Apna Paricha UP School, Parlakhemundi/17th January 2012

Visited the school in the afternoon after reaching from Bhubaneshwar and could spend about 1.5 hours only. Had a discussion with the HM and found that he had attended the first phase of training and had missed out on the second phase because of an accident. I am not very sure how well he understands the DE program as I didn't have much time to delve deeper into this aspect due to insufficient time at my disposal.

I could observe a lab transaction and the details are mentioned below.

Teacher name:Swarna Prabhakar

HM: Bidyadhara Panda

• Topic/ Lab Transaction: Soil
• Tools used: charts, computers, black board, Edu-kit
• Topic introduced indirectly
• Students used Edukit to explain
• Activity/Demonstration/box constructed of card board with one side covered with a transparent paper used to demonstrate the different the different layers of soil
• Students given an opportunity to demonstrate
• Questions posed to students as well as the class - question wheel used, which was an innovative   arrangement
• Group formation and activity
•  Evaluation sheet was used
• Lesson plan available
• Micro-lesson planning not available
•  Home task was assigned to all the students/groups
• Quick assessment showed that students have understood the fundamentals and were forthcoming with answers to all the questions posed
• Teacher aware of Edukit but not very thorough
•  Had a look at the registers - training (teacher and students), lab transaction and pedagogy and found them to be up to date.
• 3 resource group meetings have been held so far instead of 5 (@ of 1 per month)
• There are 6 teachers who are undergoing training but three of them seem to use computers regularly whereas the other three are aged people and are not very enthusiastic about computers and I found them doing lesson plans in paper.

I feel the school can improve in many ways and there are ample opportunities available for the same.

Critical remarks

• Group formation was resorted to by the teacher but there was no clear role allocation.
• Using a question wheel to select questions for groups was a very innovative step.
• As far as an ideal lab transaction is concerned it met most of the criteria as detailed by the team in our earlier review-cum-refresher meeting.