What kind of basic education would I choose for my daughter? May 9, 2009

I recently watched the documentary -” Two Million Minutes”. The time between the moment a student enters ninth grade to when they graduate out of twelfth grade is about two million minutes. The documentary compares how a a few students in India, China and U.S spend these “two million minutes”.

While the documentary doesn’t make any conclusions at the end, it  seems to drive home a message that students in India and China are spending their time more fruitfully. It seems to say that compared to Americans, Indian and Chinese students seem to be  more serious about careers in math and science and are hence better off. It seems to conclude that America is not doing enough to compete with the rest of the world in the areas of math and science.

Ok, I agree that given what I know about education in USA,  the country can do better in preparing it’s students for math and science careers. But given what I know about education in India, I strongly feel that there is absolutely no need to put the Indian education system on a pedestal and say that it is better than the US education system. How much time the students spend on academics and whether they chose a career in math and science is not the only measure of a successful education system. An education system should be measured with many more outcomes – how well-rounded the students are, whether they are able to critically think about issues and make decisions, whether they are able to problem solve, able to think out of the box, whether they are confident, compassionate, responsible and so on.

First of all, I would like to note that I’m very passionate about developments in both India and America. I am a first generation Indian American who lives in America currently and who has plans of living in India in the future. I received an engineering degree in India and after a Masters and a ten year career in the engineering field, changed my career to one in Education after getting a Masters degree in this field. While my daughter is currently getting a K-12 US education, she will in all probability continue her education in India in the future. Given this background , I would like to think of my opinions on both these education systems to be quite objective.

Given what I know about both US and Indian K-12 education systems, if I was given a free choice without any other constraints to choose between these two systems for my daughter, I would any day go for the US education system. Following are the reasons why:

Firstly, I feel that my daughter will have a better environment in the US to explore her interests and pursue a career inline with her interests. She will have an opportunity to explore many options other than math and science – humanities, arts, sports and what not. She will even get opportunities to be competent in more than one field. I know that in India, unless parents work hard to swim against the tide, the society and the environment will put enormous pressure on the children to pursue a career in science and math even if the children are not interested in these careers.

I feel that even if my daughter decides to pursue a career in math/science after doing K-12 education in America, it will be out of her own interest. There is a huge difference in outcomes when someone pursues a career out of passion as opposed to when someone pursues a career because she was pressured to do so. Research studies have shown that people perform at their peak when they are pursuing something out of their own interest.

And secondly, there is the question of how well-rounded my daughter will be if she does K-12 in the U.S. My daughter will grow up in an environment where creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork etc are encouraged in a non-competitive environment. Research studies have shown that these skills are critical to success as an individual. I also feel that these skills are critical for a successful democratic process in a country. There is a reason why the American democracy is as sophisticated as it is today. If the Indian democracy has to reach this level of sophistication, it is crucial to instill these skills in it’s citizens. Research studies have also shown that a non-competitive environment is crucial for developing competencies at their best. The K-12 education environment in India is extremely competitive which puts a lot of pressure on the children to be the best, which in turn could bring-down their performance.

Apart from these academic skills, I also feel that my daughter would have a much better chance of growing up to be a social-minded, compassionate, confident and responsible individual if she completed her education in USA.

While the documentary “Two million minutes” has made a good attempt to bolster the importance of math and science education in K-12 schools in America, people should not confuse this attempt to mean that the Indian education system is better than US or that US education system is inferior to Indian and Chinese education systems in all respects. All these education systems have a long way to go and success cannot be measured on one dimension alone.

Any thoughts?

An encounter with a government school classroom in India March 23, 2009

When I visited India in August, I had an opportunity to visit a government run school in a village at the outskirts of Bangalore and observe a multi-grade (I and II) classroom in action. I had decided to observe the classroom to get a first hand experience on what kind of pedagogies the teachers use to motivate and help the children learn. As I sat down to observe, I really didn’t have any expectations on what would happen in the classroom. I was pleasantly surprised by a few strategies that the teacher used to teach the children but was very disappointed by many of the happenings in the classroom. In this blog, I describe some of my key observations in this classroom. While this blog is not a reflection of all the government classrooms in the state and the country, I feel that there are significant number of schools where the teachers teach this way or even worse. But I would imagine that there are definitely government school teachers who have developed sophisticated methods of teaching due to their own motivation and interest. I did encounter one such teacher in another government run school, which I’ll describe in my next blog post but this teacher whom I’m going to talk about now was clearly not one of them.

There were about 40 students in the classroom, half of them in each grade I and II. All the children sat on the floor, most of the times even without a floor mat. Everyone wished me good morning. I wished them too and went to the corner of the classroom and sat on the floor. To me it seemed like the most comfortable way to sit but the teacher in the classroom was adamant that I sit on a chair and offered me one.
Although I assured the teacher that I was just here to observe the classroom for my own interest and research purposes, the teacher didn’t seem convinced with my explanation. She perhaps thought that I was a government official who wanted to make sure that the classrooms were running smoothly. Because, all through the next hour and a half, she put in extra effort to make sure that the children appeared to be learning.

Following are some activities that she did with the 2nd graders

She started with a lesson on the place-value of different digits in a number . As she wrote a number on the blackboard, the children were asked to speak out the value in the tens place and the value in the units place (all in Kannada). For example, if the teacher wrote 23, the children said “2 in tens place, 3 in units place 23”. When she wrote 65, they said “6 in tens place, 5 in units place 65”. They had to use the same phrase every time to describe the place value and only change the numbers.
Next the teacher started a role play activity, where the children stood in two different lines. As she announced a two-digit number, the child at the front of the line on the left said the digit in the tens place and the child at the front of the line on the right said the digit in the units place.
The next activity was with the sticks. When the teacher announced a two digit number, the children had to separate the number in the tens place and units place and put that many sticks in two different containers. All through this activity, the teacher worked with each child individually at the level that he/she understood the concept.

Some observations from the above activities were as follows:

I liked the fact that the teacher conducted multiple activities to teach the same concept. Also, in some of the activities, the teacher “tried” to teach every child at his/her own level of understanding of the concept.
The teacher was only interested in showing off that her children knew what she had taught them. She created a very performance oriented atmosphere rather than a learner centered atmosphere.
One of the boys who knew the concepts very well, kept helping the other children in the background to answer the questions that the teacher asked them. As a result of this, even when the children didn’t understand the concept, they answered the questions through the prompts from this boy.
When a child was asked a question in one of the activities, and he/she didn’t know the answer, the teacher shouted the same question to the child two or three times as though that would elicit the correct answer from him/her.
One of the children seemed very depressed and wouldn’t answer the teacher’s question. The teacher, instead of finding a way to engage her, shouted at her and started to work with another child.
Although it appeared as though the teacher was teaching the concept through many different activities, finally there was a lot of rote learning that was incorporated even into these activities. For example, the children had to use the same phrases each time, to describe the place value of the digits – i.e “2 in tens place, 3 in units place 23”. It was not clear whether the children understood what this phrase really meant. For example, After chanting this phrase, when some of the children were asked a question “What is in the tens place?”, the children couldn’t answer it.
Some activities were not well thought out. For example, in the activity with the sticks, the children could easily confuse the number of sticks to represent the whole two digit number. For example, for number 23, they can confuse 5 sticks to represent the number 23.
When the teacher was working with one kid individually, many of the other kids seemed quite disengaged with the activity.

After the work with the II graders, the teacher decided to work with the I graders. In order to keep the II graders engaged during that time, she asked her favorite II grader (“the boy who knew all the answers”) to lead the class. She asked him to tell a two digit number to each child and he/she had to write the number on the blackboard. After that, the child had to say the place value of each digit.

The teacher then started to work with the I graders. She had the children sit in a circle. The idea was to work with each child individually at the level that he/she understood numbers, while the other children observed.
First she called out a few children one by one and had them place 1 to 10 in the correct order.
She then asked a few children as to which number is greater than which?
She had a few children place the numbers in the reverse order.
She then had a few children do this activity – place any number between 1 to 10 in the middle. She then asked the child to place the number that comes before and after 3 in their correct spots.
The teacher had some of the children do 1 digit addition.

Following were some of my observations during these activities with the I graders:
Like with the II graders, the teacher shouted at the children if they were not able to get the answer, as though that would help them get the answer immediately.
One of the children was intentionally left out of the activity. Other children kept saying that he hasn’t had a turn but the teacher seemed to intentionally ignore their pleas.This led me to think that the teacher left him out because the child may not have been able to shown any progress. Then the child himself requested that he wanted to do the activity. The teacher then facilitated an activity for him.
The teachers worked with the children on the activities with the assumption that all children understood the concepts at the level that she thought they understood them. But it was clear that their learning was very fragile because they required a lot of prompting and help by the teacher. In some cases, the teacher herself walked the child through each of the steps of the activity, in effect performing the whole activity for the child. This led to a situation where the child thought that he/she had accomplished the activity when in truth it was the teacher who had done the activity for him/her. This could lead to false confidence in them.

General observation: It is not that the children are not motivated to learn or don’t enjoy learning. For, when the teacher shifted from math to nursery rhymes, the children suddenly cheered up. Almost all the children including I and II graders sang the rhymes happily with full body actions. But again, the nursery rhyme activity was all rote learning based. It is important to remember that the children didn’t know how to speak english but they sang the nursery rhymes quite well. Many of the body actions didn’t match the words. Also many words were not pronounced correctly. But they did have fun!

These observations raised many questions within me:
Is it that rote learning has become a way of life for these children? Is it that they have begun to implicitly assume that they really don’t need to “understand” the concept but all they need to do is to appear to understand the concept? This is what a performance centered environment (as opposed to a learning centered environment) leads to. How do we change a teaching culture that has remained for decades, which doesn’t encourage the children to think on their own? How do we change a whole system of education that is based on a culture of rote learning and examinations?

Prema Clarke, a prominent researcher in the field of education offers many strategies to combat this culture in her book “Teaching and Learning: Culture of Pedagogy”. While nationally, several innovative policies and strategies are being put in place to improve the pedagogies of teachers, she notes that “None of the curriculum documents consider the educational ground reality. There is a huge disconnect between prescriptive accounts of good education and the system’s capacities to realize such goals.” From my observations in the government school classroom, I could make a lot of connections with what Clarke talks about. I could clearly see many of the implicit cultural models of the teachers that she talks about in her book. Following are some examples of these connections that I saw.
the teacher’s behavior as an authority figure in the classroom,
teachers’ excessive focus on rightness of the answer as opposed to a focus on exploring the misconceptions of the students (eg: she shouted at the children when they didn’t give the children when they didn’t give the correnct answer),
the teacher giving excessive freedom to the “boy who knew all the answers” to prompt the other children with the answers without any concern for whether other children learnt the concept or not.
the teacher’s focus on imparting knowledge (through rote learning) rather than skills, and the performance oriented atmosphere in the classroom which reflects the constant focus on the examinations in India

Following is what Prema Clarke recommends to improve the teaching in the classrooms:

Teacher training today is viewed as a way to impart technical skill only. It is not viewed from the behaviorist angle which should be incorporated into teacher training. Clarke argues that teacher training should take into account the teachers’ implicit cultural models and the broader cultural framework.
She talks about the need to focus on teacher thinking research and the importance of addressing the beliefs that underlie teachers’ world views. She feels that the training in technical skills is less effective if the underlying beliefs and world views that construct these skills are not understood and developed.
For what really matters is that “the children learn” and not “appear that they have learned”!!

Towards better education March 23, 2008

A question, I’m sure many of us have asked ourselves is “Should children’s education be merely about imparting knowledge or should the children be taught essential skills including how to acquire knowledge?”.
During the 20th century, it was common practice for schools (at least in India) to follow a didactic method of teaching, which usually meant that the children were expected to sit in a classroom listening to teachers. They were expected to absorb the information/knowledge that the teacher taught and reproduce them in the exams. The exams mainly tested the students on how well they had “accumulated” the knowledge imparted by the teachers and the textbooks. Even my own schooling during the 20th century was this way.
But as I entered the workplace of the 21st century, I found myself lacking many skills that were needed to succeed in the workplace. I needed to think critically about issues, solve problems creatively, articulate my thoughts well and so on. Luckily my parents had taught me how to persevere. This allowed me to work hard and learn the skills that were needed to succeed in the workplace. But I’ve always wondered, what if I had an opportunity to acquire these skills during my school years instead of later on during my work life. Isn’t it one of the jobs of the schools to prepare children to be successful in the work place?
A couple of other important things that I wish that my schooling had taught me are life skills and how to respond to societal issues. My schooling absolutely didn’t prepare me to strike a good work-life balance. All that was important during my schooling years was passing exams which gave me the notion that doing well in the exams was the only thing needed to do well in life. Likewise, my schooling didn’t help me understand the issues in the society around me and how I can play a positive role in solving these issues. I feel that there was an excessive focus on “me” and my personal benefit.
This brings us to the question whether the schools today are addressing these issues? With the advent of new-age technologies, it is easy to search for new information/knowledge at the wink of an eye. Hence, a person who has merely accumulated information/knowledge in the schools is pretty much obsolete. Children need to be taught higher order skills as mentioned in the previous paragraphs. Similarly, with the modern day stresses, attaining a decent work-life balance is one of the most important things, as is caring for the society and the environment. Even with the ever increasing awareness of all these issues, why is rote learning so prevalent in schools (at least in India)? Why are only a handful of schools paying importance to the higher order skills that need to be taught? Why are we not learning from the wide range of issues that we face today as a society and seeking to educating our children to face these issues in a meaningful way? What will it take to break this cycle of ignorance on our part?

Some books to read August 5, 2007

Following are a set of books that I have read/referred to in the past which have helped me to sharpen my sensitivity to childrens’ learning needs and their cognitive development.

Coloring Outside the Lines: Raising a smarter kid by breaking all the rules, Roger Schank
This was the first book I every read on the field of education, back when I was contemplating changing my career to this field – well before even my daughter was born. It helped me to break away from the traditional mode of thinking about schools and education. He starts the book with the sentence – “I am writing this book because I’m horrified by what schools are doing to children”. His emphasis on developing the “life-long passion for learning” in children and what parents and teachers can do to develop it, has lived with me through this day as I struggle to be a good parent for my daughter. He gives very practical tips about how educational theory can be applied to “personal, everyday situations”.

Smart Schools: Better Thinking and Learning for Every Child, David Perkins
I read this book for one of my courses at Harvard and it introduced me to what is important to teach children and some of the methods of teaching them. This book is about how we should move away from teaching “fragile knowledge” and move towards teaching crucial skills like critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, meta-cognition and so on. For, if we teach children these skills, not only will robust knowledge be automatically developed, but skills crucial to navigating this world and making a difference in it will become ingrained in their brains.
Parents who are not familiar with the field of education may find some of the language in this book somewhat “deep”. But overall this book is quite easy to read and I would say that it is good for us parents to really become familiar with this “deep” language in order to understand our children and their learning, better.

How children learn, John Holt
How children fail, John Holt
I have read only parts of these two books, but they are probably the most down-to-earth books that parents can read to understand their children’s cognitive development. In fact, many of the instances that Holt describes in this book are related to his parenting.

Overall, I would say that all these books drive home the message again and again, that it is not knowledge and facts that we should teach our children, but it is the skills to acquire this knowledge, think critically, problem solve, be creative and so on. And that they should be done in a way that they develop a life long passion for learning and NOT for rewards.