Dear Friend,"We cannot teach everything using activities!"Recently, we were interviewing a high school teacher. The teacher repeated the above-mentioned statement at least five times during that 30-minute conversation, as though they did not know how else to emphasize it enough. As the interview progressed, the teacher explained to us what they meant while making this statement:"We cannot teach everything using activities. Activities work in primary school. There they have enough and more time for activities. They do not have a board exam to work toward. Activities do not work in high school classrooms, however. In high school, we have a vast syllabus to complete, and we cannot set any time away for activities like they do in primary school. Our students will have no time left to learn if we do activities throughout the day."Let us put the conversation above in context for you. At Innerkern, we do a School Readiness Assessment once a school signs up for Classroom Shapeshift, our flagship school improvement solution. The School Readiness Assessment helps us understand how ready a school is from four different angles of organizational change. Guided by the principles of design thinking, this Assessment helps us understand how to design and pitch our school improvement interventions during Classroom Shapeshift for a specific school. Recently, we interviewed a few high school teachers as a part of the School Readiness Assessment, before officially launching Classroom Shapeshift in their school. As we talked to these teachers, many of them mentioned the same concern, directly or indirectly.Often, the high school teachers we interview during School Readiness Assessments say they usually explain new concepts, ask questions to check for understanding, and guide their students to individually solve word problems or do written exercises to clarify these concepts. In other words, they use fully guided instruction, followed by fully guided individual practice to teach. They do this because they feel experiential learning and inquiry-based teaching do not work in high school. They believe classroom activities are a waste of time, need to be separated from 'real' teaching, and do not help children learn. According to these teachers, they do classroom activities in primary schools where they are not pressed for time and are not worried about 'the final exam,' the sword of Damocles hanging over every Indian high school teacher's head. Remember, we are doing these interviews at a time when School Boards in India actively champion experiential learning and inquiry-based teaching in all classrooms, and our schooling policies are adamant about us implementing them in schools.
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We cannot teach everything using…
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Dear Friend,"We cannot teach everything using activities!"Recently, we were interviewing a high school teacher. The teacher repeated the above-mentioned statement at least five times during that 30-minute conversation, as though they did not know how else to emphasize it enough. As the interview progressed, the teacher explained to us what they meant while making this statement:"We cannot teach everything using activities. Activities work in primary school. There they have enough and more time for activities. They do not have a board exam to work toward. Activities do not work in high school classrooms, however. In high school, we have a vast syllabus to complete, and we cannot set any time away for activities like they do in primary school. Our students will have no time left to learn if we do activities throughout the day."Let us put the conversation above in context for you. At Innerkern, we do a School Readiness Assessment once a school signs up for Classroom Shapeshift, our flagship school improvement solution. The School Readiness Assessment helps us understand how ready a school is from four different angles of organizational change. Guided by the principles of design thinking, this Assessment helps us understand how to design and pitch our school improvement interventions during Classroom Shapeshift for a specific school. Recently, we interviewed a few high school teachers as a part of the School Readiness Assessment, before officially launching Classroom Shapeshift in their school. As we talked to these teachers, many of them mentioned the same concern, directly or indirectly.Often, the high school teachers we interview during School Readiness Assessments say they usually explain new concepts, ask questions to check for understanding, and guide their students to individually solve word problems or do written exercises to clarify these concepts. In other words, they use fully guided instruction, followed by fully guided individual practice to teach. They do this because they feel experiential learning and inquiry-based teaching do not work in high school. They believe classroom activities are a waste of time, need to be separated from 'real' teaching, and do not help children learn. According to these teachers, they do classroom activities in primary schools where they are not pressed for time and are not worried about 'the final exam,' the sword of Damocles hanging over every Indian high school teacher's head. Remember, we are doing these interviews at a time when School Boards in India actively champion experiential learning and inquiry-based teaching in all classrooms, and our schooling policies are adamant about us implementing them in schools.