A step towards improving our teaching methods and guiding our senior students towards the right career path - Lawrence School

An educational workshop

We, at Lawrence, believe in upgrading our teaching methodologies with the changing times and helping our teachers equip themselves with the most effective ways of teaching. In this regard, there was a workshop for the teachers on “Assessments” conducted by the Azim Premji Education Foundation on 17^th November 2012.

Bloom’s Taxonomy formed the basis for the workshop. It refers to the classification of learning objectives under the main heads of Cognitive, Affective and Psychomotor, loosely explained as knowing/head, feeling/heart and doing/hands respectively.

The idea is provide a holistic approach to education since each child understands a concept in a unique way, something that can also be broadly classified under the above mentioned domains. The assessment strategies vary for all the three domains and each was discussed.

Teachers at the workshop

Children learn and grow with the help of questions. The workshop dealt with the issues of who asks the questions and how a student responds to a particular question. The idea of posing a question by a teacher at the end of a lesson is to gauge the students’ understanding of the concept. So, the crux of the situation lies in how effectively the teachers frame the question. The questions need to be more open ended and they should facilitate more creativity rather than merely recalling the concepts taught.

The workshop had a lot of practical exercise thrown in which made the session extremely engaging and fun-filled.

Career guidance for 9^th and 10^th graders

In other news, we had ‘Edugroomers’ (Mumbai) conduct a career guidance workshop for our 9^th and 10^th graders to help them understand themselves better to chart out their future career goals. This workshop was held on the 24^th and 25^th November, 2012.

The workshop comprised of a personality test, an aptitude test and an interest test, at the end of which the test results were summarized to prepare an individual report for each participant. Parents accompanied the students on the second day of the workshop, when around 350 different career and further studies options were discussed briefly, culminating with an animated discussion on the varied career choices.

A sample report was discussed enabling the parents and students to have a better understanding of the report.  The parents found the report quite accurate vis-à-vis their own observation of their children.

The wealth of information provided has given these students a great platform to build their careers.