When they say, “Ama lipi didi”, I feel honoured and satisfied of my accomplishments as a teacher. It took me a long time to get this space in the hearts of my children and now that I have got it. I always want to keep it,” says lopamudraPanda, popularly known as lopa, while she narrates her journey from serving as a Contractual Teacher at Kendriya Vidyalaya to an elementary school teacher currently working at Mahulbereni Koilipangi Upper Primary School of Kakudibhag cluster in Dhenkanal district.
It is just another Indian summer day and I am on my way to Mahulbereni Koilipangi School. This 15 km stretch from Dhenkanal town has always been one of my favourites. One can enjoy travelling through the beautiful coverage of lush green farm fields, surrounded with mountains as much as relishing upon the freshly plucked farm produces being sold by the roadside. I just finished my last slice of melon, collected from a roadside vendor, and while I entered the school campus, I see students rushing to their respective classrooms after the mid-day meal break. Surprisingly, I see Bibek and Sheela- the duo who were continuously absent from the school, as learnt from my previous visits. To my curiosity, lopa joyously exclaims, “They have started coming to school again and now they are regular. Finally, I nailed it!”
I could not wait any more to listen to the story behind and while sipping my cup of tea, I see lopa assigning a task (something about rolling the dice to solve an equation) to the mathematics class of seventh standard and comes back to entail the story. She elaborates, “It happened a few months back. I observed that two students of seventh standard were continuously absent at school and whenever they came, they sat idle. I wanted them to come to school regularly and bringing them back was not an overnight job. For that I had to struggle for months together. I tried almost everything- starting from convincing their parents through motivational story-telling to exploring possibilities over the internet to encourage them to get back to school. However, little did that work. This did not demotivate me and rather persuaded me to feel that, I ought to make my classroom a joyous place to learn, which would encourage my students to come to school regularly”.
Playing with numbers
“In this new venture, my students do most of the talking and I listen to them,” says lopa, while explaining her method of learner centric mode of teaching. “I am just a facilitator who assigns the task, instruct them what and how to do and watch them performing. I guide them wherever necessary. Whether it is a group work or pair work or story telling or role plays or any other activity, my students perform and I enjoy as much as they do,” she says.
Very interested to see the work in practice, I approach towards group-I (as the teacher has named it). Simali, the group leader, introduces me to her group members, Priti, Shravani, Bibek and Vikramwhile. They sit together to perform a task, “throwing the dice to solve an algebraic equation”. Priti explains the activity to me: “All the members of our group will throw the dice one by one. Our group leader, Simali will jot down the numbers in her notebook and she will assign these numbers against the variables, X, Y and Z. Together we will solve the equation after discussing with each other. If any member of our group is not able to understand, we will help him/her. Our group will then present the answer before the class, upon which the teacher as well as our classmates will provide their feedback.”
Sneha and Nandini, doing the same task, but sitting in pairs, add, “Earlier, we used to do it alone and now we do it together and it is so much fun.”
Changing minds
Soumya Ranjan, a student suffering from mental health, is also seen involved in the classroom activity, silently observing what his friends are performing. “There have been remarkable changes in Soumya’s behaviour-the student who made noises and disturbed the class, earlier, is now an observant.
Motivating factor
My eagerness kept on increasing and I became more interested to learn what motivated lopa to think that way. lopa answered my curiosity by thanking the TESS India Open Educational Resources and the Key Resources, to which she refers as her “Encyclopaedia”. “These have provided me a plethora of knowledge and have answered to my queries on how, when and why,” she says. Whilst acknowledging the TESS India Key Resources (print and online both), most of which she has been using in her classroom transactions, lopa also mentions, “I was familiar with all these resources prior to undertaking TESS India training for mathematics class-VII in August 2015. However, there is some difference in the way I used to practice earlier and now. For instance, I did tell stories to my students earlier, asked them to sit in groups, planned my lessons and provided feedback to students etc. However, with TESS India Key Resources, I became aware of using the methods in a systematic manner”.
Ups and downs
While this conversation gets deeper, the success story unfolds the challenges, lopa had to tackle through. She highlights, “It was a daunting task to get the boys and girls sit together while assigning group/pair work but I realized this was important. My children did not accept this change initially. Similarly, I struggled to meet the syllabus while keeping pace with my lesson plans. I also found difficulty in assigning a common activity to my class which had mixed level of students. Amidst all challenges, the remarkable positive changes that I have seen have created win-win situations.”
When asked about the most significant change lopa has witnessed, she proudly mentions, “16 students out of 25 students (as compared to 10 earlier) in my class stand above an average mark today.”
More hands join
In between our conversation, during our visit to the neighbouring classroom, children are seen sitting in pairs and their teacher,
Meanwhile, Binodini Mohanty, the head teacher of the school, delightfully mentions, “As a school leader, I feel it is my responsibility to spread the good work to all my classrooms and students so that all are benefited. And after the workshop, I decided to encourage all teachers of my school to follow TESS India Open Educational Resources and Key Resources and execute in their classroom transactions. And three other teachers, Manasi Das, Sushmita Sahoo and Sujata Sahoo have also taken part in the scale up training programme of TESS India and are practicing it. They were also a part of the Massive Open Online Course on “Enhancing Teacher Education through Open Educational Resources”.
learning and sharing
“To make this process effective, all of us sit together once in a week with our head teacher to discuss over the lesson plans, reflection notes, classroom experiences, the progresses/challenges and learn from each other of what can be done better,” says lopa, Manasi, Sushmita and Sujata, over a discussion. It is indeed impressive to go through all of theirs reflection diary, where they write down their good as well as bad experiences from the classroom.
New hopes
The school bell rings and I bid goodbye to children and teachers, but my conversation with lopa has still a way to go. We walked down to lopa’s residence which is in the neighbourhood. I have come here to see lopa’s dream which she has often been talking about- a building under construction which is going to be a coaching centre in near future. The 30-year-old lopa aims to run this center for the underprivileged students of her village who are deprived of taking up coaching classes for preparation of competitive examinations. Speechless and so much satisfied with this visit, I wish all her dreams to come true.