Workshop on Identifying Children with Learning Differences

The second workshop on preparation for handling children with special needs was conducted by Parwarish Institute of Parenting at the GIIS Noida campus in March 2015, and teachers from other GIIS India campuses joined through video conference. Taking forward the concept of ‘No Limits’ from the previous session, the focus of the second workshop was towards implementing the first ground rules of helping students build self-confidence and self-esteem to achieve a seemingly difficult task.

After a brief discussion on the learning gaps that the teachers faced in implementing the ‘No limits’ concept in the classroom, the workshop instructor, Mr. Sushant Kalra provided various cues to the teachers to plan short modules to help address the special needs of their students. A few simple activities that emerged from the session are:

Remove Tags
We tend to form opinions about others by observing their external behaviour, ‘Tagging’ happens by teachers, friends and even the child himself. It is a natural tendency to form judgement about people and every judgement will be a ‘tag’. In order to have a fresh perspective, the teachers need to start on a clean slate without any feedback of any kid from the previous year’s teacher to avoid any bias. They need to identify all the tags for each child and write them down. Then the teacher needs to start the process of ‘un-tagging’ and tell the child, “you are No-Limit”; the child has limitless potential!

‘I can’ Activity
At the beginning of the session, every teacher will ask the students in her class to write down all that they ‘can’t do’ on small chits of papers and the teacher collects all the small chits and takes them to the field and burns them and says, “all that you feel that you can’t do are gone. Now all that you have with you is You Can”. The child learns that he or she can do and will make positive attempts towards achieving his or her goals.

Mostly, there is a practice of awarding stars, patting the back etc. as typical rewards for the performer. By making him participate, the performance may improve but not necessarily self-confidence. Performance is one area that can be clearly measured; therefore, evaluating a child is easier for the teacher. Correlation between performance, self-confidence and self-esteem needs to be established in the mind of the teacher. The important task here is not to benchmark the child on the basis achievement or accolades but to take the approach of building self-esteem and confidence in the child.

Pearl Fishing
The teacher could start with writing down the positive attributes like self-confident, happy, friendly, independent etc. for each student in her class on the basis what the teacher may want to see in each one of them, on a clean sheet of paper. This would help her combat any preconceived notion that she may have about any child. Also, as human beings we tend to form quick judgement basis a few visible traits and pearl fishing indeed helps in building an attitude for teaching and learning.

Developing a Connection
The next exercise for the teacher would be to write the names of her students on a sheet of paper, and ask herself, “am I connected?” Then, she picks two or three kids at a time and starts working on them. Once the connection is established, it becomes easier for the teachers to address issues with children and she will be able to extract more positive and forthcoming response from the children. The students will be more receptive to attend remedial classes or will be disposed to wherever the teacher wishes to support them.

The teachers were advised to implement in the annual plan, ways of helping students build their self-confidence and eventually start at a rudimentary level of establishing the fact that there is indeed no limit to what a child can do.