An important issue that has plagued the Indian sub-continent is that of education and more importantly primary education. Since past few months, my weekends are usually occupied in teaching English classes to underprivileged children from 5th grade at a government primary school. As an Agile coach and a practitioner I was drawn towards unifying the concepts of Agile to help increase the quality of education.
As a teacher, I was given a set of high level goal by the school administrator that needs to be accomplished every quarter. My goals for the first quarter were :
- > Kids should be able to identify basic words
- > Form short sentences.
- > Converse reasonably in English
I started with the traditional chalk and blackboard style of teaching focusing on the spellings, grammar, sentences, reading and so on. In initial few sessions, I quickly realized that it took too long for the kids to understand and so was not yielding the desired results. Some of the problems were like
- > Too much focus on semantics and grammar
- > Kids not opening up in the class room
- > Only able to read words but not talk or frame sentences
This is where I had to reflect and consider course correction in my style of teaching and Agile came to my rescue. This is a talk which highlights how Agile techniques were applied in teaching kids effectively.
