Pradeep was accompanied by his American friend, Taylor. Taylor is a PhD in mathematics. His area of concentration is functional analysis and topology. Is currently teaching at Arizona University in phoenix. One of the interesting courses that he takes is at the intersection of humanities and math.

Taylor has taught high school for three years. A lot of time was discussed in how teachers can integrate subjects. Taylor gave an example of a project that he gives to his high school students. Students had to look at animals and find a correlation between bone size and weight. They realised that bone dia increases in geometrical proportion. Pradeep added his own tuppence over here. He talked about how the skin area has to increase in the squared proportion as the insect size increases. (Insects breathe through their skin.) How fractals and lung geometry are related.

Teachers asked Taylor about suggestions for elementary school. He recommended working together in projects. Cooperating. Also competitions, where teachers send to kids to the board, and race to find the answer when a problem is given. As a kid, he remembers being given a jar full of candies and being made to guess how many candies are there inside. Making paper airplanes and finding what makes them fly the farthest. Pradeep recommended a water lab for kindergarten students. With bottles, pipes and funnels. He remembers that in his childhood days, he would spend hours in the water lab. In addition stuff like Play-Doh will help develop motor skills of our young children. Nisha’s observation was that if anything is done from the book, it’s construed to be boring. If anything is done outside of the book, students find it interesting. Possibly because it seems to have spontaneity.

Another idea that Pradeep discussed was that activities should develop multiple skills. For example, if students are making a sandwich. They need to logically list out steps involved in the recipe. They need to be able to use good language in order to document the recipe. And they need to have the motor skills required for cutting vegetables which will go into making the sandwich.

Pradeep talked to teachers about how they need to focus on skills rather than content. How they need to take simple things, but get it done perfectly. Gave an example of the work he does on writing skills. It’s important that students have the right posture. It’s important that they write their letters on the line. It’s important to have appropriate left and right margins. Any writing activity starts with planning. So writing also improves thinking skills.

Education is not what a teacher teaches, but it is what a student learns. Teachers need to focus on the learning process. Teachers need to plan how to enact sessions. They need to look at it chapter to decide what skills it requires. The skills are:

Listening. If you are making students hear an audio clip, do it twice. Find out the difference between the first time and the second time. Another tactic to help improve listening skills of our students is when teachers tell a student: ‘I didn’t understand.’ Then she asks another student: ‘Did you understand?’ Make the student talk to the class not to the teacher. This way they build up their presentation skills also.

Writing. Is important because most assessments are based on writing. Requires effort. Also improves the ability to concentrate for longer times. For a grade 1 kid 10 to 15 minutes of writing time is good enough. They need to repeat writing assignments till the time that they perfect it.

Observing. Ask them to find out similarities and differences between a set of objects that they collect. Pradeep feels that teacher should always prime students up before taking them for a field visit or showing them a movie. The priming should be for processes and not content. Teachers can build their own observation skills by attending each others classes. After all, stealing improves education!

Speaking, Explaining. Usually 90% of a class’ talktime is dominated by one or two students. What we need to do is to make these guys teach. When homework is given, the teacher should tell students: ‘Your parents don’t know what we discussed today. Please go home and explain to your parents.’

Reading. Helps immensely, when students are asked to make questions about reading material themselves. In fact they can even design the homework for other classes. On the subject of homework, Pradeep feels that simplicity is of essence. HW can only be 4 lines, but students need to do it perfectly.

In ToK (Theory of Knowledge) that Pradeep teaches, he tells students that I am going to teach you three ways to learn. He demonstrates the first way: where he speaks and students listen. This is a monologue. In the second way, there is a discussion that happens between him and a teacher or a student. Students have to observe this dialogue. And in the third way, the student has a dialogue with herself. She develops questions and she tries to find answers herself. At the end of this exercise, students realise that the third way is indeed the best.