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From the kitchen to the classroom A mother is busy cooking dinner, glancing occasionally at her daughter, who’s attending an online tutoring session at the dining table. The tutor’s voice fills the room with questions like “Isn’t it?”, “Okay?”, “Are you clear?”. The daughter nods, says “yes,” and moves on to the next point. From […]

I just finished a class with Andrea and am feeling great about it. I meticulously prepared and spent extra time explaining concepts to ensure Andrea understood everything. When you ask me how the class went, I enthusiastically say, “It was excellent!” I truly believe it was a job well done. But then, you run into […]

Great teachers want to make a lasting impression on their students. Teachers generally feel they come up short in terms of the time to cover the topics as per syllabus. They are under tremendous pressure to “cover the material”. The only way teachers could expand the depth and breadth of their students’ learning is by […]

How many teachers have never come across situations where their students asked them to explain certain concepts or problems again, because they had not understood it well? Good teachers have tremendous patience. They will be happy to explain the concept or topics discussed any number of times so that their students get all their questions […]

Who doesn’t love a good story?   Once upon a time, there was a great teacher. Whenever she was teaching, her students’ eyes and ears were glued to her. When these children went home, many of them used to share a lot of what they discussed in her class, with their parents. The parents wondered […]

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Researches on the benefits of frequent testing and feedback explain that in the history of the study of teaching and learning, the role of feedback has been equally important as the process of teaching. It is so important that it provides students with information on what exactly they did well, what may still need improvement, […]

Feedback is a verbal, written, or a gestural response regarding a student’s academic standing or behaviour with an intention to improve his/her performance. The power of feedback is so strong that the process should be a positive or at least a neutral learning experience for the student. On the other hand, a negative feedback discourages […]

Learning to drive a bike wants you to remember multiple steps: balancing, speeding up, stopping, etc. Each of these skills requires a bit of reflection and a mixture of many small complex tasks. The skill of teaching is more complex and is a symmetrical combination of many small and repetitive tasks. Reflective teaching helps you […]

Teachers generally plan and execute lessons with great care. Even the most carefully planned and executed lessons may turn ineffective and end in failure. Being busy, most of the teachers simply ignore those challenging or unsuccessful situations. Next time, or in the following year, these uncomfortable experiences and displeasing emotions will fade out from their […]

The word, ‘coherence’ is defined in two ways: one, ‘the quality of being logically consistent’ while the other refers to the ‘quality of forming a unified structure’. In other words, ‘coherence’ is the situation when the parts of something fit together in a natural or logical way with a clear relationship between parts, especially in […]

Since the beginning of the new millennium we have been witnessing a dramatic growth in the number of students taking online tutoring and therefore using technology as a tool to enhance their learning. They can now master a foreign language or complete a whole subject of study without leaving the comfort of their study room […]

Tom, a student in the primary class, is very reluctant to eat anything other than chocolates or candies. Feeding him has become a tiresome task for his parents. One day, after spending almost half an hour to make him eat a dish of vegetables, his mother told him. “If you eat your vegetables you can […]

“Judge: The charge here is the theft of frozen chickens. Are you the defendant? Defendant: No, sir, I’m the guy who stole the chickens.” This is a quote taken directly from actual court records. The accused did not understand the jargon, ‘defendant’, used by the judge. This is an example of taking your audience to […]

In the debates on measuring student learning outcomes, we often hear critics repeatedly say “you can’t fatten a cow by weighing him all the time,” It simply means you cannot truly educate students by spending all the time preparing them for testing. But, Peter Drucker, one of the most widely known thinkers on management, famously […]

“Oh! Only 30 more seconds left. Do you have any doubts?” Tutor asked. The student was about to say something and the class ended all of a sudden. This is something that happens in some of our classes. Such a situation will bring a chaotic end to the class. Here the tutor is not capitalizing […]

We are heading fast towards a world of mobile supercomputers, intelligent robots, driver-less cars, Neuro-technological brain enhancements, genome editing…..and many more. Signals of these changes are found all around us and it is happening at exponential speed. We are at the threshold of a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and […]

Have you ever been to a lecture-style class where you listened to the information provided by the teacher but found it difficult to learn it? Perhaps there were too many facts to absorb or you were simply bored by it and not motivated to learn. What if instead you were in a class where you […]

Spatial intelligence or spatial reasoning is the ability to imagine or visualize in our mind the positions of objects, their shapes, their spatial relations to one another and the movement they make to form new spatial relations. This is one of the nine intelligences in the Theory of Multiple Intelligences proposed by American psychologist Howard […]

One day, Edward Murphy, an engineer working on a project at Edwards Air Force Base, found that one of his junior technicians made a technical error and made a sarcastic comment, “If there is any way to do it wrong, he will find it.” Another engineer, Dr. John Paul Stapp, who was also involved with […]

Dear Tutors Do you occasionally think of and question some of your behaviours and actions in your classroom and wonder how you could have handled a situation better? But, the truth is that we all make mistakes. Even the best teachers make mistakes now and then. The surprising fact is that it is generally the […]

Going back to our school days, we all had that teacher who speaks in a monotonous voice and reads aloud from the textbook. Now, the opportunity has come to all of us to not be that teacher. Have you ever come across moments, recognising that flash of interest in the eyes of your students, even […]

You had planned and prepared a session for one hour, but in between the student asked many questions and the whole lesson plan got disturbed. Unfortunately, you were not ready with a backup plan. Exactly the opposite of this also might happen. In such a situation, not your academic skills, but adaptability which is an […]

“We are not necessarily thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think,” says Antonio Damasio, an American Neuroscientist and Professor. As far as teachers are concerned, this statement is appropriate and true. All of us have fond memories of our teachers and remember those who have made an impact on our lives. Some teachers are […]

“Dreams are not those which come while we are sleeping, but dreams are those when you don’t sleep before fulfilling them.” This is one of the best remembered quotes of a man who dreamed and whose passion in life was to inspire others to dream, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam. It is a noble idea to […]

What do the students of today need to learn in order to succeed, not only in the classroom but also in their future career? The education policy in many developed countries is being focused now, on the need for students to develop deeper content knowledge and the ability to apply their knowledge and skills to […]

Excellent performance! Appreciate the efforts taken! More efforts needed! Keep it up! It is not too late to improve! Balance your efforts! These are the common report card comments we usually come across. Now it is high time to come out of these stock, general expressions applicable to any student. Our comments should be supportive […]

Neuroplasticity is the theory that our brain’s structure and capacity are not fixed and learning and experiences are able to change our brains. This on-going change is what is meant by plasticity. It offers new ways to improve learning and education, mental illness and addiction. This understanding obviously says that things are not necessarily predetermined […]