Strategies for effective teaching

Education has traditionally been Teacher-centric with the teacher being the source of information and all activities being driven by the teacher. In most cases, students worked in silos. This is however not conducive to the development of 21st-century learning skills like Communication, Collaboration,  Critical Thinking and Creativity. Today's student must be in a position to access information, link new information to existing knowledge and develop creative solutions. Essentially, they should be able to learn independently. Student-centred learning(SCL) inverts the traditional model and puts the student at the heart of the learning process. It developed from the constructivist learning theory. Constructivism views learning as an active process of constructing knowledge from information. New information is linked to prior knowledge and hence the learning is subjective. SCL is designed for the student keeping his or her interests, abilities and learning styles in mind. Th...

As teachers, we may have seen cases where children seem to forget their lessons. It is not uncommon to see children forget their lessons or be confused, a few days after it is taught. This could happen even after some practice problems have been done. What could make lessons stick in children's mind? To understand this problem better, it would help to know how memory works. Psychologists have come up with different memory models based on what best corroborates with their research. Be it the  Atkinson-Shiffrin 'multistore model' or  the Craik and Lockhart 'Levels of Processing model', it is clear that information coming into our memory is retained for a longer time only if we engage meaningfully with the information. The act of analyzing information, comparing or associating it with existing knowledge, thinking about its application strengthens the synaptic connections in the neural networks. This kind of engagement with information at hand is called Deep ...