Experiments in the classroom

These days,she is busy making the website — http://www.green warriors.org —- for her latest school project,‘Greening Young Minds’. The project involves primary school children planting trees in the school campus and spreading an environment conservation campaign by making placards and showing them in school and in their neighbourhoods. At the start of the project,the students took a “pledge to save the environment”. Shukramani scanned the pledge document and e-mailed it to teachers in Canada,Thailand and Lesotho. In response,the Canadian teacher sent a video in which her students are standing next to a map and talking of the geographical distance between Canada and India.

“Most teachers get bored with their jobs,and many think teaching is not a very challenging profession,but it can be innovative and exciting if you keep changing your teaching methodology and in the process keep children engaged,” says Shukramani,who was awarded at the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Leadership Awards-2009 in Salvador,Brazil,for her project on water conversation for fourth-graders. She was among the five winners from India in a contest that saw 80,429 teachers applying from all over the country.

In that project,she formed teams of students of “mixed ability”. “Every student has some sort of gift,be it academic or otherwise,” she says. So,if one student collected information on water from the Internt — she trained students on how to use the computer and the Internet for their project — the other drew and coloured water bodies on sheets. “So,if one was the technologist,the other was the artist. When students of different abilities are put together,they learn from each other,” she says.

The students would check if the water taps in their school would be left running,learnt to make ORS solutions in the classroom and walked with placards in their neighbourhoods. They,says Shukramani,had “acquired a life-long lesson”. “Children should be motivated to construct their own knowledge and experience,and a teacher should be a facilitator in that process. When children learn from their own experience,that knowledge stays forever,” she says. So,in order to teach them math,she told them to make a budget of their expenditure at home.

Shukramani believes she is not just a teacher,but also a “co-learner”. “There is a shift in the student-teacher relationship and education has now become more student-centric. Today,students are more exposed and aware and quite often,teachers can learn from them,especially on projects,” she says.

Shukramani’s teaching methodology is project-based leaning,which she learnt when she enrolled with Oracle’s project learning institute in Mysore in 2008. Soon after that,she launched a project on birds,which she executed in a fashion similar to her water and environment projects. Today,she trains teachers of other Kendriya Vidyalayas in project-based learning. She continually upgrades her skills. So,when she was in Brazil to collect her award,she was given an educational software,Autocollage. Today,Shukramani is using that application to make a collage of the scanned posters made by her students on their latest project on environment conservation.