Rachna Sharma completed M.Ed. and MBA in Education and has brought in a dynamic work experience to the new campus of Silver Oaks. She works with an inherent passion for creating an environment for inspired learning. With over 20 years of teaching experience, she recognises that the challenge is not just teaching but greater opportunities lie in teaching in a way that the students learn, remember and can apply. She has created training modules for students of NIAS along with professors at IISc, represented at RIE Bhopal and Vikram Sarabhai Science Centre.
The students learning progression happens based on the marks scored. But are schools meant only to teach academic subjects to the students? Are character traits not important? Is this the reason why we find this ever-growing employability gap? In this ‘marks’ driven world, individuals are not facilitated to become resilient and flexible, but to become more self-centered and competitive. These are the questions uppermost in the mind of Rachna Sharma.
Rachana understood that the process where all students are continually nurtured through feedback and a feed-forward spiral is very important in their formative years. Taking this into consideration, she follows the same at her school. It defines and shapes children’s personalities by the time they attain the age of 18, when they leave school.
“To fill the gap in education, educators have to teach, assess, and evaluate the character traits of the students. We started doing this at our school and that is how we embarked on a journey to devise a tool that would help students to know what qualities define the character of a person and what traits make them who they are. Through this initiative, students find answers to questions like ‘What is my self-image? How do I identify myself? and also ‘How others perceive me?. We call this initiative as SOLS (Self Organized Learning System), which is a name adapted from one of the speeches given by the Indian computer scientist and educational theorist Sugata Mitra,” she says.
Self-Organized Learning system is a diligently planned periodic process for the students to do self/teacher / Parent/ peer assessment of different character traits from the schools’ character curriculum. Then, they try to understand the strong and weak elements of their character profiles and accordingly, they work on their identified weak elements. In this continuous assessment and feedback, all the three stakeholders: the student, the teacher, and the parent have a role to play in the personality building of the child.
This Inside out approach helps the learners to build a strong value system within them which then reflects in their competence. It identifies the indicators of an ideal profile and then gives a scope to benchmark themselves against it. The feedback given by the other stakeholders defines the scope of improvement. Thus, learning as well as assessment happens. Marks achieved by the students every year in examinations at various levels are on the rise, but there is still an employability gap faced by the job sector. Even after employment student may excel in technical skills but are losing out on human values. There is a need for shift in the thinking, approach and expectation starting with us educators as well as parents.
Marks achieved by the students every year in examinations at various levels are on the rise, but there is still an employability gap faced by the job sector. Even after employment student may excel in technical skills but are losing out on human values
