SESSION - PROJECT BASED TEACHING

(JANUARY 2020 15, 2020)

“You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”

—Kahlil Gibran

GDGPS at all times believes in building a fraternity of teachers, mentors and facilitators who are empowered and at the same time, competent and passionate enough to inspire their students. In order to help the faculty members to augment their professional identity and acumen, the school conducts a series of Faculty Training Workshops regularly. One such engaging session was held on 15 January, 2020 for the Middle and Senior Wing teachers where the resource person was                Dr Rachel Sheffield. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at Curtin University, and is a passionate science educator. Her research interests are STEM education, robotics, digital professional portfolios. She is a passionate advocate for STEM education. She has won several Faculty, University and National Awards for teaching Excellence and was awarded an Executive Endeavour Fellowship in 2016. She was accompanied by another seasoned academician with nearly three decades of teaching and research experience, Dr. Rekha Koul. She is the Dean International, Faculty of Humanities and Associate Professor at STEM Research Group, School of Economics, Curtin University, Australia.

Through an extremely engaging workshop, Dr. Rachel demonstrated several intriguingly called projects such as Wigglebot, Pipeline etc which would help the children to overcome their Science and Math phobia. She was full of high praise when she realized that GDGPS has always been providing ‘hands on’ and ‘minds on’ training to its students. Also the school is well in sync with the global educational trends whereby it is steadily equipping the young learners with the 4Cs of the 21st century.

She shared some of her interesting experiences and projects carried out in Australia in which the students were assigned STEM projects which sought to develop Critical thinking, Creative, Collaborative and Communicative skills in them.  She further revealed details of a number of technologies and teaching practices that can support teachers to help their students to develop not only their STEM concept knowledge but also acquire Transversal Competencies (problem solving, critical and creative thinking, communication and collaboration).

It was a positive reinforcement of all that the teachers are already delivering to their students as well as a fruitful session in which they learnt new tools, websites and concepts to make their students Stem-philic.