decent amount of doctor

What strategical mistakes do we make in the Lab as a team in Indian context?

1) Clarity of riddle that needs to be solved, in the research you are doing. The question in research should identify the problem and how to solve the problem. We cannot expect everything to occur in serendipity, by doing random stuff without knowing what is the problem. 2) Pretending to work Research supervisors are obsessed with the amount of time spent on work you do, instead of quality work. For doing research, we need to think, we need to discuss the problem with our team as a total. Research cannot be done after you are exhausted because you cannot think at that time. All members come from a different psychological environment with different passions and mindset. So, it important to bring their mindset into solving the problem, instead of forcing them to only work. Usually, students come to build their career and earn money. Many are almost not interested in doing research because of the environment they get. So, they start to pretend to work to appease the supervisor and get