“Education is a natural process carried out by the child and is not acquired by listening to words but by experiences in the environment,” stated Mrs. S.R.Bobu, who was the resource person, addressing the teachers gathered in Milan Hall, NavSadhana, Varanasi on April 25 and 26, 2014. She was assisted by Mr. Deepak Mishra. Both of them used the inateractive method, dialogue and group discussion. The theme was INGREDIENTS FOR GOOD INSTRUCTION. They dealt with various strategies under the title engineering the instruction. The strategies used were:
- Brainstorming and Group Discussion: Each idea coming up during brainstorming is valuable. So written form of brainstorming is useful. Group discussion promotes time management skill.
- Drawing and Artwork: It helps in the delivery of instruction at a moderate speed and minimizes rote memory to a greater extent.
- Field Trips: It enhances the explorative skill among students.
- Games: It helps students grasp concept in a non-threatening manner.
- Nonlinguistic representation: It helps in converting complex verbal ideas into simple visual ideas.
- Humour: It builds positive relationship between teachers and students.
- Manipulative, Experiments, Labs, and Models: The teacher should meticulously play the role of a facilitator.
- Metaphors, Analogies, and Similes: They could be used mainly by language teachers to enrich their vocabulary bank. Mnemonic Devices: It is a technique that serves to facilitate storage, encoding or recall of information in memory.
- Movement: It converts closed class room climate to an open ended climate.
- Project-Based and Problem-Based Instruction: It assesses not only the final product but also the learning process and it is student driven, challenging and meaningful.
- Reciprocal Teaching (RT) and Cooperative Learning (LT): RT enhances questioning skill among students through summarizing, question generating, clarifying and predicting; CL provide equal opportunity of success to all students as well as it brings in individual accountability among students.
- Storytelling: It builds students adaptive skills.
- Technology: It widens the horizon for new information and puts them all under one roof.
- Writing and Journals: It promotes both learning and its related thinking about a subject.
- Common Mistakes of Classroom Management.
At the end she stated, “If we teach today the way we were taught yesterday we aren’t preparing students for today or tomorrow.” It was well attended by the teachers from various schools in the diocese of Varanasi and they were grateful to Msgr. Eugene, Director and Staff of NavSadhana for arrangement and accommodation, hospitality and cordiality.
