Recent Happenings
Isha Vidhya publishes textbooks
Isha Vidhya’s Academic Team has begun designing textbooks specifically aimed to meet the needs of rural students. The fist published textbook was designed for LKG students and it includes simple exercises that will help them become proficient in recognition and identification of the English and Tamil alphabets and numbers 1-10. A second book which will cover the 2nd Term material has just been published and the third one is currently in the design process.
Recent Contributions
ASHA foundation, an organisation dedicated to providing basic education in India, has sponsored 80 children from the Tuticorin School both last year and this academic year.
Capt. Avinash Batra has fully funded the creation of a school library together with the acquisition of more than 1500 books at the Tuticorin School.
A fundraising project set up by Christy Foley has succeeded in raising $20 000 to build 4 new classrooms. Utilizing the website FirstGiving.org, Christy designed her own webpage and contacted friends, family and coworkers to support her in raising $20,000. In just 6 months, she reached her goal and was here to see the construction begin for the new classrooms, now finished and full of enthusiastic, young learners. We’ve gone about creating a similar format to FirstGiving's telmplate directly on our website and the first such page is already up and running www.ishavidhya.org/ Lakshmi . To find out more about how you can launch a funding project, write to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Intensive Teachers' Training
More than 70 teachers from all across Tamil Nadu came for 11-day Isha Vidhya training workshop in Coimbatore this May 2009. The workshop covered the basics in education, from how to build a lesson plan, to how to guide students in activity based learning. The majority of teachers joining Isha Vidhya have no prior teaching experience, and the May workshop provides a critical orientation into the Isha Vidhya teaching methodology, while also giving the teachers an opportunity to see that they are a part of something which extends far beyond just their classroom and their school.
The key focus of the workshop was providing an opportunity for teachers to implement different teaching methodologies in front of their peers, followed by self and peer feedback. The practices of self-evaluating at the end of each class and observing other teachers’ classes to get ideas are valuable tools which will enable the teachers to continuously upgrade their teaching techniques. Based on teacher feedback from previous workshops, this workshop gave substantial attention to the topic of class control. Beyond the obvious no-no’s, like no corporeal punishment, teachers discussed what types of negative reinforcement should not be used in the classroom, and the alternatives are for motivating students and maintaining class control. After returning to the schools and implementing their new ideas, the teachers were genuinely surprised to see how effective positive reinforcement is in shaping student behavior.
