Facilitator: Usha Pandit, Mindsprings
Mindsprings was started in the year 2002 by Usha Pandit to contribute positively to Indian Education and meet the needs of bright and exceptional intelligent children, after returning from a decade of teaching abroad in three countries. Earlier, gifted education in India was unheard of and bright and exceptionally intelligent children were not considered to have any special needs.
A Five-fold Agenda:
- English Beyond The Boards
- How The Mind Learns
- Classroom Applications
- The Proof Of The Pudding
- Conquering Change
Beyond Examinations: A Long-range View
- English : the medium of instruction to express all other subjects
- To get into the best universities in the world
- To interview for good jobs
- To use in business presentations
- For career advancement
- English is a vehicle of thought and influence
- There is life beyond the English Board Exam
The True Test for Competency
- Are children able to generate language independent of books to speak their minds?
- Can they debate and argue their points of view without rehearsal in speech and writing?
- Can they persuade effectively?
- Can they discuss an issue and present it after researching facts to show both sides?
A Verbally Astute Child
- Understands nuances of language like connotations and euphemisms
- Can infer subliminal texts
- Is aware of irony, satire, and parody as forms
- Can read tone, style
- Can critique and challenge existing beliefs
- Has the purpose, form and audience in view when writing and speaking
Paradoxes of the Mind
- Language is an inborn instinct – Stephen Pinker
- Maximizing learning by working with the nature of the child
- The mind enjoys patterns and challenges
- The mind needs purpose and variety
- We need to move from the industrial to the organic model of education
- Break set patterns, raise the bar
The VFC Approach
- VFC = VOLUME, FREQUENCY, CONTEXT
- A Syllabus must be procedural (procedures), cultural (sensitive to local needs), skills-based (application), structural or formal (academic), multi-dimensional (differentiated and learner-led), and content based (choice of the best)
- Genre based
- Layered and scaled
- High order thinking
- Active teaching
- Balances assessment
- Mainstreaming what is significant
- We must have a meta philosophy underpinning our approach to teaching. Even a Board prescribed philosophy needs to be “unpacked and examined” for its validity, contextual reality, long term impact, scientific integrity, and feedback. Create lifelong curiosity, autonomy, wisdom, and character – supply the tools to do this and demonstrate it through content.
Genre Based English
- Recognize and use the varieties of language, how influence is created
- Various forms and registers
- Outputs in genres of describing, narrating, discussing, reporting, debating or persuading people, which is the core purpose of language as communication but has a deeper level in personal leadership
Skills Based English
- A traditional syllabus contains mainly comprehension, some reading, guided vocabulary and writing skills
- A basket of skills: predict, read, skim, scan, sequence, find key ideas, summarize, apply, comment, critique, develop arguments, analyze, compare, classify, infer, reflect, and view critically
- Metacognition of skills: Knowledge is power
Modeling to Empower
- Teacher Directed Empowerment
- Demonstrations to model good English (model)
- Tools to work with (supply)
- Processes on how to get there (teach)
- Rubrics on how to be rewarded (share)
- Feedback and selective re-teaching (support)
Layered and Scaled
- What is not layered and scaled fades and needs to be reworked
- Is your syllabus graded or random?
- Skills scaled from grade 1 to 8
- Progressive levels of complexity
- Move the child along a structured continuum of learning.
- Frequency in learning: revisit concepts and skills each year
- Woven strands – saves time and integrates
|
Grade 3 |
Grade 4 |
Grade 5 |
Grade 6 |
Grade 7 |
|
Toys VS. Books |
Should Animals Be Kept As Pets |
Do Kids Need Pocket Money? |
Plastics Should Be Banned |
Satyagraha Is the Only Solution For Peace |
|
Table of advantages and disadvantages |
Differentiating fact from opinion |
Revising facts and opinions |
Recognizing fact and opinion in media |
Revising fact and opinion to see media bias |
|
Library and people resource for research and survey |
Web search for information |
Using a survey, graph, note-making |
Survey using people, net and yellow pages |
Doing survey, researching news, spotting opinion pieces |
|
Analyzing data |
Generating argument |
Debating using features, rules and language of debating |
Citing, relevance positioning |
Using multiple sources for research to write |
|
Writing for one side |
Writing the arguments |
Writing for debating |
Arguing issues found in poetry and book study |
Generating debates on issues in poems, stories, book studies |
The Collective Conspiracy of Blame and Inaction
- The double role: perpetrators and victims, participants and critics
- The problem is not with our numbers – they can be an advantage
- The problem is with our systems
- The problem is with our methods and our expectations
- The problem is with our blind spots
- The problem is with our attitude
An Avalanche of Poetry
- Can we do six poems in one go?
- One word theme
- Tools for interpretation
- Understanding features
- Understanding symbols
- Unseen puzzles of beauty
- De-stressing (not distressing) poetry
Book Study- The Life-long Critical Reader
- How does one teach a 200 page book?
- Teachers and peers unpack the wonders of a book and marvel together, learn to how to read critically
- Using multiple strategies like group work, research, reflection, presentation, language, and literature studies
- Test for literature component
Painless Grammar
- Is the study of grammar necessary for language learning?
- Grammar at Board levels is on functional usage – that is a clear sign of acknowledgement of its place
- The smoke screen of grammar as English
- Daily five minutes x 5 days = 150 sentences
- Works on the principle of frequency and layering
- Composition feedback prompts for grammar teaching needs
- Try it in your classroom for a week
The Child at the Centre
- Oral and aural learning
- Child-generated spelling
- Viewing and visual language
- Internalizing study skills
- Celebrating a ‘word’ culture: word walls
- Encouraging psychological spaces in learning
- Making links in learning
Active Teaching
- Teaching sophistication of thought
- Exposure VS. mastery
- Sharing assessment rubrics
- Metacognition and weaving knowledge into wisdom
- Autonomous learner: The whole independent child
- The team player
Roadmap to Change
- Seeing the big picture
- Being ambitious for our children
- “Using” rather than endlessly “perusing”
- Concept mapping: planning
- Consolidating resources: time management
- Creating user-friendly systems: effort management
- Acknowledging implementation dips
Learning from Assessment
- Assessments teach teachers
- Charting progress objectively
- Reflecting on experiential observations
- Using assessment to grow and change some more
