Mita Mukherjee
In tune with the new pedagogical and curricular structuring recommended for preschool education in the New Education Policy (NEP) 2020, several institutions have made parents involvement compulsory in day to day classroom activities of three to five-year four year old students.
With the NEP emphasizing that parents must play a vital role in the child’s learning process, the schools are using technology enabled teaching methods in which students are taught each and every lesson through digital platforms in the classroom along with normal physical teaching.
For example, if a teacher teaches a particular rhyme in a class, she or he would use a certain method to ensure students understand what is being taught to them. Once the physical teaching is complete, using text books or worksheets, the teacher would again repeat the same on the digital platform.
The digital lessons can be accessed by parents which makes it easy for them to get a clear understanding of exactly how and what their words had been taught during the classroom teaching. It also gives parents the idea how they should guide their children to learn and revise the topics at home without the guidance of teachers.
Don Bosco School Bandel in West Bengal is one institution which has recently started the new model and noticed “remarkable improvement” in parents’ involvement in the teaching learning system, Father Siby, the principal of the school said.
“Parents’ involvement in their child’s learning process has improved remarkably after we adopted the new method. Children are learning faster and parents are showing more interest in their wards’ progress.
A section of parents would often not send their children to school regularly for petty reasons. This number has gone down. The new system has helped the kids in other ways too. They are finding the classroom teaching more interesting and understanding the lessons better,”
Father Siby told EducationWorld. Under the new 5+ 3 + 3 + 4 structure recommended in NEP, preschool education has been made compulsory and students are supposed to be covered under the formal education system from the age of three.
Don Bosco School, Bandel where the entry cut-off was six years (Class 1) in the 10 + 2, structure has introduced a new preschool unit from the current 2023 academic session to align with the recommendation of the NEP. The school’s preschool unit has started with five year old students and it will gradually open classes for four and three-year old kids shortly, the principal said.
Don Bosco School Bandel has partnered with Nalanda Learning for providing the entire academic support to align with the NEP format. Nalanda Learning is providing the daily lesson plans, the mobile App for parents and teachers and it has also framed the training programmes for teachers to equip them with the new system.
One of the most vital recommendations of the NEP is that parents should be considered as equal partners in the teaching learning process. Use of technology for teaching toddlers is another important recommendation of the NEP.
“Bearing these two features in mind we have blended the physical classroom teaching with digital teaching in the day to day teaching learning process. We are happy that the schools which have adopted our methodology have seen improvement in the learning outcome to a considerable extent,” Tamal Mukherjee, director of Nalanda Learning said.
Surendra Kumar Agarwal, trustee of Springfields Academy said he has been using the same concept for classes of three-year, four-year and five-year old students and the results are “extremely good.”
Several schools located across Bengal, Jharkhand, Punjab and other parts of the country have started using the concept, Mukherjee said.
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