Centre for Learning Leadership and Excellence

Dear Educators

Greetings from CLLE!

The Centre for Learning Leadership and Excellence (CLLE) invites you to join “The Art & Science of Neuro Pedagogy – Classroom Practices”, an exciting certificate program designed to equip you with cutting-edge tools and strategies based on the latest brain research.

In this engaging program, you'll delve into the fascinating world of neuroscience and discover how the brain learns best. You'll explore:
1. Practical application of neuro-pedagogy principles to real-world classroom scenarios.
2. Opportunities to collaborate with peers and share best practices.
3. Guidance and support to implement neuro-pedagogy in your classrooms
4. Connect with a vibrant community to share ideas, challenges and successes with fellow educators passionate about transforming education.

Kindly find attached the poster for further details and registration or click the below Google link for registration. Once the registration process is completed, the other program details will be sent to your email IDs.

Link for registration:
https://forms.gle/HV3LVSY925VMeefx9

Looking forward to your participation.

Warm regards
CLLE Team

The Centre for Learning Leadership and Excellence (CLLE) invites you to join the "Workshop on - Demystifying The Challenges In Accreditation Processes of HEIs", is tailored to demystify the NAAC accreditation process, including the quantitative and qualitative aspects. It is meant for Educational Leaders, Principals, IQAC Coordinators and Academicians.

Kindly find attached the poster for further details and registration or click the below Google link for registration. Once the registration process is completed, the other program details will be sent to your email IDs.

Link for registration:
https://forms.gle/3d7dP4SxJZBnqqCY7

Looking forward to your participation.

Warm regards
CLLE Team

The Centre for Learning Leadership and Excellence (CLLE) would like to extend our warmest greetings and best wishes to you on this special day, for your invaluable contribution and dedication in shaping the minds and future of our children. Your impact on students' lives is immeasurable and your influence is everlasting.

Your kind and caring nature has made a world of difference for a generation of students.

As there is, alive and well, an “unschooled” or “transmission” view of education. To wit: The child has an empty mind, the educator has (one hopes!) a well-stocked mind, and the goal of education is to transfer that stock as efficiently and actively as possible from the mind of the educator to the mind of the child. It’s ironic, but perhaps also fitting, that in a book with this title, stiff resistance to its central ideas itself reflects the smooth and powerful operation of the unschooled mind.

Three Characters in Search of a Framework.

First, there is the intuitive learner (sometimes known hereafter as the natural, naive, or universal learner), the young child who is superbly equipped to learn language and other symbolic systems and who evolves serviceable theories of the physical world and of the world of other people during the opening years of life.

Second, there is the traditional student (or scholastic learner), the youngster from age seven to age twenty, roughly, who seeks to master the literacies, concepts, and disciplinary forms of the school. It is these students who, whether or not they can produce standard performances, respond in ways similar to preschool or primary school youngsters, once they have been removed from the context of the classroom.

Third, there is the disciplinary expert (or skilled person), an individual of any age who has mastered the concepts and skills of a discipline or domain and can apply such knowledge appropriately in new situations. Included in the ranks of the disciplinary experts are those students who are able to use the knowledge of their class to illuminate a new phenomenon. Their knowledge is not limited to the usual text-and test setting, and they are eligible to enter the ranks of those who “really” understand.

Why, one may ask, should we care about erasing these gaps? And, in particular, why is it important that natural or scholastic understandings give way to disciplinary understandings? The answer is simple: The understandings of the disciplines represent the most important cognitive achievements of human beings. It is necessary to come to know these understandings if we are to be fully human, to live in our time, to be able to understand it to the best of our abilities, and to build upon it. The five-year-old knows many things, but he cannot know what disciplinary experts have discovered over the centuries. Perhaps our daily lives might not be that different if we continue to believe that the world is flat, but such a belief makes it impossible for us to appreciate in any rounded way the nature of time, travel, weather, or seasons; the behavior's of objects; and the personal and cultural options open to us. And it was because Christopher Columbus dared to entertain a contrasting belief that he embarked on a journey of fateful consequences.

Trivia by Mrs. Minakshi Balkrishna

👩🏻‍🏫 At the heart of good classroom management is the understanding of students and their social emotional learning needs.

Educators must be always aware of how social emotional learning can influence the quality of teacher-student relationships and how that relationship is a part of any classroom management design.

When the classroom is managed so that the academic and social emotional learning goals are met, there is little need for student discipline. 🧑🏻‍🏫👩🏻‍🎓🧑🏻‍🎓

Curated by CLLE Research Team

Inquiry Teachers are passionate Inquiry teachers love the classroom. They are passionate about kids and excited about learning. Their infectious energy ignites a passion for learning in their students, colleagues, and leaders. Inquiry teachers are not merely cheerleaders of content; rather, their genuine love for learning and the understanding they foster in their practice have an immensely positive impact on their classroom.

Inquiry teachers know their students’ stories, passions, interests, and goals, and they use this knowledge to empower learners. They help their students understand learning and identify their own learning needs. Inquiry teachers ask students questions about themselves so the teacher and the student can learn more about the whole child. Inquiry teachers construct learning moments calling for reflection and sharing of self.

Trivia by Mrs. Minakshi Balkrishna

The Science of Successful Learning 📖

🧠 “The act of retrieving learning from memory has two profound benefits. One, it tells you what you know and don’t know, and therefore where to focus further study to improve the areas where you’re weak. Two, recalling what you have learned causes your brain to reconsolidate the memory, which strengthens its connections to what you already know and makes it easier for you to recall in the future.” 💡

Source: Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown

Curated by CLLE Research Team

What is creative thinking? Creative thinking, in its simplest form, is the ability to make something new. The mental process of thinking creatively requires students to draw on their imagination, using their skills to combine, change, reshape, refine or improve ideas and solutions (Cash, 2011). Creative thinking is, at its core, a generative process that focuses on the number of ideas as well as the range of ideas generated. It relies on one’s ability to manipulate and play around with ideas, looking from a range of perspectives in order to find the best and most innovative solution for a problem. The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) defines creative thinking as: “To think creatively is the capacity to generate many different kinds of ideas, manipulate ideas in unusual ways and make unconventional connections in order to outline novel possibilities that have the potential to elegantly meet a given purpose.” (Ramalingam, Anderson, Duckworth, Scoular & Heard, 2020) What is important to note is that while creative thinking has its foundation in the generation of numerous ideas, ensuring that the ideas generated are of high quality is important. In a classroom setting, students need to be able to distinguish between ideas that are ‘good’ and those that are not going to achieve the intended purpose or desired outcome.Goal: The goal of creative thinking, therefore is to explore many ideas, generate several possibilities and look for many ‘right’ answers. Critical thinking plays a crucial role in a student’s ability to problem-solve.

Examples of creative thinking skills: In the classroom, there are a number of verbs that teachers use that draw on creative thinking skills, including:
👉🏼 Brainstorming (brain . storm) To solve a problem or come up with ideas
👉🏼 Elaborating (elab . o . rate) To expand on something in detail
👉🏼 Imagining (imag . ine) To form a mental image of something
👉🏼 Questioning (ques . tion) To ask questions in order to seek information Improvising (im . pro . vise) To make, invent or arrange something out of what is conveniently on hand.
👉🏼 Speculating (spec . u . late) To review something and ponder on it
👉🏼 Drawing (draw) To cause attention to be given to someone or something
👉🏼 Creating (cre . ate) To make or produce something.

While this is by no means an exhaustive list, it provides a clear snapshot for educators about some of the tasks that require students to draw upon their creative thinking skills and what that type of thinking is requiring our students to do. For example, imagining requires our students to form a mental picture of something by piecing together snippets of information to form a larger picture. This type of thinking also asks our students to draw on their understanding and prior knowledge of a broad range of areas to make sense of something. Some of our students find this an easy task to perform, while others find it a little more challenging.

🧠 Developing Thinking Dispositions 💡💭

The main goal of the Visible Thinking project was to develop students as thinkers and learners by cultivating their dispositions toward thinking. A disposition captures one's personal patterns of interaction with the world. Our dispositions are a part of our character. Our thinking dispositions reflect who we are as thinkers and learners. Of course, a disposition goes beyond merely having the skill or ability - it implies that an individual also is inclined to use those abilities, is aware of and sensitive to occasions for the use of those abilities, and is motivated at the moment to deploy the skills (Ritchhart 2002). Thus ability, inclination, awareness, and motivation must all be present for us to say one has a particular disposition.

Source: The Power of Making Thinking Visible - Practices to Engage and Empower All Learners by Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church

Trivia by Mrs. Minakshi Balkrishna

🧠 Inquiry Mindset is about empowering our learners with the tools, understanding, and skills to make a difference in the world. The ideas Rebecca and I share here will clarify the inquiry process, how we use it in our classrooms, and what our learners gain from it throughout the year. 🧑🏼‍🏫🛰🚀🎨🏆

Source: Enquiry Mindset - Elementary Edition by Trevor Mackenzie With Rebecca Bushby

Trivia by Mrs. Minakshi Balkrishna

THE IMPORTANCE OF NOVELTY

You might not notice a person walking past your classroom or office door, but if a tiger strolled by, you would. Our very survival depends on attentiveness. Being alert to changes in the environment allowed early humans to capitalize on an opportunity (“I’ll hunt that bird for dinner”) and avoid harm (“I’ll hide from that rhino”).

Stimuli have changed with the times, but we modern humans continue to be attracted to novelty. It’s easy to imagine tomorrow’s anthropologists studying YouTube to figure out which sights and sounds grabbed our fleeting attention in the early 21st century.

When novelty is present in the learning environment, students’ brains become alert and receptive. A part of the brain called the reticular activating system filters incoming stimuli, deciding which information to trust to autopilot and what deserves our full attention. Without novelty, we tend to let our brains rest and conserve energy - for a while. Then we start looking for fresh stimulation. Psychiatrist and child trauma expert Bruce Perry explain why repetitive classroom activities, such as lectures or worksheets, inhibit the brain’s craving for novelty and can interfere with learning. “Only four to eight minutes of the pure factual lecture can be tolerated before the brain seeks other stimuli, either internal (e.g., daydreaming) or external (“Who is that walking down the hall?”). If the teacher is not providing that novelty, the brain will go elsewhere” (Perry, n.d.).

Projects build opportunities to introduce novelty. Projects often start with a “grabber” or entry event of some kind. That’s when teachers deliberately facilitate an introduction to capture attention and interest, getting students’ attention and curiosity engaged. Across the arc of the project, new challenges and opportunities for discovery continue to present themselves, supplying students with ample reasons to stay interested once the project is underway.

Source: Thinking Through Project-Based Learning: Guiding Deeper Inquiry by Jane Krauss & Suzie Boss

Trivia by Mrs. Minakshi Balkrishna

The world is hungry for more ideas - preferably good ones. THERE IS SUCH A THING AS A BAD IDEA It’s not hard to come up with ideas but - let’s be honest here - most ideas aren’t any good. Academics use two criteria to judge the creativity of an idea: they expect it to be new and valuable.

If you’ve to use that as a way of judging ideas, then this matrix can help you decide what to do with any ideas you generate: A simple way to decide what to do with an idea But it’s worth us digging further into what we mean by new and valuable because there are different levels of new. An idea can be new to you, new to your peer group, new to an industry, or new to the world. Obviously, these are massively different and can have a wildly different impacts.

When you’re working with ideas, it’s good to define the value you’re aiming for upfront. If you’re clear about this, you have a far better chance of achieving it.

And it makes it easier to judge your ideas at the end.

Source: How to Get to Great Ideas: A System for Smart, Extraordinary Thinking by Dave Birss

Trivia by Mrs. Minakshi Balkrishna