THE BROWNING VERSION Terence Rattigan

Mindmap of character of Crocker-Harris & Frank

My first encounter with WORD WALL

And then...

I will now trace my Action Research journey.

https://1drv.ms/i/s!Aqa0uo7EZpQJjlovvKL8lsqshtXS

My question for Action Research was “Reading for pleasure is an important skill. Students and youngsters now-a-days just don’t have the inclination and interest for this simple pleasure. Almost all their language woes will be sorted once they get into the habit of reading especially reading for pleasure. So how to make my students take interest in reading?”

I started taking them to the school library and let them read ‘any’ book that interested them. This happened for about 4 weeks. But I couldn’t progress past teeny magazines with colourful pictures. I understood that they were plain ‘not’ interested in this supposed to be intellectual activity.

Meanwhile, I started a facebook page "Reading for pleasure’. 

https://www.facebook.com/Reading-for-pleasure-163564200835939/?modal=composer

I diligently posted pictures, thoughts and lists of books to be read. But with my students, it was as if I had hit a brick wall.

After much pondering, I thought of problems faced by my students. As I discussed this with teachers of other subjects of the class, I understood that they have a problem of comprehending words. Vocabulary was their problem. So now I changed route and started my own research on how to tackle with this problem – the problem students face because of difficulty in understanding words and to use them.

Now I reframed my Action Research question to “there is a gap between words and their meaning. What can I do to decrease this gap?”

I put to use my close friendship with the ‘net’, to find out ways to decrease the word-meaning gap.

Lo!Voila! I hit pay dirt with WORD WALL!!!!

All about my encounter with this gold mine in the next post...

The beginning of my Action Research Journey

British Council, India has been a part of my life since my college days. My friends used to tease me about my magnetic draw towards British Council Library, Chennai- ‘BCL’ - as we used to call it. I drank in Daphne du Maurier and Nevil Shute from the BCL and got teased for that too.

After a gap of many years, British Council, Delhi came into my life in the form of International School Award (ISA) when DAV Public School, sreshtha Vihar, Delhi,  applied for it and I was in the ISA core team. Since then it has been a very fortuitous and fruitful association for me. After twice accredited with the ISA, 5 teachers from the school were selected by Principal Mrs Prem Lata Garg to work with mentors Mrs Suman Chawla and mrs Chandeep Marwah for the Aptis Action Research  Mentor Scheme (AARMS).

To quote Wikipedia, “Action research is either research initiated to solve an immediate problem or a reflective process of progressive problem solving led by individuals working with others in teams or as part of a "community of practice" to improve the way they address issues and solve problems.”

The first meeting was an exciting one as our mentors Mrs Chawla and Mrs Marwah are dynamic personalities. They introduced us to Action Research, what it is and how to go about it. It was intimidating to all five of us from the school, Ms Preeti Bhatnagar, Ms Shweta Handa, Mrs Ranjana Varma, Ms Nupur Gupta and myself.  We wondered if we will be able to take up the challenge of classroom research with all other duties as senior teachers. With the reassurance and positive vibes of Ms Chawla and Ms Marwah, we promised that we will take it up. As passionate teachers, we indeed wanted to be change makers by bringing in small yet fantastic changes in our classrooms.

In this exciting journey we were joined by 5 teachers from Ramjas School, Karol Bagh. It was an interesting mix of teachers of Chemistry, Computer Science and English from primary to the senior classes. We were told to think of questions on which we could base our action research. It could be “something which has been challenging us in the class room or something which is a success but needed further exploration”. The webinar led by our mentors’ guides Mr Amol and Mr Richard was an eye opener as all of us were impressed and intrigues us the teacher from Mexico and her action research. Through action research, she was able to find out “how to end her lessons interestingly”. As teachers, we plan extensively about how to introduce each lesson and ways to begin every class. We do not give much thinking about how to end our classes. We just summarise and probably exit the class. The webinar in detail spoke about this teacher’s research and how she started practicing different interesting means to end her classes. Wow! Just great!! we thought. Can we also practice such simple, interesting and exciting things in our classroom? 

We started discussing things then. And then...