Benefits of a Learner based classroom approach

The inbuilt calendar in my phone shows all the lectures scheduled for a week. While scrolling down, I came across something totally different. On Fridays something called the ‘Topic Seminars’ had to be attended from 10am to 12am. Sounds Interesting!

At sharp 9:50 am I found myself seated in a classroom with an assortment of new faces lead by an elegant professor.  After the introduction session, she put up the very first question ‘How do Universities benefit the society?’ Now her question wasn't only for me. It was to be answered as a group activity in which we had to tell how do universities benefit different sections of the society. All the new faces slowly became known and got involved into deep critical thinking. All the answers were recorded and after some more brainstorming we were briefed about the next week’s seminar.

Soon it was time to attend the second seminar.  A new kind of challenge awaited for us this time. The task was to conduct a group research on four companies and identifying their roles in the society. These were mainly supermarkets incorporating various strategies to capture market share and increase sales.  

In the Seminar four we had a mock session for our poster presentation. The task was to prepare an electronic poster to create awareness on the pollution inside oceans made from the discharge of plastics.

My Interpretation

Topic Seminars help develop various skills-

·     Critical Thinking-

At the end of the fourth week I had completed various types of tasks and performed numerous activities. A lot of them stressed upon presentation skills and deep research. May it be understanding a key concept with the help of a passage or any other group discussions or any business idea based on a case study. Critical thinking is very important for analysing a situation and making calculative moves. Topic Seminars are a great way to brush up this skill and make us think out of the box.

·     Teamwork-

Throughout lifetime we would be required to work with other people. At every point we would have to collaborate and present ideas together. Topic Seminars are a good place where we can interact well and learn how to compete as a team. This enhances our social skills and helps in networking. By making contacts we can open doors to new kind of opportunities and can benefit from them.

·     Time Based Activities-

“A stitch in time saves nine”. We were exposed to a lot of time based learning and problem solving activities during the course of our topic seminars. Throughout any professional career, meeting deadlines is very important. These activities not only teach us to complete work on time but they also teach us to come out with innovative ideas in short spans.

My Evaluation

Spending two hours in a class continuously and attending lectures seems so scary. Before attending my Friday Topic seminars even I was very scared and didn’t feel like going.

This feeling of mine was proved wrong after attending the seminar. I felt it was a very unconventional method of teaching which reduced the burden of studies. Earlier I used to fear expressing my ideas publicly. The very idea of an audience having all ears on me sent shivers down my spine.

After my first mock poster presentation got over, I was told that my group had finished before time. On hearing this I should have freaked out, but to my surprise I was very satisfied with what we could manage within such a short span of time.

My personal belief is that education should not only be limited to books. We should be exposed to challenges and not served directly on the plate.

In the tutorials we had to come up with new innovative ideas and try and make a connect with everyone. The overall experience of these tutorials is great. I find that by performing group tasks the burden of a particular task gets divided and the output is much better because the ideas come from many different perspectives.