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The line up of speakers was very impressive and several key areas of education were addressed. Some of the themes for the sessions encompassed deliberation on: School and Society, Emerging domains of school leadership, effective leadership, learning organism Vs organisation, school management processes, navigating systems and processes, growth and quality, curricula, pedagogy and assessment.
The focus of most of the speakers revolved around the a desperate need to revamp the way in which we look at education and our curriculum, the way we are assessing our children, bringing back the smile on the faces of children and most important of all focussing on teacher development. Like what is typical of conferences there were some brilliant sessions and some very irrelevant sessions, but by and large the enthusiasm of over 500 educators from across India was commendable as they had all come in eagerly to learn and make a difference in their institutions.
What was amazing was that almost every speaker in as many words as possible unanimously agreed that the single biggest issue that needs to be addressed in the current scenario is to bring about Excellence in Education to nurture and empower ‘Teachers’. The challenge for India in the coming decade is going to be to create educators or teachers who can take up the responsibility of educating an entire generation of children that our population is throwing up.
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While at the Conference my presentation was on ‘addressing the issues of Teacher Empowerment’, the challenge for our country is twofold:
- Creating teachers training programmes that are scaleable
- Ensuring that there is a consistency in quality across all training programmes
As a possible solution to this problem I introduced the audience to School Cinema and demonstrated how it could be used as an amazingly successful Teachers Training tool. Several schools across India have been using this very effectively in the past year and the results are very encouraging. As educators we attend a lot of conferences and workshops and the next day when we come back to our environment we get back to square one. Here is one practical suggestion that has worked for me. Over my years of attending conferences I have always done something simple, I make a note of a couple of things that have impacted me most and one or two things that I am going to act on based on the inputs I received and the relevance to my work. Keep learning and keep growing!
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