The Pathashala Times

In this digital age, a teacher needs to invent and re-invent the teaching practices to adapt to the changing learning patterns. A systematic instructional approach and a growth mindset can facilitate learning. Bloom's taxonomy can be a good starting point for defining teaching or instructional approach for structured learning. This is the reason why I choose to write on this topic. Using a simple example,  I'll discuss how a teacher can use Bloom's taxonomy to ensure learner's growth from Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) to Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). Before going to the example, I'll briefly  cover Bloom’s old and revised taxonomy and  the action verbs associated with it, including Bloom's digital taxonomy verbs. Let's get started... Introduction PC: Wiki Photo Library       Benjamin Samuel Bloom ( Feb 21, 1913  –  Sep 13, 1999)  was an American educational psychologist who reconstructed the objectives of teaching practices....

Do we learn anything from success stories? You would agree that we do. You must have also heard that we learn from our mistakes and failures. But it is not necessary that we commit all the mistakes or face all the failures in order to learn from them. We can learn from other's success, failure or mistakes. We can even learn from unknown people's story provided their journey is documented or told to us in some form. This kind of learning can help us in making wise decisions in our life. Further, imagine, the number of case studies to learn from if we know the stories across several centuries. Here, history comes in the picture.  Even the origin of the word "history" explains the real purpose of this subject. Source of reference: Oxford Languages, Oxford University Press Thus, the purpose of history is to make a person wise through investigation, inquiry or historical narrative. We can now go to a real world school scenario to identify if history education meets its pur...

At the dawn of my career in Instructional Design, I was made aware of the learner’s attention span limit. Thus, I had got the logic behind limiting the lectures in schools and colleges to 35 to 45 minutes. This awareness happened more than a decade ago. Today, when I look back, this fact seems irrelevant.  Today the students are more aware with exposure to information through various mediums. They want more than just information. They want a great learning experience as well. And what has happened to the attention span? It has almost reduced to one third of the earlier span. Hence, practically, a teacher has only 15 minutes to capture a student's attention. This is the age of smart kids, who will listen to the 1 st sentence, evaluate the 2 nd one and by the time the 3 rd sentence reaches their ears, they will make their decision to avoid or listen. How to deal with such students? Forcibly teach them? You can’t. They will find ways to outwit you. A simple solution is to becom...

Have you ever thought why most students find math so scary? Many a times, I have wondered what is so scary about this most ancient subject. I came to a conclusion that it may be the very nature of the subject itself. Math means systematic steps, set of rules and abstract study.  Even though math is part of our daily life, the process of practicing or studying it is too cut off from reality. Students find it difficult to directly relate it to real life and most of the concepts are left to imagination. This very abstract and complex composition of math as a subject makes it difficult. The difficulty level of the subject along with the compulsion to follow a systematic methodology makes math a nightmare, especially for school kids. Here, we also need to understand the basic psychology of kids. Kids are more spontaneous and less methodical. They are curious about things around them. They rely more on their cognitive skills. In general, children take more interest in tasks tha...

I was having a virtual communication with one of my school friend in the USA. During our conversation, she voiced out a concern about the modern education technique in her kids’ schools. She revealed her kids’ were asked to carry only iPad to the school. They never wrote but only browsed their lessons and typed their classwork and homework. All submissions were online; there was no use of paper and pen in the school. She feared her kids may not properly learn to write using pen and paper, and the whole day typing and use of iPad may also lead to related health issues. Post this conversation, I analyze the issue as a learning consultant. The first thought that came to my mind was “blending traditional and digital learning” so that a child gets the best of both worlds. Traditional schooling methodology too has some significant benefits, which are essential for building strong foundation for a child’s education. Basic skills, such as writing, reading, social behavior wit...

The blog post gets the tag 'True Story' because it is pulled from one of my own memories of school days. In the 8th class (or grade 8), we got upgraded from learning general science (till grade 7) to specific branches of science--physics, biology and chemistry. It was the first time we had three different textbooks in our science curriculum, and hence three different teachers to teach them with three different styles. Our chemistry teacher had completely different way of teaching. Probably, he was the first one to introduce me to the exploratory learning concept. Our syllabus primarily focused on introduction to the elements and covered their physical/chemical properties, uses, so on and so forth. Our teacher hardly spent time with us in the classroom, may be he didn't believe in reading out information in the class and making it a dull and boring lecture. Instead, he use to take us to the laboratory, show us the elements and actually allow us to experiment and test ...

What is the first thing your child learns in a school? Aren’t they the Alphabets? Since learning alphabets is the first major step in a child’s academic process, it is essential that your child learns these alphabets properly. And it is important to teach using easy to understand examples.   One of the traditional ways of teaching alphabets is associating each alphabet with a real life thing and let the child know what the alphabet stands for. Hence, we introduce the alphabets as ‘A’ for ‘Apple’, ‘B’ for ‘Ball’ and so on. In this short article, we will discuss this traditional method of teaching the alphabets. The prime aim of the article is to give you an idea about good examples and bad examples of associating a real life object with an alphabet. Let me explain this point with a scenario. Ravi and Roma are husband and wife. They have a three year old son. When this enthusiastic couple tried teaching their son his first alphabets, they landed up in a tricky situation. ...

Teaching is a profession with great social and moral responsibility. Teachers directly facilitate the formation of future society and so they should handle this crucial responsibility with poise and care. But teachers themselves should be matured enough to understand this responsibility. Imagine a class where a teacher walks into the class goes on rambling about a topic with the sole intention of finishing the syllabus for the mid-term tests without bothering a bit about the dozing students, blank faces, and clueless minds. Is this what is expected of a teacher? The students might as well sit at home and gulp the subject matter scribbled in the textbooks. Definitely, here I am talking about students who have fair reading and writing skills and a sound grasping power. I guess each child needs something more from a teacher—may be a role model, may be a guide, may be a friendly philosopher who’ll simplify the code of life for them. But to do all this, first the teacher has to reach a...