Pakistani Educational Leadership Institute

From our colleagues in Pakistan, comes this information on a growing summer school program. Additional information can be found here.

Summer School is an academic session held during the summer, chiefly for supplementary and remedial study. Summer School is an enrichment activity which is helpful for addressing the personal, social, psychological and physical well being of children and teachers. Summer School Programs are designed to assist student in accelerating their learning during the condensed period of time. These programs also emphasized particular curricular areas, such as science, social study, language or a particular performing or visual art form. These programs emphasize learning as an enjoyable activity and provide each student with an experience that is designed to create a desire to learn for the sake of learning. It is an opportunity for expended learning for children, their parents and teachers. Teachers act as facilitators or coaches, using classroom presentations or individual instruction to help students.

Summer School Program further support and strengthen the journey to quality of education. The program involves such activities that not only boost up the professional development of teachers but as new ways of learning for students with open heart and happiness. Summer School program is incorporated in ITA’s main activities to enrich school education through different hand-on activities and project based learning.

Summer School Program involves awareness, understanding and comprehension based knowledge, practical hands-on activities and project based learning. These enrichment activities reinforce conceptual clarity, learning abilities and life-skills of the students.

For all the summer activities a planning meeting was held in ITA’s office on 21^st May 2008.

Objectives of the Summer School Program:

§  Enhance learning through integrated/holistic approaches

§  Promote a mixture of creative activities for encouraging creative expression amongst children (drama/art/project learning/essays etc)

§  To develop interaction between teacher-teacher, student-teacher and student-student.

§  Acquiring the capacities of understanding, appreciation and expression through word and act.

§  To make children self-confident and self –dependent.

§  Correlation of curriculum with productive activity and intellectual and group environment.

§  Enhance motivation of the children & teachers for a meaning full and joyful learning

§  Improve IT skills of students ( Power-Point Presentation)

§  Create a healthy / positive environment in school.

§  Promote Quality Education in Government Schools

Project-based learning:

The use of classroom projects, intended to bring about deep learning, where students use technology and inquiry to engage with issues and questions that are relevant to their lives. These classroom projects are used to assess student’s subject matter competence compared to traditional testing. The project was the main component to be used as teaching tool/aid. Project method is based on the following principles:

1. Learning by doing
2. Learning by Living
3. Children learn better through association, cooperation and activity.

Purpose

Basic objective of the project were:

Ø  To introduce ‘Project-Based Teaching’ to the teachers;

Ø  To introduce the children to joyful learning. To facilitate the teachers in using the project as a tool of teaching or AV Aids( audio visual)

Ø  Students form their own investigation of their own group which allows students to develop valuable research skills.

Ø  The students engage in design, problem solving, decision making, and investigative activities.

Ø   It allows students to work in groups or by themselves and allows them to come up with ideas and realistic solutions or presentations. Students take a problem and apply it to a real life situation with this project.