What is the purpose of a school? We often think it is to make kids employable. It is much more than that. It is to prepare them for life. Today we are producing mostly Degree gatherers and Corporate types. We need to move on to producing more Freelancers and Entrepreneurs. From CD –> To EF. Some elaboration on the distinction between a freelance and an entrepreneur. Freelancers tend to be one man armies. They tend not to be too good at marketing skills. Interestingly, with the internet revolution, it is much easier to be a freelancer. Companies like ownerstrust.com, a market place for freelancers, help them get business. Incidentally, the founders of ownerstrust.com are from Denmark. They wanted to help self employed people in the developing world. To do this, they moved to Dhaka and spent 3 years there. Mohd Yunus is an advisor to this company. They also have an office in Gurgaon.

Applying the FISH philosophy? This is based on the very interesting book about the Pike Place Fish market, where customers come not just to buy fish, but watch the fun the sellers have as they toss fish to each other before it reaches the customer. It is more famous for fun than fish. Can we have our schools being famous for the same reason?

So what is fun? Theater. Animation. Panel discussions. Here are ideas for implementation.

• Take your favourite sport – and make a PPT on that using animation.

• Have workshops for parents, curated by students.
• Design a history book for Pakistani grade 5 students.
• A panel discussion in our school – on working out new designs for teaching – with one student moderator and 3 participants and an audience of kids. Or on how frequently do parents need to visit a school? My thinking is – once a month. Also, Parents see how subjects are being taught.

For 99% of students, their favourite subject is taught by their favourite teacher. What makes a teacher a favourite. A good teacher challenges students. She provides evolved challenges (Goldilocks challenges) to stretch their minds. Her classes are always fun. For getting fun into class – the first thing that is required is to help change the mindset of teachers. Teachers rightly complain that they have too many administrative tasks handed out to them. Can we relook the school, so that students end up doing all the admin tasks, leaving teachers to do what they are best at – Facilitating Learning and Mentoring. Before we look at the new role of teachers, let us understand what learning is. We did some interesting exercises at the workshop on learning. The most basic one was to define learning. (Btw, we can repeat this exercise with our own students and teachers.) We came up with a lot of definitions:

• Retention
• Outcomes
• Cognition
• Social / Practical skills
• Learning to Learn (Meta cognition / Life time learning)
• To question what is taught and examine how truths are produced
• Not just ‘what’ questions, but how and why.
• Inquiry based problem solving
• Involve the students in creating knowledge – Research based.

Which of the above fits your definition of learning? We then moved on to small group discussions on how learning works? Here is a bucket list:

• Experience / Practice
• Practical
• Interacting
• Group work (though you need to guard against free riders in the group)
• Reflection
• Interest / Motivation
• If I question

Which of the above fits your definition of how we learn? My own one favourite is of course, learning by doing. Here is an exercise that will help me justify why I think it is important. Ask a student to take up any activity which he or she is doing, which the rest of the class is not. Say cycling. Now ask her to teach the class about cycling in the classroom. Then ask a kid to start cycling based on the instructions given. After a few falls, ask the students to reflect – hopefully they will realize the power of learning by doing. Should we try this with chess? What is your favourite learning model? How would you justify your answer?

The question teachers need to answer to start with is: I am teaching, but are my students learning? We need to re-look exams, from competitive benchmarks to evidence that a teacher needs to adapt her teaching. We need to move way from Feedback through exams to feedback that targets behavior change. We need to move away from knowledge towards organizing knowledge. We need to move away from individual skills to integrative skills.

We need to move away from seeing ‘social media’ as a distraction, to seeing it as a motivator. We need to understand that in the new social language, selfies are our Identity and Likes and Shares are our Endorsements. During the age of 5 to 10, emotions are important. From 11+, structure and logical thinking skills start to develop. Early intervention creates lasting impact. So teachers need to be more skilled in emotions than logic.

We had a very interesting talk by Amit Mehndiratta on Imaging the human mind. Amit works at the center for BioMed Engineering @ IIT Delhi. When the brain receives a stimulus, it leads to higher neuron activity in some part of the brain. This activity of neuron firing can be measured by blood flow – hemodynamic response. Every water molecule is a dipole. In blood, oxy haemoglobin is diamagnetic, as is water and cellular tissue. Deoxy haemoglobin (which carries away the carbon dioxide) is more paramagnetic than tissue, so it has a stronger MR interaction. The f MRI machine produces a magnetic field of about 15 Tesla. To put into perspective, Earths magnetic field is 0.5 Gauss. 1 Tesla = 10,000 Gauss. So the machine produces a field which is 30,000 times that of the earth. Use of functional MRI machines help us understand how the brain works.

No new neurons are formed in our brain after the age of 20, yet we continue to learn. Learning is based on interconnections of neurons. A very interesting experiment was tried out. A robot was controlled by a network of 120 neurons picked up from a rat brain. The robot was placed in an enclosure that had walls. It had motors which could be reversed. The objective was to move in such a way that you don’t hit a wall. The sensor data was fed into neurons – and the neuron activity decided which direction the motor needs to rotate. Amazingly, the experiment showed how learning is happening – as the neuron interconnections happen.

This talk on hi-tech was followed by some lo-tech AI. We had an interesting panel discussion on the Role of AI in class. The conclusion of the panel was that working technology can complement a teacher by focusing on the one on one. One of the speakers, an IIT Bombay alumnus, was using cameras to check for student’s emotional status and thereby the understanding of what was happening in the class. My own view is that the simpler the technology, the better it works in class. For example, instead of video can we just make students listen to simple audio – some music, a lecture. Also, like Sugata Mitra says in his TED talk, we can look at even replacing teachers with technology.

To conclude: Writing clarifies thinking. Why don’t we have compulsory reflection at the end of each school day? (for both teachers and students)

References:

Daniel Goleman: Focus – The Hidden driver of Excellence

Karl .. Professor of Physics at Stanford

TED talk by Nancy Kanwisher – fMRI of Monks. FISH! – Stephen Lundin