Training Teachers To Teach 21st Century Students

Leesha Tirodkar Mar 15, 2019

In today’s age of technology and the Internet, children are exposed to a wide range of learning platforms. This has also drastically impacted the way students absorb information, learn and interact daily.

In a world where opinions are shared instantaneously, it is easier to store information on the cloud rather than to remember it. With this in mind, there remains one glaring fact – the learning habits of students are constantly changing and evolving. Today’s children are able to absorb information faster than ever before.

The most pressing question today for schools is to ensure that the teaching methods adopted by their teachers stays effective and relevant to the ever-changing needs of the 21st century classroom. The answer is fairly simple: The rise of the 21st century student demands the growth of the 21st century educator. Schools can address this through - effectively and continuously educating & training their teachers.

At The Scholar High School, we understand that our educators have a huge responsibility in shaping every child’s future. With the rise of new learning platforms and techniques, we realize that it is not enough to update our teachers just about modern technology or the effects of social media.

Through the course of the 58 years the school has been imparting education, the leadership’s biggest learning has been that teaching degrees are not enough to keep our teachers up to date with today’s best education practices. In order to live by Scholar’s belief that each child’s mind and learning capacity is unique, we create and invest in teacher training sessions that are thought provoking and push our teachers to constantly reinvent themselves. Having equipped our teachers with technological resources tools (iPads and more), we also are constantly striving towards empowering teachers to use these resources to help students love and enjoy learning through Audio Visual Projects, Educational Games and more. We at The Scholar High School understand the generation gap and strive to bridge this through teacher training.

The Training Workshops the school has conducted covers a wide range of areas from Innovative Teaching Methods to Classroom Management to Current affairs that impact our world socially. Training our teachers to connect curriculum to current events, not only helps the student absorb and learn better but also helps them understand the real world at an early age. Our teachers are encouraged to engage students through creative and innovative teaching practices. These training programs focus on sensitizing Scholar teachers to the fact that every child has a unique personality and has a variety of emotional needs. We strive to ensure these practices are implemented through lesson observations and teacher evaluations. Our teachers are trained to use a future oriented approach so that they teach our students for brighter tomorrow.

The Scholar High School prides itself in having gone a step further by linking our teacher training sessions to teacher performance in the classroom. The goal is that each teacher is aware of his or her areas of improvement and learns from it. The learning every teacher takes from the trainings ultimately reflects in their lessons and directly helps every student.

The school’s trustee, Ms. Leesha Tirodkar says, “Over the past year we focused on our educator’s growth by having a variety of training days conducted both by in house and outside professionals to empower our staff. Most of our teachers have clocked at least 15-18 additional hours of training in this academic year itself. As our end of year educator development strategy, in March we are conducting personalized teacher training by identifying learning needs specific to each teacher. We are pushing our teachers to grow individually so that they can do the same for our students.”