Archive for category Board of education

Plans To Strengthen The Education System Worldwide

The country’s future, a large part determined by its future adults, can be shaped by those who, with education degrees in hand, enter the field of teaching. Teachers help young children develop mentally and socially, instilling in them the skills that can help them to become capable adults. When education leaders from throughout the world gather in New York in March, they plan on trying to come up with ways to strengthen the profession of teaching.

Individuals who are born with a great talent for teaching might be among those who set out to obtain education degrees. But talent isn’t everything, US Department of Education’s Secretary suggested in a news release from the agency. She noted that the entire education system – from recruiting teachers to maintaining and supporting them during their careers – is important as far as establishing teachers who, collectively, have a positive effect on their students.

The training that students receive as part of education degree programs in the United States might depend largely upon the type of teacher they want to become. In the book, The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World’s Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom, authors James W. Stigler and James Hiebert contend that the focus in improving education should be on teaching, rather than teachers, and establishing a system that is able to learn from its own experience. Continued learning for teachers, according to Stigler and Heibert, is also important in terms of teaching. Read the rest of this entry »

India’s Move to Right to Education

BACKGROUND.

It was Saturday afternoon; the world seemed to be on vacation but me, as I was busy serving guests at a lunch party at my masters’ residence. Chatting and laughing was loud enough to be heard in every nook and corner of the house. But those were of least concern to me, because I had to respond to every single call for any requirement at the very word of the guests or the master in particular. It was 2009, and I was just seven, wearing a sweater and a half pant, watching a bunch of people boasting about the achievements of their wards and trying to prove ones child better than the other. When suddenly, an old man read from a magazine that the government was to pass a new act namely, Right to Education Act. But to me those routine talks about the household work made more sense than this new coming up topic, because neither I could read or understand there high-level conversation, which had diverted there talks from their children, on top of that I didn’t even understand, what the word ‘right’ meant. That elderly fellow said something like…

History of the Act:

The Free and Compulsory Education Bill 2003 was the first attempt of the Central government to draft a comprehensive legislation on education after the 86th Constitutional Amendment that made education a fundamental right. The Bill was an excellent example of bureaucratic empowerment, creating up to 6 levels of various authorities to ensure the provision of free and compulsory education. Furthermore, the reservation of up to 25% of the private school seats for the economically backward students to be selected by these authorities ensured that the Bill was a throwback to the old licence-permit-raj regime. Following widespread criticism, the Bill was discarded.

The Right to Education Bill 2005 is the second attempt by the Central government to set the education system right. Some of the important provisions of the Bill:

• Promises free and compulsory education of equitable quality up to the elementary level to all children in the age group of 6 to 14.
• Mandates unaided private schools to reserve up to 25 percent of the seats for students from weaker sections. The schools will be reimbursed by the lower of the actual school fee or per student expenditure in the government school. The aided schools will reserve “at least such proportion of their admitted children as its annual recurring aid bears to its annual recurring expenses subject to a minimum of 25 per cent.” Read the rest of this entry »

Board Games As Educational School Supplies

When it comes to educational school supplies we often think of the basics like calculators, textbooks and arts and crafts supplies that fill up the classroom. But it’s important for kids to have a little fun with their learning and board games can give both experiences to students. From simple color and alphabet games for the younger kids to puzzles and strategy games to make the older kids think, there are plenty of board games that can serve as educational school supplies.

When looking into games for the younger set, preschool and kindergarten, look for simple games that teach the alphabet, numbers and colors. Some of the classic games for this age are memory games, often with pictures in place of numbers or a small set of basic numbers. Kids this age are great with visuals so anything with great detail and design will keep them entertained and help them learn easier.

For the 1st to 3rd graders, they can start to really understand traditional board games that require dice and moving pieces around a board. Learning rules of a game and learning how to play with each other in this way helps them both with their social skills as well as their listening skills and following of instructions. Games like Monopoly Junior, Battleship, Trouble and Pictionary Jr are classics that work really well for this age set. All these games have pretty simple instructions that will be easy to follow and won’t lose their attention.

When you start to head to the older kids in 4th to 6th grade, consider games that will really make them think. Clue is a great classic that teaches them how to keep track of clues and deduce information from them. This is also the age where checkers is a great introduction to strategy games. Word games are great too, like Scrabble or Boggle which will have children expanding their vocabulary. Read the rest of this entry »