Collaboration, Leadership and Autonomy in Manchal Government School, Telangana (06.12.2018)
CLIx took its academic team to schools in Telangana to observe classroom practices. At Manchal Government School, students were eager to learn in a new way, collaborated to solve problems and took initiative to take the learning to their juniors.
Our entry into the Manchal School’s computer laboratory set off a storm of excitement among students. Their happy faces clearly communicated a collective message, that they were eager to discuss, learn and take home new learning opportunities from a unique classroom interaction.
The initiative by CLIx to invite research scholars and professors into schools was intended to allow these academicians to learn about CLIx classroom engagement and practices and explore the roll-outs in selected schools across Telangana.
Students and Teachers (Manchal Govt School)
It was inspiring to facilitate the lab session and observe the interaction between teachers and students from a fresh perspective. A batch of 20 students from class 9 was invited to occupy the computer terminals and assigned an English language-related activity. These young learners, who have limited access to computers (only on selected days in school) were so far amateurs in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). They shared computer terminals to work on their tasks in teams, helping their peers to learn at the same time.
Zen monk Shunryu said, ‘In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.’ This was observed in the Manchal class. It was not long before students started coming up with ways and solutions to reach their goals. With a 2:20 ratio of teachers to students, students took responsibility to learn on their own. During moments of challenge, students collaborated with their peers to log in, troubleshoot a technical glitch, navigate to reach an assigned activity page and then complete the tasks at hand.
After the lunch break, when we were packing our bags to bid a temporary goodbye to everyone in the school, all the students from the session lined up outside the classroom once again. They had come to us with their junior classmates requesting a second session. There was no way we could turn them down.
At the end of the day, we were happy to have found a new hope of leadership and a possibility of conversion to autonomous learning in Manchal Government School of Telangana.
– Mushtaq Ahmed
Research Associate
CLIx English Team
Centre for Education, Innovation and Action Research
TISS
Good to see that CLIx is putting honest efforts to improve classroom practices and helping transform the learning methodologies. Being a teacher myself, I personally believe that its the teachers who are the core of educational transformation in any country. And therefore, we the teachers must continue improving our skills and mindset. Plus government’s education ministry must focus on providing skills development facilities and distance learning programs to the teachers at an affordable cost. Because I don’t get enough time to enroll in a full time program with an institute physically while continuing my day job, I’ve personally enrolled in the AET course distance learning program to keep improving my skills.