Creating role-models

Many people (including myself) feel that moral education can not be done by giving lectures in the class room. The only way to learn moral values is by being close to people who practice good behaviour. However where would you find such people within school premises.

A school has large population of children, some of whom show traits of good behaviour. These children are soft-spoken, honest and cooperative. They like to help, without being visible. You will find them taking humanitarian view in an argument. They are willing to give-up their entitlements for others when needed. The future role-models are there, right within the the school. Most often neither the schools notice them, nor the children are aware of it themselves.

This particular school doesn't want to wait for a chance to run into good-folks. They want to create role-models within the school. So the house-captains and elected students are frequently put on the spot for their good moral behaviour. Other students are encouraged to interact and follow them. The school is creating role-models for good moral behaviour within the school.

Consider the changes happening in society out-side the school. Each day we read people linked to commercialization, quick recognition, frauds and violence. The scene is bleak. Yes, we do read about a few who have great character. However, they aren't accessible to children everyday. 

Children of good moral values exist within every school. Schools should recognize them and high-light for what they do. This requires a deliberate effort from the school-side. And it is good to see, some schools doing so.

fullstop ?

I wonder if English as a spoken language is going to be extinct in schools. I don't mean to say that it is not spoken any more. But the way one speaks - a comma or a full-stop, an  exclamation or a question, is lost on todays children. When I dictate notes (and I dictate slowly with all the nuances) children often ask if there is a full-stop here or is it a question.

Children are not used to inferring the punctuation from the way English is spoken, and it is not entirely their fault. We are not making children aware of the nuances as we read to them. In the class we hardly read English as the rich prose it is suppose to be. As a result, children are failing to recognize the clues that come embedded in the speech.

A list is items separated by comma or quote-unquote means high-lighting something - all this can be understood when one speaks with a flair. The English we speak in classrooms today is mostly text-book English used to dictate notes. And much is lost in this kind of diction.

I hope we bring back a more sophisticated way of speaking English where punctuations become obvious from the way one speaks. Also, we should cultivate listening to English with all its nuances. Otherwise English will become a flat language, where children need to be told - yes, there is a full-stop here.

One way traffic...

This is how it typically plays out in a class. A teacher asks a question and one of the students answers back to the teacher. A teacher does sporadic one-to-one communication with a few of the students in the class. The rest of the class is hardly party to the such transactions. The lesson is done. For that matter, this may well be a one-on-one tuition.

When there are 30-50 students grouped together in a class, there are some advantages. A teacher can exploit this number to expand the communication. Some change in attitude and approach can make the communication multi-lateral.

To start with, let the student address the answer to the class, instead of talking to the teacher. Acceptance is greater when one of them is talking to them. Next, let others add on to the answer one by one. Let them re-phrase and re-interpret the answer. Often a teacher will be able to generate the required points solely from such student-to-student discussion.

Lastly, when a student asks a question, bounce it back to the class - does anyone know the answer ? give some clues so that the answer can be (almost) obtained through collective discussion. Finally, rephrase the answer the way you wanted it and make them commit it to the note-book.

Increasingly I find that students are trained to address the teacher, and the teacher alone. A one-way traffic of communication. Making communication multi-lateral increases class participation, builds consensus and grows vocabulary for many more children. And your work as a teacher is done, by the students themselves.

On moral grounds...

In a book that I recently read, there was a discussion about how children are more willing to listen to moral arguments than subjecting them to rules. This reminded me of occasions where such a persuasion indeed worked for children in my class.

When a child is talking loudly or interrupting the class, teacher's natural reaction is to say - keep quiet, or that such a behaviour is not allowed in class. Or, one may quote the rules like - you are not allowed to talk in the library. After multiple use of the rules, they become in-effective. But really, such a behaviour is unacceptable not just because it's outside the rules. It is also unacceptable as it is unjust towards others who are doing their work.

As it happened, I had made this very case on a few occasions. I stopped myself from pointing out that unruly behaviour is out-of-line. Instead I said that it is morally unfair to others. And I got better response from the children. Typically, they looked around, and for the first time looked at the impact of their doing and they calmed down.

I think children can distinguish between boundaries defined by the rules (which they often don't care about) and the self-discipline that gets imposed from such moral arguments as being unfair to others (which they can't refute).

Teachers don't use this approach to resolve a situation in the class often enough. Neither do we do so in life outside the school. But we should if we want to build sensitive citizens and a fair society for tomorrow. A child's mind seems open for such an appeal.

Group work menace.

Making children do group-work has one headache.  Of course, children like to work but making groups can be a long diplomatic process. They want to work with some and not with others. Then there is the girls-boys divide. Teachers have their own wishes. Teachers want well-balanced groups with mix of talents. There is no easy solution to this.

I braced for long-drawn negotiations as I announced the group-projects in the first class. I asked some kids to chose their group-members. It took some time for trading the members with each other. In the end we got grudging but well-balanced teams. Ready to work together.

In the next class however, I was in for a surprise. The entire class unanimously said that I should make groups as I wish ! They didn't want to wait to find out. They refused to go for lunch till we made the groups. This was unheard-of. I made the groups and they just accepted their partners. Naturally I asked. It seems, this class has been polarized for a while now - amongst girls-boys, and even amongst each other. So everyone in the class could see that there was no possible nice way to group themselves.  In one remarkable moment, everyone agreed that they all should accept the groups I make - and work together.

Sometimes intense differences can lead to cooperative behaviour in such surprising ways. In the face of intractable, children are able to see and accept the Greater Common Good.

Best Practices - an admission of Failure

Somewhere in my past life, in a technology corporation, I came across claim that - Best practices is admission of failure. The author said that when we start documenting best practices so that people can live and act by these, we are unwittingly admitting that the system has failed. The system has failed to foster environment where creative people deliver quality on their own, using their individual approaches. Now we don't trust them, so we refer them to the Best practice. It made some sense to me then.

But since I started working in schools, I have come to realize how true this is. Schools have perfected the art of documenting best practices. There are formats to be adhered, log-books to be filled, profiles to be discussed, reports to be made. There seems only one accepted way to do things correctly. On the surface, it looks like an effort to bring objectivity in teaching and evaluation process. However, its more like we don't trust people to do the job. We don't want to risk any other approach to teaching or evaluation. This is sad because, of all the professions, education requires diverse and creative teaching approaches and many ways of evaluation. Once best practices are defined, nothing less or different would do.

So, indeed Best Practices is an admission of failure to foster diverse and creative environment.