Teaching from the heart

I  have spent a significant part of my career teaching students in the senior school. All through this experience, I have also tried to understand the driving force behind the sustained performance of the exemplary students. My observations and assessments point to the importance of one single factor – the early learning experience. This is axiomatic on two precepts – teaching quality and student engagement. 

I am convinced that it is the primary schools where we should focus our attention and concentrate our efforts to give our children a great initiation into the world of learning and acquire knowledge in the most enjoyable and sustainable manner. To help children run their day with a smile always is the dream of every parent. And seeing  their children succeed is surely one of the most important things on a parent’s mind.  Teaching children resilience is also equally important. Teachers are the backbone of such a step and so the first step in that direction will be to  reorient the teachers through workshops and regular discussions so as to update their skills with the latest techniques and engage them in the advancements in the field of education so that they instinctively apply these techniques in real life  and migrate effortlessly to a student centric teaching learning system. 

Developing skills in children to enable them to learn at their own pace on an advanced level will be introduced. We have a regular assessment of our students. However, to derive a predictive capability and to enable the teachers to identify early on key focus areas,  standardized tests will be introduced for children in a phased manner which will help assess their skills on a wider perspective. A program to make children learn using advanced techniques is being evolved to make them on par with the best. A team has already been set up to start the work in this space. A set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI ) for the school will be formalized during the next few months.

A parent interaction program is being planned for the last week of September to disseminate and explain in detail the philosophy behind this approach, the benefits it would bring to our children and how parents can support these initiatives by developing a more effective support system at home for their children. The program titled “Know what your child needs” will enable parents to give their children the edge that is required for them to be successful not just in academics, but in whatever they chose to do.

This year we intend to teach our children the history of India over the last 70 years through our youth festival which is themed “India at 70“. The vision of the Indian School Managing Committee is to introduce the School Band at Riffa Campus  a play area with good facilities; parking facilities for parents using private transport for their children will be in place over the next month.  There will also be a greater emphasis on achieving these goals through a collaborative and consultative process of obtaining and actioning constructive feedback and suggestions not only from parents but also from the leading educators in this part of the world.

Being with “Team Riffa” is the best that a person can think of. With a dynamic set of staff who are ready to give their best always, I believe that I can achieve these effortlessly. I have urged my staff to think “Team Riffa” in anything and everything they do. Team Riffa is not a collective of teachers but it is a vibrant ecosystem of students, teachers and parents who collectively and individually commit and wholeheartedly strive to provide the best in class educational experience to our dear children. For the sake of our children, lets join together to make it happen.

(The writer is a  Physics teacher for over thirty years who has made the learning of the subject easy and an enjoyable one. He is the  first teacher in Bahrain who was bestowed with the CBSE award for teachers, a prestigious award   instituted by the ministry of HRD, Govt. of India. A teacher who has been highly successful in instilling the spirit of science into students, Mr Sudhir  has also published books to aid student learning. He is an  alumnus of Sainik School Kazhakootam and Regional Institute of Education, Mysore a premier institute for Teacher training under the agies of the NCERT. An extremely good team leader who inspires colleagues to perform more than they think they can, he has been able to carve out programs which saw the school class XII results see a quantum jump.)