The Hindu
Thanks to the initiatives of two NGOs –American India Foundation and STiR
At the Coimbatore Corporation Girls’ High School, Puliakulam, students with their nimble fingers trace the outline of India and Tamil Nadu in maps hung on classroom walls. After repeating the exercise in turns, they then close their eyes to draw the Indian and State boundary on air. And, then they do it on their notebooks and mark important places.
Guiding them through the exercise is social studies teacher P. Chinnaponnu. “I had to come up with the idea as the students were poor in maps and were losing out on the 15 marks they could score in Class X public examination,” she says.
A few km away at the Corporation Higher Secondary School, Okkiliyar Street, is M. Pramila, who teaches students in classes six, seven and eight. By counselling and engaging a hyper-active boy she has brought about a behavioural transformation. “So changed is my brother’s attitude that he now accompanies me to shops late at night, shares his dream and also stationery,” says the boy’s elder sister C. Udayakumari, who also studies in the same school.
The boy’s classmates G. Masanammal and A. Nithish Kumar say that from disturbing them in class, the boy has come to collaborating with them in studies.
In the Corporation school in P.N. Pudur, the classrooms are clean as students compete with another to bag the ‘well maintained classroom’ award from their teacher J. Jamuna, who, to make the classrooms clean, made the students of a class compete with the other for the prize.
In the same school, teacher A. Anju has taken a cue from Ms. Pramila to bring about a transformation in another hyperactive, mischievous student.
These small innovations are taking place at classrooms in various Coimbatore Corporation schools because of an exercise the American India Foundation and STiR, both non-government organisations, carried out sometime ago.
The two agencies wanted the teachers to innovate solutions to problems they faced in schools and also share the solutions so that teachers in other schools could implement those, says V. Alexander of the American India Foundation.
The exercise was in three categories – innovate solutions, implement solutions that other teachers have innovated or influence changes. For those teachers who brought about remarkable changes in classrooms, the agencies facilitated certification from the Roehampton University, England.
For teachers volunteering to implement solutions, the two agencies provided a list of solutions that teachers in Punjab, Haryana, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Orissa, Karnataka and Telangana had innovated.
The result of the exercise is that the Puliakulam school students scored well in their social studies examination and there have not been failures in the subject in the last couple of years, Mr. Alexander adds.
