How facts develop concepts?

What makes a good monday morning?

Well this was the theme of our monday morning assembly at school, worth being pondered about.

Today my monday morning started by sharing good thoughts as usual on my twitter and facebook profiles, some of which are my own and some shared so generously by the the whole community of my social networkers.

One of the tweets which struck my mind went as follows:

Ryan Campbell @ryandal

Use factual questions to guide students to a conceptual generalisation. Don't tell them generalisation instead draw it from them. #IBDunia13

Well it was a tweet from the Indonesian IB teachers group. I never knew that this thought would be later justified so quickly and so well in our school assembly today. The big questions thrown to us in the monday morning assemble by our Head Teacher were in the form of few facts. They went as follows....

1. Total of about 50 percent of the world population lies in the urban region and by 2030 ,UN projects that it would be raised to 70 percent.What does that mean to Kolkata?
2. In the late 20th century , Shanghai , which today projects an image of "modernisation " as quoted by one of our students, was very much similar to what Kolkata is today.

What did these facts mean to us? Was there a corelation? Did it have a purpose?

These facts stated , actually had a far bigger meaning to the audience as our Head Teacher had started a competition for the students, 90 percent of whom were not born or brought up in Kolkata, to contribute to Kolkata and make it a better place to live. It resonated with the theme "Think globally and act locally".

How well we could use this in our classroom practices...Connecting back to the tweet ..developing conceptual generalisation from factual questions. To what extent do we articulate this approach to generate an inquiry based learninhg?

My learning in the journey of being an IB teacher is just endless where the horizon gets pushed away by each passing day.

A new academic year...

Why do we ask 'Why" ?

What a way it was to start the formal monday morning assemblies at our school in this academic year, with the thought shared by our Head Teacher, why do we ask 'Why'?  The thoughts that he kept infusing last year and which continues this year is actually what works wonders in keeping the monday morning blues at bay and add value to my existence.

Today is World Ozone Day and I had been asked to be a guest speaker for the same during the assembly. What I had prepared to share with the school community members could be so well linked with what I heard in the morning. Our head teacher left us all with an impending thought about discovering our own self, about who we are, to think about the past , present and the future. And probably my speech connected from there itself.

World Ozone Day is celebrated all over the world on 16th of September to mark the success of the Montreal Protocol signed in 1887 for the prevention of depletion of the ozone layer. As my conversation moved around the information that I had collected and collated over the internet, the most interesting facts that I could reveal were the extent to which the targets in reduction of production and consumption of the ozone depleting substances set way back in the late 19th century have been achieved by 2011 to a significant way.

The entire discussion brought 4 important thoughts to light:

1. The importance of identifying crisis and the problems related to that.
2. To have a vision to pull oneself away from the crisis with probable projected scenarios
3. To take collaborative intervention if the crisis has a collective nature
4. Meticulous planning by setting targets and having a proper review and action plan for the same.

Does not this coincide with the way the whole education process is set in our school?

The discussion very fluidly connected to the prior thoughts given by the head teacher.It is all due to the tireless efforts of scientists, technologists, legal advisors, economists and policy makers, of identifying the planet earth as the "SELF". A zeal to look through the crisis of the past planning meticulously and implementing the present , by means of which a far better planet can be handed over to our future generation. Our students got a deep insight into the necessity of a connected and collaborative platform of effective communication between interdisciplinary wings for progress.