CSpathshala Community of Teachers – a platform for collaborative learning

CSpathshala’s  primary goal is  to create a strong teachers community in India which with the necessary support from the academia, industry and government departments would help address the issues involved in creating, implementing and evaluating a CS curriculum for schools. The community would not only provide a platform for learning through experience sharing  but also get answers to their day to day problems.

We at CSpathshala have been working towards building a Community of teachers. Attempts have been made to enable  teachers’ engagement and experience sharing  through various platforms :

• Whatsapp groups (most popular)
• Share your story series
• Experience sharing during training workshops
• Feedback calls
• Forum and Blog posts

Start with stories

Teachers along with their experiences have also shared various challenges they faced. Most common ones, “Why pen and paper activities?” and “Why Maths?” in the computer period being asked, both by students and parents. The teachers also shared their experiments with creative and adaptive implementation of the lessons.  They created worksheets in Word for the lessons so that the “Worksheets could be taken up as a lab activity” to address the problem of computer period = practicals in the lab!

The sharing of the personal stories from teachers across the country paved the way for the other teachers to overcome these ever-changing obstacles in daily teaching.

Teachers as Mentors

Some teachers both in urban and rural have played a lead role on mentoring their local community of teachers by providing handholding   support in implementation and also sharing the approach of teaching a lesson. As part of the pilot implementation in Sabarkantha District , Gujarat the teachers who have no computing background were provided a 2 day training on the CSpathshala curriculum. With no dedicated period or teachers for computers these teachers went ahead with implementing the curriculum. What was interesting was that Miteshbhai Pandya, from Ambaji na Muvada School, Talod, first one in the taluka to implement the curriculum went on to guide the rest of school teachers. In Pune and Nagpur teachers have conducted teachers training sessions.

Be part of a learning

We have received evidence based feedback on how the activity based approach coupled with the teachers training programs have equipped the them to implement the curriculum. Across the country, teachers have also shared some of the impact on the children which have been shared through our blog.

E.g. all the children are able to find all the words in a grid using a systematic approach of finding words moving on to:

• “A Rainy Day no longer means being cooped inside the classroom with the teachers struggling to keep the class engaged. Instead it means fun and games with the numerous puzzles and activities – all thanks to CSpathshala which has got children interested in solving word puzzles and Sudoku.”
• Teachers created a word grid that has animals and after the students find the animals they are required to further categorize them into domestic, wild and marine animals
• A crossword designed by the teachers has clues for across and down to guide the children to look for the words.

Sharing stories does more than entertain, it enables learning and helps creates bonds, sustains an interest and in turn become the building blocks of a community. It provides an opportunity to the larger audience to appreciate the efforts of the teachers and the impact CSpathshala  curriculum has had on the learning of the students.

CSpathshala community of teachers provides not only a platform to contribute but plays a larger role community learning through a collaborative effort!