Interesting and disappointing at the same time

Your library articles in the August 2008 issue, especially the ones discussing the experiences of two different organisations in taking libraries to people in two different settings, were very interesting and informative.

However, I can’t say the same about Last Word. The insensitivity with which the author has discussed the cases of people trying hard to communicate in English was very disappointing. Today, knowing English and being able to speak it fluently has become the means by which you measure a person’s standing in society and when you are not exposed to the language from childhood, what can you do but approach the “institutes” that promise to teach it.

I understand that Last Word is meant for light reading, but if the article found a place in Teacher Plus it should have promised some substance for teachers. Hope the message of the article has not been understood as “English is the legacy of few elites and others better not attempt to mess with it”.

Shikha Sharma, Bangalore.

Intellectual treat

Just one word can be used to describe your magazine – brilliant. The issue that I read was an intellectual and visual treat. Most of the articles were splendid. I hope you will continue with this freshness and enthusiasm in all your issues. I really liked your magazine. It is like an all-rounder in the field of education because it covers all topics and needs. It helped me know the answers to many questions I had in mind on different things. I truly enjoyed reading it and I wish you all the best in the future with all your issues.

Vasiliki Rachel, Dubai.

A mistake

I just got the copy of your Teacher Plus Teachers’ day Special.

I was sad to note that you have punctuated the word Teachers’ Day wrongly in many places starting from the cover. We don’t write it as Teacher’s day. It should be Teachers’ day. The apostrophe should come after the s. We don’t say child’s day, do we? We say Children’s day.

The word was wrongly written in colourful posters in many pages as well.

B O Sebastian, Kerala.

The teaching and learning of mathematics is an art. Somebody once rightly said, “One extra step taken by a teacher to help students can make a difference in their lives.” Ever since I joined the teaching profession, I have been exploring and experimenting with new strategies of teaching mathematics. I have come to realise that students are not able to visualise mathematical concepts in a classroom as greater stress is laid on solving problems using formulae. This approach makes the subject less interesting. As a teacher, I believe visualisation of geometrical representation of formulae is equally important to learn and understand mathematics.

During my journey of exploring new ways of learning mathematics, I learned to use unit cubes creatively with my students and I would like to share my experiences with you.

What is a unit cube?
A unit cube is a manipulative tool made from plastic or wood of a 1×1x1 dimension. It’s important that each of the cubes is exactly the same size.

The author is a P.G.T. (Mathematics) and teaches at the Kulachi Hansraj Model School, New Delhi. She can be reached at mathclass_khms@yahoo.co.in.

This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@teacherplus.org.

Acrostics are a type of blank verse in which the first or last letters of each line spell a word. Such poems are a great way to help students remember concepts in physics, mathematics or any other subject that they may otherwise find difficult to grasp. Shall we see how poems make for good pedagogical tools for classroom instruction? Readers will recall that in an earlier issue of Teacher Plus we had discussed how haiku poetry can be used to help children understand and remember basic concepts in physics. Acrostics work in much the same way.

Linking physics and acrostic verses
Physics is often considered a dry subject and I am constantly looking for ways to make the subject more interesting for students. During revision time for my students in class nine, I gave them acrostics of different concepts in their textbook so that they would remember the concepts better and more importantly learn how physics can be understood in different ways. Take a look at the examples on the facing page.

The author is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Unfolding Learning Potentials, Jaipur. He can be reached at Lalit_culp@rediffmail.com.

This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@teacherplus.org.

Teacher Plus has been as a mantra talking about the project method to deliver content in the classroom as a means of tapping into the innate resources of the child and also to make the classroom a stimulating place.

Some of the reasons that some practitioners give for not being able to implement the project method is the heavy syllabus and the classroom numbers. Recognising and appreciating these concerns, we started with the August issue this year, sample “webs”, a series of stories which have guidelines on how to link further to different subjects. The first story “Happy and the We landers” talked about how to live in harmony in the midst of diversity, along with which, were given pointers on how to link it to various subjects. Taking this further and realising the need for teachers to have an “instant pill”, we bring you this month yet, another story “Dr. Happy goes camping” (see poster) in a delightful narrative that reiterates the need to believe in ourselves and realise our uniqueness. We have then gone on to give some detailed exercises on linking it with the various subjects. The topics and levels are approximately at the class 3-4 level.

The authors are partners in Edcraft, Hyderabad, a firm engaged in making teaching-learning materials, conducting workshops and providing consultancy services. They can be reached at edcraft94@gmail.com.

This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@teacherplus.org.

I belong to a generation whose parents didn’t know any better. When they found that books kept me quiet, they gratefully let me read anything I could lay my hands on. Nobody ever told me what I should or should not read. Thangod, as Arundhati Roy would say.

I used to pick out words from the paper, and I remember particularly an ad for HECH O AAR EL EYE SEE KAY YES! Horlicks! It had a drawing of a boy being woken up for school by a frowning father, with his smiling mother holding out a steaming cup. I made up a rhyme about it (Ezhundhuko da, mani aachu!), and remember singing it ad nauseam around the house.

Apart from my schoolbooks there was not much ‘kidstuff’ for me to read, but I do remember an Enid Blytonish book ‘Lone Pine Five’, with a band of intrepid children whose elders seemed to be looking the other way as they set off to follow a tribe of gypsies and explore an underground river. My elders didn’t allow me to leave the compound gate. Then there was ‘Robinson Crusoe’ in which Man Friday seemed unaccountably stupid and his ‘Mas’r’ infuriatingly superior. And ‘Oliver Twist’, which inspired me to direct my brother and sister in skits of two of the crucial scenes, one being ‘Please, Sir, can I have some more?’ and the other the final melodramatic reunion. But the scene when the burglar Bill Sykes strangles his girlfriend Nancy, I kept to myself, wallowing in daydreams about it, and wondering how she could say she loved him when he was doing something so horrible to her.

‘The Coral Island’ was gifted to me by a book-loving uncle, and I read it not noticing that there were no girls in it… Feminist hypersensitivity would have spoilt it for me. When I was grown-up and read William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’, a chillingly demonised version of the same tale, I thought “Thangod I didn’t read it back then! I’d have had nightmares and wet the bed!”

Cheaply-priced Russian books started to come in, and I was given a book of quirkily-illustrated fairy tales, with a story about a fair-haired boy named Ivan who invents a salt-making machine. But he loses it in a shipwreck, and it is still lying at the bottom of the ocean, making the water salty. Watching the water churning outwards from the stern of a ship, some months later, I had a vision of the contraption full fathoms deep – and stopped the thought, midway, and resolutely dismissed it as a fairytale. With that, I gave childhood notice.

The family spent some years in a house in America, with a room full of miscellaneous books. I found that there was no rule that said you had to read a book from the beginning to the end but could start anywhere I wished and read back and forth, and over and over, and skip the boring bits. ‘Tom Sawyer’ was there, and ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’, but I rapidly moved on to Readers’ Digest Condensed Books. They were all bestsellers in the fifties, but since the authors’ names didn’t interest me then, I don’t remember them now. One book mysteriously entitled ‘Not as a Stranger’ was about a medical student (probably a White AngloSaxon Protestant, as I deduced much later) romancing a poor Swedish immigrant nurse and getting her to pay his way through med school while he fooled around with a glamorous girl student. In those days even the most daring books didn’t deal very explicitly with sex, so there were whole passages I didn’t understand and had to skip. But I got the main message: the medical student was SELFISH. Another book was called ‘My Brother’s Keeper’, in which two antagonistic brothers end up spending their crabby old age together in different wings of a house strewn with meaningless bric-a-brac. They seal themselves off from each other with towering walls of piled up newspapers, and die separated by them! It gave me some curious dreams, this book with the stern Biblical title, and to this day when old newspapers accumulate in my house, I am uncomfortable, remembering those unloving and unloveable old men on opposite sides of a newspaper wall.

Then there was the unreadable ‘From Here to Eternity’ by Hemingway, who seemed to me to be saying nothing very much. My initial prejudice was, I am sorry to say, confirmed by later attempts to read him, except for ‘The Old Man and the Sea’. Sea adventures I liked, Thor Heyerdahl’s ‘Kontiki’ interested me mainly because it was a true life adventure about a journey across the Pacific on a raft. Heyerdahl was trying to prove that the Incas colonised the Pacific islands.

At the same time that I was dipping into these grownup books, I discovered the neighborhood public library. For me the most wonderful thing about America, and something which Indians never seem to bring back with them as something to fight for, is the idea of the free public library. Every neighborhood has one, and it is stocked with books for all ages, from the classics to the latest publications, as well as audio and video tapes. We think of America as a country professing free enterprise and private ownership as the only way to get things done, but that nation has always kept the public schools and libraries in the public realm, and for very good reason. It is local governments which maintain these libraries, and anybody, even a resident foreigner, can take out dozens of books without paying a cent – but must pay stiff fines if he or she loses or damages a book.

I was delighted to discover ‘Swami and Friends’ back then, in that American public library. Although I enjoyed books about other kinds of people and places, I yearned for books that would explain me to myself, that would put into English words my very Indian family ambience and culture, without cutting me off from the wider world into which I sensed that I had been brought, through English. Swami clicked magnificently in that sense.

Yet I couldn’t sit around waiting for other books of that type, I had to read whatever was available. I probably filtered out most of what was indigestible. While my father was pleased that I liked to read, my fifth-standard educated mother who had never been taught English began to complain that I was reading too much. She thought books were making me impractical, and she was right, of course. But she didn’t, or couldn’t, do anything about it. Sensing that I was having an overdose of Western books, she began to read me Kalki’s stories, Bharati’s poems, and the epics and legends serialised in Tamil magazines like Ananda Vikatan and Kalki. She had a passion for Hindustani, and wanted me to speak the language and to read it. But where were the children’s books in Tamil and Hindi? Even later when I wanted books for my children, I could never find any Tamil or Hindi books that were amusing and stimulating without being preachy. I still can’t get my hands on really good kidstuff in Indian languages for my grandchildren.

Most people who like to read a lot have learned to read more or less by themselves, from books that have had little or nothing to do with schoolwork. It seems to me that it is roughly between five and fifteen that we acquire most of our language skills. It is during that same period of late childhood-early adolescence that children easily pick up languages. To stimulate them and expose them to various kinds of reading experience is the challenge. For, it is also the stage when children either become interested in books, or get turned off entirely. This happened to several people I know, and it had nothing to do with IQ or any of that stuff, but just with what books were available to them, and how they were introduced to the reading habit.

Making plenty of books available, without pushing them, seems to be helpful, as also a reasonable amount of freedom to pick and choose. An interesting-looking book with ‘difficult’ words isn’t likely to be put down by a child on that account alone, except reluctantly. But the most interesting of books, even an easy-to-read one, thrust on a child by a too-eager parent hovering over his/her shoulder with an insistent “Read it! Read it!” is likely to meet with a sticky end. Coaxed and bamboozled thus, a four-year-old I knew once flung his Noddy book into the toilet.

Writers of kidstuff – Beware!

First appeared in Indian Review of Books. Reprinted in The Hindu (Youth Page) on Aug 3, 2002. Reprinted here by permission of the author.
Are you an educator of children, or a parent who has tried to get her/his children to read? Write and tell us about your experience!

The author is a poet, translator and journalist. She can be reached at suryavasantha@gmail.com.

I am a class V teacher and have 60 students in a class. I find that most of my time is spent trying to bring some order in the classroom. How do I, with 60 noisy students, create a climate for learning and complete my syllabus on time?

Classroom management is essential to create a proactive and enthusiastic class where learning actually takes place. With so many students in a class, what a teacher needs is effective classroom management skills.

What do we mean by classroom management?

• Creating a functioning collective
• Developing a “success culture”
• Effective management of resources found in the classroom
• Making Sense of motivational and movement psychology
• Dealing with difficult students
• Creating classroom community and a positive classroom climate

To be an effective classroom manager a teacher has to play many roles. She needs to be a:
Motivator: Encourage students
Counsellor: Listen to them and advise them
Guide: Give them the right values
Facilitator: Render help only when necessary
Leader: Lead by example
Task master: Make sure that work is done
Disciplinarian: Be firm without being rude
Story Teller: Make learning fun

The key to effective classroom behaviour management is to keep in mind always that discipline is an educational process and not a punitive one.

A teacher has to devise strategies for effective classroom management. What this means is she has to build a structure that promotes cooperation and community where each student has a sense of belonging and ownership in his or her class.

It also means composing a setting in which students feel secure. To achieve such an atmosphere a teacher needs to stress equitable treatment for all students, while simultaneously recognising that equity may need to be tailored to meet the diversity of students’ backgrounds and individual skill levels.

Dr.Frederic Jones is a classroom management theorist whose idea about how to maintain a well-managed classroom, so that little time is wasted on discipline, is especially attractive. For example, by practicing body language, facial expressions and good eye contact, a teacher can effectively manage the class. These are techniques that with practice a teacher can master to his or her full potential.

Something else that a teacher can do is to design a contract of rules and policies with the help of the students. This can be an important tool for maintaining a well-managed classroom. For every rule broken there must be a consequence.

The contract should be displayed in a place where all students will be able to access it with ease. Further, the contract should be made available to each student to take home to his/her parents. This way the parents too will be aware of the rules and policies in the classroom and the consequences of their children’s actions or lack thereof.

One of the best ways to keep your students interested in your class is to bring in variety. As a teacher one must try to have different teaching techniques, be prepared for each day with lesson plans, and yes, at times be prepared to change the plan to incorporate some fun. This is the hallmark of a good classroom manager!

Proactive teachers have an important and crucial role to play. Remember that proactive teachers deal with fewer behaviour problems, they enjoy teaching and their students are more productive. Always allow yourself the right to be in control without stifling the freedom, energy and creativity of the student. A tall order indeed, but I am sure with practice all of us can take pride in our classroom management skills.

The author is Principal, Pallavi Model School, Hyderabad.

Rahul Gagangala: “I want all books to have coloured pictures”.
Gayatri: “I like reading books with jokes. I get to laugh”.
Vandana: “I like T.V. more for Tom and Jerry. My books don’t have cartoons”.
Sudhkar: “Libraries in schools only give books for a single day to take home”.
Verra Reddy: “My favorite book is Bobak Nerchena Pattam (Bobak Learned a Lesson) that has a sheep like me that keeps eating”.

Community libraries are designed to allow children access to books in order to sustain their interest in reading, to strengthen their reading skills and also to support their all-round learning.

Pratham’s (An NGO working toward the betterment of the poorer communities including children) community libraries are situated in bastis that comprise 200-250 households. Housing a library in a basti gives that much more freedom to the children in that basti to come visit the library regularly. Also by focusing on a particular basti, the community libraries are able to follow a localised development model thereby creating greater scope for community mobilisation. The linkage fostered by a basti based library intervention also broadens the scope for advanced network within and among communities.

The community libraries of Pratham target children between the age group of 3 and 14 years. The libraries are located either in the community or within the school, if it is in the basti. The libraries constitute a collection of books stored in a cloth bag with pockets that can be hung on a wall. Each library contains about 150-200 books catering to varied learning levels that are developed within Pratham Resource Centers to encompass an array of non-fiction topics as well as a vast variety of fictional texts. This programme is run in communities by local women designated as librarians. Also,for a more effective engagement of the community with Pratham’s libraries, periodic home visits are carried out by the librarians to persuade the parents to send their children to the libraries along with conducting parent-teacher meetings to ensure regular attendance of children in the libraries.

To streamline the work of the community libraries, the librarians designate fixed hours for book borrowing. But often, as the librarians are local residents of the basti and have a good rapport with the community, children flock to their houses in groups whenever they want to during the day. Pratham’s community library programme has seen encouraging cases of children running their own book borrowing activity as well in the absence of the librarians on certain days. The librarians supplement this activity by maintaining a register with a page dedicated to each child that records the child’s background details including ability to read at the time of joining so that the long-term impact of participation in the community libraries can be tracked. The names of books borrowed and read by the child are recorded with the help of a library card. As the child reads more books, she/he is given library cards of different colours so that she/he feels rewarded for having made an effort to read more.

In addition to regular book borrowing and exchange, the librarians also conduct activities such as book discussions, role plays, drawing activities, quizzes, loud reading of stories, story telling and essay writing. All these activities are linked to reading and writing, thus helping children enhance their skills and internalise reading as a fundamental habit necessary for a learning culture.

The community libraries have become a platform for monitoring children’s literacy levels. They have also evolved as community activity centres where periodic activities are conducted to ensure that children acquire various skills. As Sunita, a mother of two children aged 6 and 10 years who frequents the library in Nampally mandal says, “I inquire about new books and activities in the library. This library supports the government school education of my children.”

G Anuradha is the librarian in Musheerabad Mandal of Hyderabad. On being asked about the children coming to her library, she explains that same children don’t come everyday because they go for tuitions. Also she says that she does not scold children if they come late or even skip coming because she wants to encourage children to come to the library. Her opinion about Pratham books is that they are rich in entertainment content but these books should also balance academics with entertainment. She further explains that if GK questions that children get from school can be answered using books from libraries, children would be more excited to come to libraries. When asked about the signifi cance of a community library in her mandal, she says that books supplement the grandma story-telling sessions and children narrate the same stories to their friends in schools.

The author works for Pratham, Hyderabad. She can be reached at daminisud@gmail.com.

It’s another of those mornings in the classroom. An assignment that has been given several weeks prior is due, and when you walk around the classroom holding out an expectant hand to collect them, you find more than one-fourth of the class has not met the deadline. You get back to your desk and as the class settles down you take a quick inventory of what has been handed in. If you’re particularly lucky, most are in some sort of order, with title pages and names clearly marked, written out clearly or typed, complete at least in terms of major headings you had recommended. Some, even on cursory examination, are hastily put together with nonclear beginning or end, while others are just so perfect you know that an adult had a hand in them.

Homework and assignments are given for a reason. As teachers we know that, and perhaps the more enlightened students discern that too. But somewhere along the line, the benefit that is meant to be derived from classwork or homework remains unrealised. They become reduced to mechanical activities, often downloaded directly from the web or with very obvious adult assistance. The homework – or what passes for it – is just another manifestation of an educational system gone horribly wrong, where there is little or no understanding of what learning is all about, where the entire responsibility for transfer of content and skill is laid on the teacher. The student then is a passive recipient of teaching, not realising that a considerable effort has to be made if ‘learning’ is to happen.

This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@teacherplus.org.

These days there is much talk of teachers as ‘facilitators’ and the need to move from being the ‘sage on the stage’ to the ‘guide on the side’ in the classroom setting. Unfortunately, most of the time it remains just talk. While in some cases, the teaching methodologies may shift, the underlying power dynamics often remain the same. The teacher-facilitator (and the examination system) still holds the power over the students. Truly re-inventing oneself as ‘facilitator’ calls for a different kind of vulnerability, openness and mutuality.

As opposed to Vinoba Bhave’s famous story on “Only Teaching”, in which the teacher refuses to open himself to learning anything new, facilitators must be in a continuous learning and unlearning process. To support and deepen this, they need feedback – not just from principals or peer evaluation mechanisms or self-reflection tools but also from the students.

Most of us have only seen teachers evaluating the students. Students never get the opportunity to assess their teachers. In the Guru-Shishya parampara, there was a relationship of mutuality. Rather than a facilitator, I would describe the guru as a co-learner. Both the guru and the shishya used to play the role of nurturing the other’s curiosity and self-learning process so as to evolve in its own unique way. The shishyas also had the privilege/responsibility to choose their own guru and the guru would accept each shishya individually. There was no compulsion on either side. If the shishya was not satisfied with the guru, he could leave and search for another guru.

I remember from my college days that we used to assess our professors at the end of every course and the results were printed in a booklet and made available to all students for the following year. This proved very useful not only for providing feedback to the professors but also for helping our fellow students to decide whether they wanted to take the course given that particular professor’s teaching style. Today there are many democratic schools¹ around the world that allow students to evaluate their teacher-facilitators. There are some schools which give students the radical power to influence whether a teacher’s contract is renewed and she or he is retained in the school. I am not suggesting that this extreme example of ‘the customer is always right’ is a good idea – it probably does not help build healthy and trusting learning communities – but it is important to note that the student’s opinion should carry some weight.

I feel that if we really are concerned about creating healthy learning environments with teachers as facilitators, we must encourage students to assess their teachers (and ultimately choose them). Students are always doing this in their own way behind the teachers’ backs. We can all remember talking about our teachers as being ‘nice’ or being ‘very strict’ or ‘very boring’. (Strangely, I have found that most people across the world had harsh comments about PT sirs.) It is now time to encourage this feedback process to happen more consciously and openly and as an essential part of the teacher-student relationship.

We have created a reflective questionaire with the help of some children who frequently visit the Shikshantar² learning center in Udaipur. By no means is this meant to insult or demean teachers. Rather, it is intended as an invitation to strengthen the dialogue and relationship between students and teachers. We hope to generate a more conscious vision and visible set of reference points as to what constitutes a good teacher-facilitator for the 21^st century. Are our children and parents clear on what we should expect from our teachers? Are the teachers clear on what is expected from them – by their students, their colleagues, parents, society, the planet? It is high time we raise the benchmark in order to bring quality learning and real shiksha in our communities.

We think that this questionnaire is an important process tool for empowering students by encouraging them to reclaim control over their own learning processes and learning ecologies. It also can help reinvigorate relationships between students and their teachers, and teachers and the local communities. We shared the questionnaire with selected students from government and private schools and found that they provoke the students to start reflecting on their educational journey from new perspectives.

Needless to say, these few questions are only a starting point for much-needed deeper conversations between teachers, students and parents. You should feel free to add to them based on your context, particularly with more open-ended questions such as: What is the most interesting or inspiring things you have learned with this teacher? What concrete suggestions do you have for improving the performance of this teacher? I should clarify that the questionnaire should not be used as a tool to punish or reward the teacher. Nor should the student be punished for giving his or her honest feedback. This would severely undermine the integrity of the exercise. I would suggest that the results be shared with the students and community within a larger context of talking about how to improve the situation and how to give the teacher more support. Students also must be invited to take responsibility for positively shifting the learning environment. A healthy feedback process will help increase motivation of both teachers and students. Ultimately, the teachers and students will start to internalise a larger set of the criteria for creating healthy learning ecologies.

An interesting way to begin is for teachers to first fill out the questionnaire as a form of self reflection and then compare their own perceptions about their roles and performance with the students’ perceptions. One does not have to wait until the end of the course to do this. Sometimes it is helpful to get feedback in the middle of the course. I have found that the start and the end of the assessment process is most critical. The teachers should be invited to start by asking themselves questions such as: “What can I learn by finding out how students experience me?” or “In what areas do I feel my teaching needs improvement?” There needs to be a baseline agreement from teachers on why this kind of reflective process is important.

The end of the process is equally critical. The students should feel that their feedback matters. Only then will they take this responsibility seriously. Teachers should listen to the feedback and not reject it immediately or become overly defensive. Acknowledge the student feedback that you are planning and not planning to incorporate into your teaching, and explain why. Your response to the feedback can also create exciting opportunities to clarify your expectations for the learning environment, and open doors for further dialogue with students, parents and the local community.

As we seek to create quality education for the 21^st century, it is critical that students be given more power and responsibility to self-design and shape their learning environments. This may initially sound like a scary proposition for teachers, but it is one that we need to explore if we want to get to the heart of real shiksha.

The author is learning activist with Shikshantar Andolan, an organic learning community in Udaipur, Rajasthan. He can be reached at manish@swaraj.org.

Guru index

You should assess your teachers on the scale of 0-4:
0 means not at all or never
1 means very little
2 means sometimes
3 means oftentimes
4 means really fantastic

1. How much real knowledge and practical experience do they have about the subject that they are teaching? For example, if they are teachers of science, have they conducted any experiments in their homes or communities?
2. How much positive energy (happiness and enthusiasm) do they bring into the classroom with them?
3. How curious are they to learn new things and to upgrade their knowledge?
4. How much do they listen to the opinions of students and respect what you are saying?
5. How often do they acknowledge their own mistakes?
6. How much do they know about you personally – your actual dreams, interests, talents, problems?
7. How much do they respect your parents and your community?
8. How much do they help or support you in you personal life? For example, can you discuss personal problems with them?
9. How many ideas do they try to share with you that are relevant to your everyday real life and to your local community?
10. How much do they participate and involve students in community service projects?
11. How much do they try to connect you with other learning resources and opportunities outside of the formal syllabus?
12. How much do they encourage you to collaborate and work together with other students?
13. How honest are they in their daily life and work?

Total Possible Score: 52
Score given:

1. For more information on democratic schools, see: http://www.idenetwork.org/index.htm and http://www.educationrevolution.org/demschool.html.
2. For more information about Shikshantar, see www.swaraj.org/shikshantar

Brainstorming is now a commonly used technique for generating creative ideas and gearing up the process of innovation in industries and companies. However, few of us realise that the technique can be effectively used in classrooms as well. If implemented properly brainstorming has many advantages over the conventional teaching – learning process in the classroom:

• Brainstorming stimulates and enhances the creativity of students.
• Accelerates interactive, joyful learning.
• Helps in self learning and provokes thinking skills.
• Encourages a ‘constructivist’ approach.

The author is a freelance trainer in creativity. She can be reached at devpan65@gmail.com.

This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@teacherplus.org.