Advice to Teachers in becoming a Principal

Apart from the roles of a principal, such as learning, leading, excelling and monitoring....any other specific roles are ?

Is the job difficult or different?

Even some quality Teachers capable of being leadership find it hard and reject the opportunities because it has nothing to do with instruction.

I learned from my interactions with teachers across our country,

The position was still rejected by the reason...

It has nothing to do with instruction
The job is different from teaching undoubtedly but feeling of difficulty is an individual matter. It’s difficult for those who don’t know the knack of balancing different roles and satisfying for those who enjoy it.

This role is specifically connected to the soul. What we call it as satisfaction

A teacher loves instruction in the classroom

Truly, a leadership qualities are out of box thinking, not connected with qualifications and experiences.

First and foremost we must remember that a leader is one who knows the way , goes the way and shows the way. A successful principal ( not necessarily a good one) must be able to identify a bunch of talented and multitasking teachers and entrust them with certain key responsibilities but keep an eagle eye on them to avoid backstabbing. This job must be done with utmost impartiality to avoid alienating others. Some of them should be kept changing every two three years or as and when fresh talent joins the school.

He must sincerely promote talent and act as a strong bridge between staff and management.
Collective and department wise meetings will not only help him put his point across and get a genuine feedback. He must be able to convince parents body that their wards are in safe hands through his interpersonal skills.

He must have good communication skills and address morning assembly in immaculate English on any topic under discussion in the assembly extemporaneously.

He must maintain good but safe relationships with the students by  going to their classrooms and chatting with them informally.

With management of the school

There are certain well founded reasons for the management to be uncooperative. I’ll try to enumerate them one by one
1) The management is not getting positive feedback about the head from various sources like - parents, students or their own favourite teachers planted among the staff permanently. The head should identify such elements and take them into confidence without compromising with principles.
2) Communication gap with the management and failure to win them over to his/ her own side on certain issues and administrative decisions.
3) Differences among the members of the management themselves and head’s failure to strike a balance.
4) Failure to remain heads and shoulders above new and upcoming schools.
5) Managements feeling that fresh blood needs to be inducted on a lower salary as the old head has become too heavy monetarily and influentially.

This is main attraction towards the teaching job.

In the same way what shall be the attraction that brings a teacher to be promoted to the leader level subjected to missing nothing about the instruction which a teacher believes for job satisfaction.

As a leader, teachers are always practicing their art and learning how to improve their techniques. They listen in class for opportunities to teach. One student’s question can drive an entire lesson plan from which all students will benefit. Teachers are not looking for short answers. They look for explanations that present several concepts and perspectives to the students

In a word we can say
Building the quality of instruction

1. A leader who involves in improving the quality of instructions are satisfied with their leadership qualities.
2. Seek out the best preparation for instructional management, for organizational development, for change management - for these things that we know matter. Be aggressive about finding the right support and training for yourself.
3 collaborate, collaborate, collaborate.
Go into this with the idea that, 'I'm going to build a team. It's not going to just have to be me. My job is to really find the expertise and the skills and the abilities of the people that I work with, cultivate those, glue them together.

You will be both a more successful principal and you will be a saner principal who has at least a little bit of a life beyond all of the effort that you put into the work in the schools."

DEVELOPMENT OF THINKING SKILL IN CHILD

DEVELOPMENT OF THINKING SKILL IN CHILD

“THINK BETTER TO BE BETTER” Being educated is not enough to utilize human potential or to meet the needs of the world of work or to be a good citizen of a country. Children are to be equipped with a varied range of competencies to face an uncertain and unpredictable future. In this era people are exposed to diverse problems in diverse contexts at different times throughout their lives.

Nowadays job markets as well as societies are looking out for people who can comprehend, judge and participate in generating new knowledge and processes.

Developing countries are in need of citizens who can assimilate information from multiple sources, determining its truth and use it to make sound judgements.

Real challenge for the educators is to develop educational programmes that will enable all individuals to become effective thinkers as it is required by all.

WHAT ARE THINKING SKILLS?

Thinking skills are the mental processes that we apply when we seek to make sense of experience. It refers to the human capacity to think in conscious ways to achieve certain purposes.

Such processes include remembering, questioning, forming concepts, planning, reasoning, imagining, solving problems, making decisions and judgements, translating thoughts into words and so on.

A thinking skill is a practical ability to think in ways that are judged to be more or less effective or skilled. They are the habits of intelligent behaviour learned through practice, for example children can become better at giving reasons, or asking questions the more they practice doing so.

NEED AND IMPORTANCE FOR DEVELOPING THINKING SKILLS IN CHILD

Thinking skills will enable us to learn from our experience and to utilize our intellect. Improving the quality of thinking skill is directly linked to better learning and there by maximize the potential towards betterment of society.

“In our evolving world, the ability to think is fast becoming more desirable than any fixed set of skills or knowledge. We need problem solvers, decision makers and innovators. And to produce them we need new ways to teach and learn. We need to prepare our children for their future, not for our past.

As a person becomes more proficient, thinkers move from being merely recipients of information to become manipulators and judges of information and ultimately to discoverers and creators of information. Most of the growth in the human brain occurs in early childhood. By the age of 6, the brain in most children is approximately 90% of its adult’s size. This implies that interventions will be more effective in the early years, while the brain is still growing, than at a later stage.

Growing interest in ways of developing children’s thinking and learning skills is the result of finding about how the brain works and how people learn and that specific interventions can improve children’s thinking and intelligence. If thinking is how children make sense of learning then developing their thinking skills will help them get more out of learning and life.

A thinking skills approach suggests that learners must develop awareness of themselves as thinkers and learners, practice strategies for effective thinking and develop the habits of intelligent behaviour that are needed for life long learning

Rediscover your life - Part - II

Rediscover your life - Part - II

Somehow as adults, we stop asking these questions, we go about
our lives in such a robotic way. However, for the young ones, these questions do matter, deeply, and they need to be addressed. They are struggling to find meaning in their life. There are times when I come back from work feeling so worn out with this nagging question, ‘What’s happening to these young people? What can I do?’

According to a World Health Organisation (WHO) study in 2015, Depression is the leading cause of ill-health and disability worldwide. Over 600 million people are now living with Depression and/or Anxiety. The WHO study also showed that one in four people might struggle with mental health problems in their lifetime. I am sure by 2019 these numbers would have grown exponentially. In India, suicide is the leading cause of death among the youth. In fact, a student commits suicide every hour. Nearly 40 per cent female suicides occur in India. Across the world, more die from it than stomach cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, colon cancer, breast cancer, Alzheimer’s or actually any form of violence including terrorism, domestic abuse, crime and war. And we still do not think the issue is serious enough and want to shrug it off as ‘character weakness’, where all we have to do is ‘become stronger’ and ‘snap out of it’. There are some who seek help and get the right treatment. There are many who struggle and do not get any support due to lack of awareness. Then there are others who do not have a full-blown condition to give them a diagnosis of Depression or Anxiety but life might have recently become a little  colourless for them. There might be a feeling of being stressed out, a sense of meaninglessness and joy leaching out of their lives. And, that’s why this blog.

This blog is for all young people and adults who are struggling with their dark, dreary winter and have not yet found their ‘daffodil morning’. It is for their family and loved ones, who witness their pain every day. It is for counsellors, therapists and psychiatrists, who are looking for a creative, effective approach that holds on to their clients’ dignity while they help them rise strong.

In fact, this blog is for every human being who wants to build a joyful, meaningful journey of life. More than anything, this blog is about standing up to the forces of shame, stigma and silence in mental health and reclaiming our lives. As I could not find other words to encapsulate the wavelength of these difficulties, I have stuck to using the words ‘mental health difficulties’. However, I do think these words can be a little simplistic. Mind and body are closely intertwined, and there is no dichotomy there. Emotionally, the person might feel excessively sad, miserable, anxious, worried, guilty, ashamed, frustrated, agitated, angry or just numb and apathetic. Physically, she might experience aches and pains, drained of all energy, have a heavy pit in the stomach, panic attacks, appetite changes, sleep disturbances, gastric troubles, fatigue, exhaustion, lethargy or bouts of agitation. Cognitively, the brain might feel sluggish, dull, not be able to think clearly, concentrate, constantly ruminating, churning in a sea of negativity. Behaviourally, inactive, lethargic, passive or losing interest in most things, including not taking care of personal hygiene or doing things that typically would give the person pleasure. Socially, withdrawn, with low self-worth, feeling like a burden, continually comparing self with others, mistrustful, cutting oneself off until the time the person feels stuck in a tiny shell. On the other hand, a person could express the anguish through raging, aggression, violence or violating social norms. In terms of occupation or functionality, he might not be able to carry out day-to-day activities like getting out of bed, going to school, college or work, numbing his pain with excessive video gaming, alcohol, drugs, self-harm or taking high risks. Having said that, there are many ‘high-functioning’ and ‘strong’ people who, despite the distress, continue to achieve, excel and succeed. I should know as I was definitely one of them—nobody could have known what I was going through, as outwardly I soldiered on with the pentagon of Ps: pleasing, performing, perfecting, proving and pretending. Darkness seeps through and colours every aspect of our being. It takes over our identity, until the time we are left feeling like a shell of our previous self. In that state, it is impossible to think that we could ever get our life back again. But we can. And, we will.All that I request you to do is believe in oneself and attain it.

PHONEMIC AWARENESS AND PHONICS

PHONEMIC AWARENESS AND PHONICS

Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in words. We know that a student's skill in phonemic awareness is a good predictor of later reading success or difficulty. Find out what parents and teachers can do to help children develop this critical literacy skill.

Dr. Louisa Moats explains to a kindergarten teacher why it is critical to differentiate between the letters and sounds within a word when teaching children to read and write.

Phonic and Decoding:
Phonics is the understanding that there is a predictable relationship between the sounds of spoken language, and the letters and spellings that represent those sounds in written language. Successful decoding occurs when a student uses his or her knowledge of letter-sound relationships to accurately read a word. This section provides information about how to teach children to sound out words, and what to do if a child is having difficulty linking letters and sounds.

Phonics instruction helps children learn the relationships between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language. Children are taught, for example, that the letter n represents the sound /n/ and that it is the first letter in words such as nose, nice, and new.

Learning that there are predictable relationships between sounds and letters allows children to apply these relationships to both familiar and unfamiliar words and to begin to read with fluency.

Programs of phonics instruction should be:
Systematic: the letter-sound relationship is taught in an organized and logical sequence
Explicit: the instruction provides teachers with precise directions for teaching letter-sound relationships

Effective phonics programs provide:
Frequent opportunities for children to apply what they are learning about letters and sounds to the reading of words, sentences, and stories

Systematic and explicit phonics instruction:
Significantly improves children's word recognition, spelling, and reading comprehension
Is most effective when it begins in kindergarten or first grade but should be used as a part of a comprehensive reading program with students who do not have a firm understanding of the letter-sound relationship, regardless of grade level.

Phonological awareness and phonemic awareness: what's the difference?

Phonological awareness refers to a global awareness of the sound structures of speech and the ability to manipulate those structures. Phonological awareness is an umbrella term that encompasses both basic levels of awareness of speech sounds, such as rhyming, alliteration, the number of words in a sentence, and the syllables within words, as well as more advanced levels of awareness such as onset-rime awareness and full phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is the most advanced level of phonological awareness. It refers to a child’s awareness of the individual phonemes — the smallest units of sound — in spoken words, and the ability to manipulate those sounds.

Phonological awareness (PA) involves a continuum of skills that develop over time and that are crucial for reading and spelling success, because they are central to learning to decode and spell printed words. Phonological awareness is especially important at the earliest stages of reading development — in pre-school, kindergarten, and first grade for typical readers.

Explicit teaching of phonological awareness in these early years can eliminate future reading problems for many students. However, struggling decoders of any age can work on phonological awareness, especially if they evidence problems in blending or segmenting phonemes.

How about phonological awareness and phonics?

Phonological awareness refers to a global awareness of sounds in spoken words, as well as the ability to manipulate those sounds.
Phonics refers to knowledge of letter sounds and the ability to apply that knowledge in decoding unfamiliar printed words.
So, phonological awareness refers to oral language and phonics refers to print. Both of these skills are very important and tend to interact in reading development, but they are distinct skills; children can have weaknesses in one of them but not the other.

For example, a child who knows letter sounds but cannot blend the sounds to form the whole word has a phonological awareness (specifically, a phonemic awareness) problem. Conversely, a child who can orally blend sounds with ease but mixes up vowel letter sounds, reading pit for pet and set for sit, has a phonics problem.