The COVID 19- Challenge to the system of education
Horace Mann pioneered the promotion of Public Education. His father being a farmer he realized the need for public education way back in 1820s. As he gained public prominence he promoted formal education to provide knowledge and to establish mind sets.
With the growth of the system of Education it soon became a means of transmitting accumulated knowledge, skills & values from one generation to another.
Now the new age teacher with changing times has become a facilitator helping students to acquire skills, values, beliefs and also help in habit formation.
Education was never static .It grew with the growing needs of the global education systems- adopting new techniques and adapting to the new age requirements. Opening the mind, and generating new ideas has now become the focus of this new system of education.
Now with the shadow of COVID 19 once again education system seems to be challenged.
Change management is essentially important and the digital world has already made its foray into the field of education, so we are quite equipped to face the COVID challenge.
The new problems faced by the Education system are:
- Transmitting knowledge virtually, managing and gauging attention span of the students. So from transmitting information to getting feedback COVID19 seems to have challenged us.
- Understanding, studying and analyzing the situation we can say that COACHING & FEEDBACK methodology needs to change as per the changing need.
So we need to look at:
- Provision of virtual training equipment like Laptops, Tabs making it as imperative as the curriculum text.
- As for their usage the new age Facilitators & students are very well versed with these techniques .In case of using Zoom , Team or any other such facility it is easy to understand / follow /learn.
- Now comes the main task of understanding how to virtually connect effectively
- Pedagogical changes are required. Thus old lesson planning needs to change.
- Feed back in the form of questionnaires have to be constantly interspersed with every information given.
Road ahead:-
- Students need to constantly make presentations & do Voice Communication
- The entire lesson plans need to be revised and updated
- Lesson planning and teaching prep needs to change as per the requirement.
- Teachers here can also grade the written material as per the students need
- Seminars can now become Webinars
Now comes the part of meeting the students and directly training them / I am sure calling them just twice a week in batches could be equally effective.
The above has its advantages, like one can group children in a manner that the class is highly effective at the same time they can be divided into batches to maintain the social distancing norm.
Seminars can be in the form of tutorials and speeches and debates can be done virtually.
This will lead to participative Education. Virtual classes can be made very interesting with Storytelling, quizzing and other such activities.
So let us positively move ahead facing the challenges, this is what education is all about.
Ira Sehgal
Educationist and Consultant
