HumaneMaths

Possibility of teacher collaboration What stood out most for me is teacher collaboration (Edutopia, 2015). Listening to the teachers share so openly the fears they had and how they were overcome by aligning to the passion for teaching that connected them was quite a change maker for me. I would like to try it out. I loved the camaraderie that emerged among the teachers while working together. It is the greatest kind of professional relationship and I have always hungered for the same. I did experience it in short spurts but my inability to form relationships always came in the way. Kids collaborate so beautifully (Skooler, 2020) using strategies. So why can’t teachers do the same for the sake of helping learning improve and also be role models for the kids? The structure exists for the same (Tran, 2015) but most of the times, running from one class to the other, the energy for the same diminishes. Hence, we need some clear processes that can help. (Tran, 2015) talks of most schools hav...

Cross Curricular  In my grade 6 class in the IB school, I did a cross curricular project with the language and drama teachers (Kochar, 2016). We took a math story; the language teacher taught the kids how to convert it to a script and the drama teacher gave the nuances of role play to the kids. Then the kids performed the play in front of the drama teacher’s class and asked math questions to the audience in the end. This was one of the very successful projects that I have run so far. In working this out, we defined the 3 core areas very clearly which were (a) defining the core purpose, (b) exploring our ideas and (c) mapping our aligned and non-aligned spots (Tran, 2015). We were very clear that we wanted to work together to give an experience of ‘integration of knowledge’ to the kids, we listened to each other intently and then together built a flow of work where we worked together for the aligned areas and allowed each other to work independently for the non-aligned areas. For ex...

Collaboration Every child can come into a problem-solving mode through collaboration (Skooler, 2020). One of the ways to encourage kids to collaborate is teacher collaboration and exchange of ideas to build STEM classrooms. The structure for the same exists in most schools (Tran, 2015), but the reality on the ground is different. Actual collaboration between teachers is not as much as one would expect. It seems that curriculum and teacher attitudes are in place but the infrastructure for collaboration is yet to be evolved. This infrastructure involves three areas of work (Tran, 2015): 1. Statement of purpose: While it is great to see a vision and mission in every school, one would need a clarity of purpose for STEM as an independent part of the curriculum. But hiding behind an individually created jargon would not work. This is a team work. 2. Exploration of individual ideas: The moment one would try to define the purpose of STEM as a team, the first thing that would emerge i...