Reaching the student who had switched offReaching the student who had switched off

An hour or two online.

During the lockdown, Shreya says, there were online classes for “just one or two hours in a day, and we would shut off.” In those days she would scroll Instagram, checking for an opportunity, feeling she had sat at home long enough. That was where she came across Suraasa.

She spoke with a mentor, who told her the programme would put her in a group with teachers from around the world. That was what drew her in. “I’ll get to know what they do in their classroom so that can help me develop as a teacher as well,” she says. “I thought, okay, let me give it a try.”

Her daughter watched too.

Of her B.Ed she says, “I didn’t actually understand the intense meaning of what I was learning there.” PgCTL, she says, taught her practically what she had learnt in it. Before, she had not given much importance to the behavioural challenges she saw in the classroom.

She liked the self-paced videos, and she was not the only one watching. Her daughter would sit with her through the sessions on behaviour, classroom management and dynamics. “She would say, okay mama, this is so nice to listen,” Shreya says. If a child could understand the ideas and connect with them, she reasoned, a teacher should be able to connect them to a classroom.

So she started in her own. With a student who is not concentrating, she talks to him to find out what interests him and how to get him into the topic. Students learn, she says, “when they are free enough to speak out and tell, okay, this is a challenge that I’m facing.” Helped individually, she says, they start to show some interest in the subject.