Primary Concerns

“STEPS AHEAD”
Rays of Light - An educational institution where teachers, students and parents all uphold the same vision is certainly a huge step ahead in the overall development of the society. Ruhee Gala takes a sneak peek into the city’s pristine education system that lays emphasis on the needs of the ‘young minds’

‘Which village are you from?’ or ‘Whose daughter or son are you?’ were amongst the questions posed at an individual in the past. Today, however, human concerns have changed and questions like ‘Which school does your child go to?’ or ‘Does he go to coaching classes?’ form the crux of most parental conversations. This total shift in the society’s focus towards education has led to many new educational ideologies and curriculums being adopted by new mushrooming schools and classes within the city. A lot of thinking is being done by educationists to shift learning from a mere memorizing of facts to skills.

Educational Initiatives Pvt. Ltd. at Drive-In Road, Ahmedabad, offers to schools services like teacher’s training and workshops. It conducts research into student learning processes amongst many others. Their main flagship is ASSET-a diagnostic test for students from class 3 to 10. With a database of over 10 million student responses, the test serves as a benchmark for the students with their peers, and pinpoints their strengths.

Riverside school, a catalyst in many respects, has made path-breaking changes to the staid and monotonous teaching methods. “Students are the stake-holders in the education system. The goal of Riverside is to put into practice teaching processes, which benefit students, while also focusing that the teachers have a win-win mentality with the students,” says Kiran Bir Sethi, the team leader. ‘Teaching for understanding’ is the backbone of the program. The programme, with its deep policy to make visible to the students the reasons why they do what they do, has a strong but flexible structure in terms of time allotted for teaching various subjects. No text books and no school bell is a concept very new to an Indian school. The city also boasts of schools that have adopted international curriculums. These schools feel that their students will have a competitive edge on the global stage, both in terms of excellent academic education as well as personal development.

“We provide the right environment and right technology for the students to grow up into self-reliant individuals, with teachers being facilitators. Keeping their interests in the forefront, students’ are taught integrity whereby they are made to acknowledge the help they receive in completing their assignments and project work rather than pass of all the work as their own accomplishment,” says M P Chandran, Executive Director, J G International, which follows the University of Cambridge curriculum as well as the ICSE Delhi curriculum. The school has arranged for student exchange program with Australia and Canada that aim at broadening the horizons of the learners and initiating them into becoming world citizens. A pioneer in the field of education is the Calorx Foundation. In order to address all types of learners, they have a project called Prerna, which is a school for kids with Dyslexia - special kids who are intelligent but are poor performers in exams. A new methodology of play-way, which uses visual associations and visual aids is employed, wherein the child is initiated to learn by arousing his curiosity first rather than through black board teaching. Visamo, another Calorx project, is a foster home for the less privileged, wherein village students with a sound IQ are offered an opportunity to study in an environment which will bring them at par with the urban privileged.

India is seeing a new dawn in the educational system as every school is trying to understand the child more and a questioning method of teaching is replacing a data feeding and data assessing system. The city is also witnessing many coaching classes like I-Math and Aloha Mental Arithmetic that prepare the students to perform well by improving their concentration. The projects initiate creative thinking, with many of them imparting skills of time management and effective communication. A fluency in languages like French and Germany, in addition to English, are also fast becoming popular as they initiate in kids an understanding of varied cultures and prepares them for a global future.

Though the entire educational scene right now is a myriad of various systems, a clear path where the child is being nurtured in a holistic manner so as to compete and succeed globally is evident.