The CSPathshala team organised a feedback session for teachers and content creators on 24th Sept 2016. CSPathshala is an education initiative to promote teaching computing as a science in school.
Teachers provide feedback on a regular basis regarding course material, using google forms. Mentors also collect feedback through phone calls and face to face meetings. Feedback gathered earlier indicated that 85% of the times the teachers found the syllabus different from the earlier one, 90% of times they faced no difficulty in teaching the syllabus about, 75% of times the students found the lessons interesting as well as easy to understand and 90% of the lessons took more than 30 min to complete.
However, the objective of this session was to enable a direct face to face interaction between teachers and content creators. This would help content creators to understand what worked and what could be improved when the curriculum designed by CSPathshala was taught in the schools. 45 people including content creators, mentors and 24 teachers from 12 schools attended the session.
Vikhe Patil Memorial School very graciously hosted this session. The session was opened by Mrs. Kiran Jadhav, Principal of VPMS.
The teachers provided ample feedback regarding the content and quality of the lessons provided by CSPathshala. To begin with, Mrudula Athale from Vikhe Patil school, Mugdha Joshi and Jyoti Wakhare from Kalmadi Shamrao Primary School and Afreen Usmani from City Pride School Nigadi shared their thoughts. This was followed by an interactive session for all the participants.
The teachers commented that overall the material was very useful, interesting and students enjoyed it a lot. Few schools where the duration of each class is 30 mins, it was difficult to complete the material in one session. Grade 1 and 2 students find it difficult to understand some words and some complex instructions. It would help to use examples that the children can relate to. The grade 5 students greatly enjoyed the concept of ‘aambot’ and the related course material.
CSPathshala initiative co-leader, Venkatesh R very lucidly explained the objective of teaching computing in schools. He stressed the fact that we would focus on teaching computing techniques, the tools to implement those could be any. Problem solving capability is very different from just being able to use the computer and data entry tools. CSPathshala is looking at developing thinking capabilities in students. He encouraged the teachers to participate actively in the process as they are the most important link in the process of the students learning computational skills.
CSPathshala volunteers attended classrooms in Orchid School and Kalmadi Shamrao school; an important step towards better understanding how teaching happens in schools. The team presented their observations to the content creators team. In a parallel session for the teachers, they were walked through the process of how they could modify lessons from CSPathshala for their requirement. The teachers can share these lessons with CSPathshala team. After review, the modified lessons can be available for download with other CSPathshala material. The work of the teachers can thus benefit a larger audience.
The session was extremely fruitful as many people came to know facts they were not aware of earlier.
– Arati Halbe, Lead CSpathshala Implementation team
