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| Challenging the Bright Child in the Classroom |
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“A Workshop by Mrs. Usha Pandit”
Our academic advisor, Mrs. Usha Pandit uncovered the myths and mystique surrounding the gifted child at the third workshop organized by the Cathedral Workshop team on the 21st of November 2009. Educators and parents were offered precious insights into the rare world of the gifted child and requests for more such awareness workshops have been pouring in from schools since.
Punctuated with a lot of humour, and lightened by real life anecdotes of children from her classes, Mrs. Pandit brought home the idea of giftedness and its needs to a rapt audience. She got them to identify gifted children they knew of using a set of parameters, as these could well be disguised as the class-clown, the dumbed-down girl or a reticent student. She gave the audience a few hands-on tasks to get them to appreciate the special pathos surrounding the gifted mind when it meets mediocre material.
She spoke of the media-perpetuated myths of the gifted person as an eccentric genius capable of solving algebraic equations in their head and dispelled pet notions of giftedness by speaking of the unfortunate asynchrony of the gifted child’s intellectual and emotional inscape and the social awkwardness that some of them tend to manifest. She spoke about the dangers of confining a child to an IQ number and the many areas of intelligence that IQ does not cover.
The most popular part of the presentation was Mrs. Pandit’s module on planning, where she shared a gifted lesson plan on a regular topic: ‘Plants’ by showing how a set of unusual questions could trigger abundant learning in biology, literature, poetry, mathematics and environmental science. The table of learning outcomes left the audience gasping.
A teacher who attended the workshop had this to say: “I really liked the fact that the presentation did not 'glorify' giftedness. Many times with highly intelligent children or adults, we forget that they are human beings too and completely ignore their socio-emotional needs. The range of emotional turmoil they go through was an eye opener for me in the presentation. The talk covered many aspects of teaching, thinking and perspective taking that made it very interesting and gripping.”
Both Mrs. Ganguly who introduced Mrs. Pandit, and Vidushi Chaudhry who did the closing acknowledged the contribution that she had made to Cathedral in her role as the enrichment teacher and Academic Advisor. Vidushi thanked the whole workshop team individually and told the audience of Cathedral’s intent in sharing our best practices through this series of workshops, and creating increased awareness in the teaching community.
The final thought was that fifty million of India’s children, who constitute 5% of the population, are gifted and it is a huge sea of human potential that remains untapped and lost. The common consensus was that a speaker of Mrs. Pandit’s calibre should be heard by a much larger audience of teachers and parents, because what she had to say was vital for the health of a large section of children who are gifted and have special needs.
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Mrs. Pandit puts the audience in the hot seat |
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Our Audience - hard at work! |
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Our Aim |
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Mrs. Ganguly and Mrs. Pandit - Collaboration |
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A photo of at tea |
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