Education as known for centuries

  What? You are teaching! Again?   Should I say, Congratulations or commiserations?   Is something wrong with you? Aren’t you making more money now?  You cannot take teaching out of a teacher, can you?  These and similar reactions greeted me when I announced to my friends and family about my decision to give up my comfortable executive position and return to classroom teaching. It made me think of the decades that I have spent in the teaching profession, the things that have changed and things that haven’t. Changes have been many – some extremely revolutionary and others a bit subtle. We moved from a blackboard and chalk classroom to Whiteboard and marker, then to Smartboard and now to online Zoom lessons. Teachers started getting called tutors, facilitators and guides and are often on a first-name basis with learners (nee-students). Governments introduced and scrapped new curricula with every change in the shade of the ruling cliques. Private schools,...

After almost ten months in the PG program of Mindlab, here I am penning (rather typing) my thoughts on the last required activity. The learning of these 30+ weeks have not had as large an impact as Dr. Bruce turning into the Hulk, but it definitely has refined, re-calibrated and changed some of my thoughts and classroom practices. I am using the reflective model suggested in  (Rolfe & Jasper, 2001) . What :   I can safely say that I have started looking in the mirror a lot more after joining the course, of course not literally, but in context of my Professional learning. Reflective questions have made me think about what is working in my classrooms and what is not. It increased my listening and understanding the student's voice. I sought and used the comments of my colleagues on my classroom practices. The reflections have shown the need for some changes in my processes and perceptions meeting the need of the students who are not able to achieve NCEA credits in ...

Kia orā, Haere māi, welcome to Aotearoa – New Zealand - The land of long “ white ” cloud. One may think that the country has embraced bi-culturalism or even multi-culturalism whole-heartedly and is an ideal oasis in this world that groans under racist rants and vindictive violence. However, the need for talking about cultural responsiveness and the achievement gaps brings one back to reality. The almost hour-long talk of Anne Milne at CORE event and her earlier report takes aim at the inherently “racist” system that apparently is the cause of the continuous underachievement of Māori and other underprivileged sections of New Zealand society  (Milne, 2009) . Her focus as a school principal was the demographics of the community she was working in, which is predominantly Māori and Pacific. They come with a huge cultural capital of indigenous knowledge. Indigenous knowledge for me is an indistinguishable mass of practices, beliefs, folklore, religion, system of medicine, languag...

  It was the lesson before Morning tea break and I was in a class of 11-year olds talking about anxiety and ways to use it to your advantage. One of the students had his arm in a cast but was valiantly completing all the tasks on the Google classroom. When the bell rang for the break, the kid came up to me and said, “Sir could you please tie my laces, its difficult to do with one hand.” I did and he went away with a happy smile. Nothing unusual or out of ordinary in the incident, but will this be the same in the coming decades? Reading about the trends in education, one would tend to think that soon AI and the learning apps would make teachers redundant and schools a thing of past. I think, of all the trends, the impact of changing technology is going to be huge on education in general. Applying Rolfe’s model (Rolfe et al., 2001) I have penned the following thoughts. What? … A study conducted almost a decade ago (Benedikt Frey et al., 2013) had dire predictions about th...