Platform 9 ¾ took me to Think CIQ
My 2 days of “exploration” at #ThinkCIQ2015 wasn’t too different from a muggle visiting Hogwarts from Platform 9 ¾. Pseudo smart parent in me was a bit reluctant to travel 30 km and attend a workshop on a weekend. Conundrum running in my mind - I anyways read most of the all the articles on parenting, do I still need to go? I wouldn’t have sacrificed my weekend siesta, if it was not for my kid’s future. What followed was a roller coaster ride, which busted many countless myths.. shook my overconfidence of I-know-it-all. It showed me the mirror of reality that I still knew very little about grooming my kids and helping them achieve their full potential.
Day
1 – 6th September 2015
Day 1 started
with a motivational inaugural session about taking small incremental steps to
make it big. Every great deed has a history of discipline and perseverance.
Natalie Seer (Director, Rainbow School – Stanford University) took us through
the brain development – Brief anatomy of nature’s most revered creation and
stages of its development for a child. What completely shook me was that even a
30 sec exposure of unpleasant environment (e.g. Violence on TV) gets registered
in the brain of a child. Child might not remember that memory but it influences
the thought process of the child.
Jayanti Tambe
(Executive Director – UCLA Early Care and Education) took over from Natalie and
spoke about “STEM to full STEAM ahead”. She emphasized on the importance of A
(Arts), which often gets ignored when our society is more focused on STEM
(Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). We don’t leave any room for
nurturing the talent of Music, Drama, Painting, Sports at all. She narrated a
story of how a group of 3 year old kids built a replica of “Golden Gate Bridge”
in her school. It was a 2 month long project but it was so enriching and a
valuable learning experience for kids as well as the teacher.
Another session
from Jayanti Tambe was on “Power of Play” (which was my personal favorite) and
entire session veered to a highly interactive and invigorating parenting
workshop (even if it wasn’t intended). Jayanti started with 2 experiments,
which proved that our current generation of parent is highly stereotyped. Of
course, we can blame it on traditional rote education system we grew up with.
However, this blame game isn’t going to solve the challenge of nurturing
creativity and out-of-box thinking in Gen-next. She clearly exhibited the
powerful negative influence of media on Parents and kids. How our thoughts are
victim to the manipulation of global brands. Media decides, what color we
should wear, what toys are appropriate for Boys vs Girls etc. Increased screen
time for kids these days is hampering their eye sight as well as curbing their
creativity.
She also
emphasized that we keep our kids in a highly protected environment. For every
silly question of our kids, parents are ready with an answer. Why Mamma?
Because this. We don’t let them explore the answer by themselves. How would
their thought process and reasoning develop? Every kid shouldn’t have a
separate toy/table/play space. They need to learn the art of sharing,
negotiating, fighting and coming to its resolution amicably. If they don’t
learn these skills now, chances of them learning when they are adult is remote.
Just imagine what kind of citizens’ would they turn out to be without these
skills?
Jayanti
concluded Day1 with “Reggio Emilia” approach of teaching which has Teachers,
Parents and Environment as its 3 pillars. How Reggio approach goes deeper into the
capability development of child with teacher recording every single observation
witnessed. Role of the teacher is to facilitate the conversation with kids and
to develop an emergent curriculum based on children’s interest area.
Day
2 – 7th September 2015
Day 2 started
with Dr Srinivasan (Founder of Gear Innovative International School) giving us
all a glimpse of “Divergent Thinking”. He mentioned that with right direction
and practice, it is possible for kids to develop the sense of intuition,
Divergent Thinking. He narrated many examples, where kids were able to solve a
complex problem but couldn’t explain the logic behind it. This is called Divergent
Thinking!
It was followed
by a highly coveted session on “Messy Science” by Shelley Gonzales (Director,
West Valley College – Child Development Center). Shelley was able to bring
alive the kid in every single parent and teacher. Room had multiple tables,
each of them was set up with a science experiment and we had to fold our
sleeves and try out the activity. Outcome was entertaining, de-stressing and magical.
Most of these activities can be done at home and require basic inexpensive
materials. It is so much better to do them and learn science with kids than to
be a couch potato in front of idiot box.
Shelly
continued with the importance of emergent curriculum. It is a common myth that emergent curriculum is not structured and doesn’t need much though
process. However, reverse is actually true. She explained it with an example
that how teacher needs to pick up cue from child’s interest area and build curriculum
around that. We also did an exercise, where we picked up a topic and built
emergent curriculum around it covering various aspects of learning.
It was followed
with an open house panel discussion where Dr Srinivasan, Natalie, Jayanti and
Shelley took up the questions of audience and answered them in great detail.
Last session was on “Multiple Intelligence” where Dr Srinivasan and Jayanti
touched upon its importance. Concept of Multiple Intelligence was proposed by
eminent psychologist Dr Howard Gardner in his book “Frames of Mind: The Theory
of Multiple Intelligences (1983)”. Dr Srinivasan and Jayanti Tambe emphasized
that every person is intelligent. We just need to find out, which intelligence
is more developed in whom.
We ended the 2
day magical journey on a musical note where talented kids of Gear
Innovative International school completely
floored us with their talent. Thank you Dr Srinivasan, eminent speakers and
entire ThinkCIQ family for conceptualizing such a brilliant forum. Hope,
ThinkCIQ is able to reach every single parent and teacher in the world. Amen!
Disclaimer: It is not an official article
from ThinkCIQ team but personal views of author (Amit Aggarwal), who is a proud
parent of a Gear cub and was one the lucky attendees of ThinkCIQ2015. Author
has provided information about only those sessions, which he attended. It
doesn’t cover all the sessions of ThinkCIQ
About the author: Amit Aggarwal is a
theater actor and film critic at heart, who is trapped in a serious corporate
job to pay his EMIs. He works as a Strategy Manager in one of the technology
multinational firm. He is an avid traveler, foodie and loves to write on
anything and everything in this world
