I was speaking to TH a little while ago. He was telling me about how he had made up a game to teach a very difficult history lesson. It is a very interesting game and will ensure that history doesn’t remain just names and dates for the children but becomes something alive.
It got me thinking about innovative teaching methods. In India, the usual method is to memorize things and reproduce it in the exam. So, most of us don’t understand concepts or their applications. We just remember information…only till the exams are finished :)
I remember TH telling me that he had a history teacher who would either narrate history lessons as stories or get the children to enact them. TH knows history so well because of this method.
I used to have a professor who taught a dry subject like accounting in a very animated manner. He would give a lot of examples of real situations and enact almost all situations. To this date I remember each and every thing that he taught. I remember that his was the one lecture I used to enjoy in college.
In school our English teacher used a lot of alternative techniques. Sometimes she would divide the class in two and one section would shout out meanings while the other had to guess the word. On some occasions she would get us to read out the lessons wherein one person would read the entire lesson while different other people would read the dialogues. I developed such a deep love for the language as well reading fiction.
TH and I are strong advocates of theatre in education…I mean inclusion of theatre as a subject as well use of some drama as a teaching tool for other subjects.
Teaching subjects in a different manner will, in my opinion, ensure that children learn concepts and their application. Most importantly, it will make learning enjoyable for them and they will retain the knowledge for long.
It is my long term goal to be an active contributor in the field of education to make learning enjoyable by involving theatre in it.
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