Learning is a comprehensive process. It requires persistent efforts on the part of an educator to allow learners to discover themselves and the world around them. The educators must provide their learners with a variety of experiences that create opportunities to learn from their own activities and by observing the activities of the fellow students.
Today, the role of a teacher has changed, instead of following the traditional Teacher-Centered approach educational institutions, schools, and academies have shifted their focus to the other side of the coin called the “Child-Centered” approach. The lecture method of teaching, which rarely gives students the opportunities to express their ideas, thoughts, and perspectives on the topic, has been replaced by a lot more interactive and engaging teaching methods. For example, Group Discussion.
Hakaba Academy advocates a “blended learning” approach that integrates the quality of both “Teacher-Centered” and “Child-Centered” approaches and avoids their drawbacks.
Thus, we give plenty of opportunities to our learners to Discover. Learn and Succeed in their respective courses.
We have divided our learning process into 3 steps to make the entire process of learning efficient, properly managed, and result-oriented. These three steps are:
The first step of our learning process is “Discover”.Here we focus on knowing the learners(traits and limitations), Helping learners to know themselves, and K knowing the beautiful world around them.
i.) Knowing the Learners Interests, Passion, Skills, Strengths and Weaknesses
The first step of the process is discovery. By discovery, we mean that we spent our time designing and using various tools to know the skills, talents, interests, and limitations of students. Some of the tools we use to achieve this objective are conducting the assessment and entrance tests, asking students to fill the questionnaire to express their perspectives, likes, and dislikes about the complete teaching-learning process.
We don’t restrict this information only up to us. Rather, we let our students know themselves. Our educational counselor and teachers discuss the performance of students individually to let them know their strengths and weaknesses. This way, they can focus more on the areas where they need improvement.
The last step of the ‘Discover’ phase is planning, organizing, implementing, directing, and controlling the plethora of both online and offline activities. To help the students to discover the world around them. Students get full freedom to raise their voice, make their choice, and engage in the process.
This is the widest phase of our learning process. We give each student enough opportunities to learn separately as well in groups, to ensure maximum success of the entire teaching-learning process. Following are important features of the teaching-learning process.
In simple words, after conducting the screening test and discovering each learner’s unique traits, skills, and needs. We make a Personal Profile of each student. Since every student has a unique set of skills we design a personalized study plan for each student to focus on the areas of weakness that require immediate intervention.
Next, we bring the plan into reality by working according to the study plan. Personalized learning includes lectures, assignments, doubt clearance sessions, additional sessions on the topics that need more attention, and focusing on specific goals to enhance personalized learning.
Collaborative learning is a technique that develops in the students the qualities such as cooperation, coordination, teamwork, leadership, unity, patience, problem-solving, and raising the voice.
Following the “Child-Centered” approach, collaborative learning as the name suggest takes place in small groups. A teacher often divides the students into teams to encourage participation, competitiveness, and the ability to work under pressure.
Collaborative learning can be promoted by a variety of learning activities such as group discussion, group assignments, model-making, quizzes, presentations, and surveys.
In this method, the teacher acts just as a facilitator. He/She also manages and directs the activities to ensure that each student gets a fair chance of learning and demonstrating what they have learned before the class.
Learning by doing an effective method of teaching coined by The American philosopher, John Dewey. This method is based on notions that “students learn more when they actually do the activity” and “children construct their own knowledge” This approach challenged the traditional notion that learning happens through lectures and rote memorization.
Educational intervention based on the notion of “learning by doing” includes different activities such as researching the topic on the internet, writing assignments, making models, doing surveys, writing a report on the findings, and many more.
This technique of teaching works because it creates several opportunities for students to engage with the material, objects, people, and the world around them to generate the knowledge themselves, bit-by-bit, chord-by-chord.
In today’s world, technology is an unalienated component of every field. Whether it’s commerce, health, manufacturing, engineering, IT, or anything else. We cannot separate technology from daily activities. How can education remains segregated?
The world today requires individuals who are not only the expert in their respective field but also techno-savvy. Considering the present and the future needs, Hakaba Academy incorporates Information Communication and Technology with the teaching-learning process to prepare our students for the digital future.
We allow, invite and encourage our students to use free web tools. They are free to access the Knowledge Zone, use the internet for learning and research, and for sharing information.
This helps the students to become eager for knowing the unknown, become active participants, learn research skills, get friendly with the technology and prepare themselves for future challenges.
Lastly, we evaluate the effectiveness of the entire teaching-learning process to discover whether we have successfully achieved our objectives or not. We conduct various assessments, tests, and observations to trace the changes that occurred in the performance of individual students as well as the entire class over time.
The evaluation helps us to highlight the areas that need improvements for the individual student, for the class as well as for the entire academy as a whole. Thus by following the principles- DISCOVER, LEARN, AND SUCCEED we are striving to prepare our students for the future.