My Teaching Volunteering Experiences - The Beginning

The Start Point

It was while I was working with  Content Design & Development function of a certain organisation, where i was entrusted with the task of developing Primary Math Content (Grades 1 to 5) for their digital product that I felt an innate need to understand how children learn. Prior to this, I was happy researching concepts in mathematics, developing working prototypes of those researched concepts, demonstrating the product to teaching communities to stir interest and need as well as sell the product. At this organisation, i become aware of the fact that “there are different learning styles”, “every child learns at his/her own pace”, also that “concepts taught should be developmentally appropriate”, and so it is imperative to create learning modules (activities/lesson plans/projects etc.) that caters to these diverse needs of our learners. This way learners will be able to maximise their own learning potential. While i understood these salient points and what defines a true learning cycle for an individual, i was too driven to make the product market ready. So even though, i had these pointers haunting me every now and then, i continued dishing out math activity ideas and scripting lesson plans (storyboards).

Obviously I am on a learning trajectory and will continue to do so but what really disturbs me is our own level of understanding of children. I realised that my lack of understanding of children was acting as a bottleneck in developing good quality content. I truly and genuinely want to contribute to effective learning solutions and be part of product bandwagon in long run that systematically captures the learnings of a child as well as provides scope for improvement. These thoughts were good enough to trigger me and so I decided to work with children for a while. So that’s how this NGO happened to me. At NGO's adopted low income school, I am currently teaching Mathematics and Communicative English to Grade 2 and 3 children.

Now while i am trying to plan my lessons, i am also trying to squeeze time in-between to put together my observations. So far, i have not been able to come up with right templates to note down generic and subject specifics observations. I hope to develop right templates soon so that I can share whatever i gathered so far in a concise way. 

If anybody has suggestions or references relating to good classroom observation templates, then please do share them with me. 

Khushboo