Skip to main content

Teaching and Learning – is there a trick?

One of the big mistakes that we as parents and teachers often make, and that could stifle the mental development of our children, is to treat them as just small adults! In fact, it is this attitude of grown-ups that could be leading our next generation to become stereotyped conformists rather than original thinkers and innovators. And if we intend to drive home health messages and inculcate healthy habits we need to tailor our efforts to their cognitive potential.

That children indeed think and discover the world differently was first noticed by a Swiss scientist Jean Piaget in the early 20th century. He studied his own three children grow and was intrigued by how they behaved, played games and learnt at different ages.

With further observations and experiments, he propounded the theory of ‘cognitive development’, placed great importance on the education of children and is hailed even today, 30 years after his death, as a pioneer of the constructive theory of knowing. He noticed that logic and abstract thinking had no place in the first 3 stages of a child’s development that spanned from infancy to age 11. Therefore trying to explain concepts such as“ healthy living increaseslife-expectancy….” to them would be wasteful and boring.

Small children, aged 2 and 7, like to discovering the world through their senses and by their rapidly developing motor skills. Colourful toys, tasty food and lots of action, supplemented by instructions from parents, teachers and peers make the perfect recipe for their learning. They cannot ‘imagine’ invisible germs on their dirty hands for example, unless depicted by an animated cartoon.

Younger kids will wash their hands before meals only because “mother told me to”. But as they grow to 10 they love participating in large active group exercises of hand-washing, more as a fun game, that can then be turned into a regular habit through regular reinforcement by superiors.

When dealing with older children, the techniques need to be different, as imagination and logic start making their appearance between ages 11 and 16. Posters, games and quizzes work best but debates, which require logic, still remain beyond the fringes of their grasp.

But once logic and abstract thinking get into their heads, students between 11 and 16 begin to engage passionately in debates and discussions! The best way to get these youngsters to learn (let us avoid the word ‘teach’) is to them a contentious topic for debate around the chosen subject. As they search and discover evidence, articulate their opinions with conviction, get rebutted and challenged by the logic of their opponents, they begin a new journey of exploring the world with their newly acquired cognitive skills.  They learn better this way than what textbooks or teachers can teach them.


Promoting healthy habits in children is therefore not an easy job of simply sermonizing “do’s and don’ts”. HOPE Initiative has emerged as a “Centre of Excellence” for exploring such innovative ways to reach out to students.

As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) dated 29th December, 2013.

Comments

  1. Thanks for Great Article, for sharing content and such nice information for me. I hope you will share some more content about. Please keep sharing!
    Dandy Design

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Doctor’s Dress

The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating  murmurs  of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives.  This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. The white coat scares children too.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to...

Questions from a Doctor’s Life

There is hardly any person in Uttar Pradesh who has not heard of Dr D K Chhabra, a senior neurosurgeon, who died recently. Over the decades his expertise, pragmatic advice and popularity had broken the shackles of his narrow surgical field coming to be known as a “brain-specialist”and a genuine adviser for all health problems. I got to know him in 1987 when I joined the upcoming Sanjay Gandhi PG Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGI) in Lucknow as a young member of the faculty in Gastroenterology. He had moved from his alma mater the KG Medical College where he is still regarded as a legend. An omnipresent bachelor doctor living in the duty room readily available to help anybody anytime.He was tasked to heading and developing Neurosciences at SGPGI. He had an eye for detail and was tasked additionally by the director to set up not just his department, but the whole hospital, the building, equipment and the campus. DKC was a tall and handsome man who spoke little. But when he did inl...