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....

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay There's something to be said for what you think is a lost cause.  If you can't do anything about it, at least raise a laugh - a joyful belly laugh or a nervous whimper or a knowing snigger - there are choices aplenty for those who will squeeze fun out of anything and lemonade out of lemons. The Lying Kind "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics!" these lines attributed to Mark Twain, among many other contenders since the 1850s, got me thinking about the connection with what we are doing with numbers, kids and even schools these days. Actually we have probably been doing it since Mark Twain's time too which might have prompted him to opine, "Never let school interfere with your education."  We have been reducing the kids to performance statistics, perhaps preparing them for performance appraisals in corporate life? 98% of our students have scored 90% or more says one institution 100% success rate!  sa...

From Pixabay - an advertisement [The credit for this memory-jog is from my friend and former colleague, partner in crime in Hyderabad, Padma.  She sent me the snapshots which feature in the main text below and got me thinking of how we, as trainers and facilitators, metamorphosed from the humble chalk-and-talk to the various kinds of projection equipment that we used across all our training.  Thank you Padma.  Please Comment and Share this blog.] Mystery Words I mentioned the term "Progressive Disclosure" to a young 20-something and she blushed, flustered. When I asked what she was thinking, she hesitantly muttered, "Is that like strip-tease?"  Knowingly, I tried another word - "OHP".  This time she was truly mystified.  "What's that? A kind of complex -- like OCD?"  Aha!  I was making her think.  Then I popped the next word into a sentence.  "No, it's what came after the good, old charts and pictures. The OHP was replaced by the Car...