Learn-Develop-Grow

  [The poster above popped into my WhatsApp feed this morning and two things got me hooked immediately.  The speaker, Anita Brooks , is an amazing educationist who is known to manage an entire school, one kid at a time, successfully.  The topic - The Power of Effective Questioning in Classrooms - has always been one of my favourite songs to sing when I work with teachers.  In fact, one of my sessions in my teacher-training programmes is called, as in the title, Questions are the Answer. Side benefits for carving out a little time in a boring, stay-home day include the fact that Anita is a very close family friend of ours, the Principal of Delhi Public International School, and also that EdTalks sounds a little like Ted Talks which has its own brand value.  You can watch the 32 min video here ]   Speed of Light and Sound Let me be my own despicable self and criticize the technology first, before I get into the happy job of analysing the content....

  [This is a post published on December 3, 2020 under Mentor Posts on the website of Cygnus Centre of Excellence https://cygnuscoeonline.com/ .  This is re-posted here with permission. The efforts of Cygnus COE to make a difference in the world of teaching and learning is commendable.  Please do visit their website, check out their various sections and leave feedback.  And, if you like, please share and comment on this blogpost.] “I can’t attend the program on Saturday or Sunday because we have webinars on those days, every week!”  – this from a teacher who works Mondays to Fridays on her online classes. Weekends?  Who needs them?  This is lockdown, we don’t have weekends, nowhere to go! The teacher’s phone rings at 11:45 p.m. Nearly midnight.  It’s the Coordinator.   “We need to discuss the program for tomorrow morning”.  Wait, that’s less than eight hours from now – and even less, as the call continues for 45 minutes. After the ca...

Photo by Yanalya - Freepik.com [Tonight's blog post is not about money, honey.  It's about systematic investment planning in Online Etiquette - something where I can't predict growth and sustainability, but I can pretend that it's a value proposition especially in these days of WFH and online conferencing.] Wake up call Imagine my surprise when I glanced through half-open eyelids at my list of e-mails early in the morning.  Guilty as hell about checking my phone before I get out of bed, I give it a quick glance before locating my spectacles.  And so, the surprise when I saw a mail from the Bank that apparently read "Start an SIP in Etiquette".  It didn't.  On closer look, through refracted rays, I read it again.  It was boringly predictable - Start an SIP in Equities, it said.  I clicked Delete and it sailed into the virtual bin. But then this got me thinking.  With the enforced use of technology and everything going either "online" or "e-...

Image by  Rudy and Peter Skitterians  from  Pixabay   [Some of us might remember the good old vinyl records that occasionally got stuck in a groove. The music went round and round, repeating the same phrase over and over, till someone stepped over and lifted the stylus arm.  Hence, was born the phrase for anyone who keeps repeating the same things over, "like a broken record".  Sorry to put you through this again, but I feel quite strongly on the subject of online teaching and learning.  The two terms are inseparable as I believe that the result of "I Teach" is that "You Learn" and not "I have taught". Read, react, object, share, comment .. but give me some feedback, please.] Over the past seven months I have been part of a teaching and learning community that has been challenged by the new normal - it's been seven months, so we are dropping the quote marks around those words.  But we also need to learn from the experiments, successes and fai...