Professional Development Day for Teachers
A Professional Development Day on ‘Role of motivation, peer learning and effective/positive communication”’ was conducted on 7thJanuary, 2020 by Ms.Tanushree Sengupta, School Counsellor and Mr.S.Varadarajan, Psychology Teacher.
The session started with Ms.Tanushree drawing the teachers attention to the evolution of the role of teachers, how the techniques, expectations, student’s learning ability and class management techniques have undergone changes to cope with the fast moving social scenario and great influence of the media on the lives of our students. Today along with academic development teachers play a key role as a role model and create an environment to reinforce good behavior, moral values and life skills. To keep up with the challenges of the educating process, teachers have to constantly learn, unlearn and relearn to keep themselves upgraded. Us being a boarding school we play an important and greater role in shaping the lives of the young minds. Thus the effectiveness of the teaching learning process depends greatly on our own learning skills and motivation, peer learning and professional attitude and effective /positive methods of communication.
Mr. Varadarajan emphasized on motivation as a growth process. Motivation is a mental as well as physiological process which arouses an individual to act for fulfilling the need. Everyone have their own goal it differs from person to person. Your preparedness to learn plays a key role in the progress of growth. It works on reward and extinction. For a student who prepares well in exam and rewarded for his hard work keep performing consistently. Correcting maladaptive behavior is an example of punishment.
Learning plays an important role, extensive research on learning style over the decade has proved that various factors play a key role in learning process out of which the three major factors contribute to the learning process i.e. perceptual process, information processing and personality factors. Perceptual process is biologically oriented that is your sensory process carrying information to the central nervous system. Information process is higher mental functions your thinking, reasoning, problem solving and numerical ability. Personality patterns are the way we interact with the surroundings. Each one of us has a preferred, consistent, distinct way of perceiving, organising and retaining information.
The role of empathy plays a key role in understanding the students feelings and emotions from there point of view. It’s important to have empathetic approach to help when they are incomplete with work, unable to comprehend, to correct their mistakes and when a student Perform poor or decline in academics the above three factors explained in learning plays an important role. Case studies were given as an example to understand each factor with empathetic approach.
The above concepts were practiced through a pragmatic approach using various activities. Mindfulness, preparedness to learn and responding
positively to changes was practiced by a hand and feet hop game. Processing information, logical reasoning and problem solving skill was done with an activity of bag full of unknown things. Empathy was experienced with drawing through a mirror and how each one result was unique and different. Teachers actively participated in role play skits to analyse challenges faced in classroom setting and plan for intervention for the situations given to them.
It was a very interactive and fruitful session.