10 things a teacher needs in the classroom!
Being a teacher is one of the toughest jobs on the planet, and shaping young minds and igniting the hunger for knowledge is never easy. To make a teacher’s life simpler and to set them up for success, here is a list of 10 things a teacher needs in their classroom! Treat this as a checklist that you need to be armed with before the start of the school year!
Things that you will need to effectively engage students:
Unfortunately the lesson plans don’t write themselves! The most important thing a teacher needs is a detailed lesson plan, either a physical copy or a virtual one. Lesson plans are a must have to be a successful teacher, they keep you on track and also ensure that your classroom time is well utilised. A lesson plan is incomplete without an objective, group work, and individual work. You can look at different templates here and learn more about lesson planning here.
While it is vital for students to have fun, it is equally important to ensure that their learning is not hampered. Having a substitute plan helps the substitute teacher engage students and ensures that learning is not hampered. Substitute plans can be related to the ongoing lesson or can be something you want students to learn and know about but haven’t found the time for. Know more about how to create back-up plans here.
Students need to be motivated time and again, and what works better than awards and certificates! You can have a variety of awards and certificates for your classroom that will work as positive reinforcement tools, these awards and certificates don’t need to be related to student academic achievement, they can be more about their classroom behaviour, like “the kind kid”, “rockstar reader” etc, this will also ensure that your students are engaged in the class at all times. Find some create award templates here, alternatively you can also use Canva to create your own template.
Books, newspapers, magazines… these are all vital for the classroom. They may encourage your students to spend their free time reading instead of staring into space. Just remember to write your name on everything you want to hang on to! Here’s a list of must-have book categories in your library.
Things you will need to make your Classroom more student centric
And so you build a classroom contract with them! A classroom contract between you and your students will transform your classroom for good. Build this contract by involving all the students to make it more effective, it must have class values, rules and expectations, and consequences. Classroom Contract will ensure that you spend more time on the learning and less on managing the classroom behaviour. Find a detailed process of making one here.
Students need a space to exhibit all their work, irrespective of this being academic or unrelated. Apart from being spaces of visual reinforcement of learning, these exhibit spaces should create conversations about perspectives, innovative ideas, visual representations and more.
Feedback and suggestions from your students will support your teaching and their learning the most. Sometimes students struggle to voice their opinions and this box will give students a space to express their thoughts and ideas about the lesson they had. Imbibing their feedback in the classroom will make students feel important and result in better engagement and ownership. Another way to receive feedback is to include Changes and Suggestions on the Parking Lot corner in the classroom. Know more about it here.
SOS Kit
A very vital part of the teacher resource is a first aid kit. The kit must have basics of first aid like bandages, antiseptic, cotton balls and qtips, thermometer, antiseptic cream, pain reliever spray, gel or balm, eyewash or artificial tears, and if dealing with adolescents, sanitary pads and/or tampons to keep the panic at bay!
A student information book, with all the information about students ranging from their favourite food to the allergies they may have, to their academic history, is essential for a successful teacher. This will come in handy not only when a student has fallen sick and the parents need to be called, but also when you want to do something special for your student. You can use the information you have to make personalised affirmation letters and to track their progress over the year.
Last but not least, a small pantry with your favourite snacks and water will come to your saviour when you forget to pick your breakfast! Also, you can lend some to a student who had to skip breakfast!
These are some of the items that will help you in being a purpose driven and empathetic teacher! One final tip, create a checklist of items that you think are important and check the status of these items on a monthly basis. Remember some of these are items that need to be refilled (snacks and water), some are items that need planning and preparation (lesson plans) and some are items that require constant tracking (badges and certificates)! We wish you the very best in your teaching journey!
And remember, being a teacher is being a rockstar!
Social Science is Integral To A Child’s Holistic Development
Growing up, how many of us explored opportunities in Social Sciences? All we ever heard about was how to become an engineer, a doctor or a lawyer. Yet, Social Science is one of the most important disciplines in our education system, where we learn the fundamentals of society, power, politics, culture, ethics, history and geography.
The New Education Policy (NEP) aims to transform India into a vibrant knowledge society making both school and college education more holistic, flexible, multidisciplinary, suited to 21st century needs and aims at bringing out the unique capabilities of each student. In this diverse world that we live in, it is important that our children become active, responsible and reflective citizens who can tackle local and global challenges effectively.
At Ekya and CMR National Public School, the Humanities and Social Science program equips our learners to:
Develop a deeper understanding of society, law, politics and human-environment interactions
Critically think about issues and perspectives by recognising the different social, historical and legal contexts
Make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good.
How are we achieving this purpose through the Social Science curriculum?
Ekya’s curated social science curriculum develops students to have a deeper understanding of society, law, politics and human-environment interactions that we are participative of, that we influence or make a change to, and live by. We build a culture of inquiry, critical thinking, perspective sharing and empathy through the use of collaborative and reflective strategies in the classroom such as Think-Pair-Share, Gallery Walk, Put On Your Thinking Hat, 3-2-1, I Used To Think But Now I Know, etc.
To help our students make informed, reasoned decisions, meaningful learning experiences are included in the curriculum. For example - Students try to answer the question,’ Why do we need the Constitution?’, through research and team work. The research they initiate allows them to collate information from international, national and local news, thereby sparking curiosity. Further investigation leads them to conduct surveys from households, their neighbourhood or social circle, for data and reliability from ground reality. This provides multiple perspectives for students to explore and enhances their communication, leadership and collaborative learning skills.
Experiences such as these aid them to make relevant observations, identify, analyse, compare, and make connections between ideas, concepts and related resources. They are also given the opportunity to be creative. This enables each student to present their ideas in various ways; be it through art, creative writing, data surveys, debates, presentations, projects, music, role play, or speech. What is important in these tasks is how inquiry helps them deep dive into a specific issue and resolve it.
In today’s world, it is important to build the social consideration and empathy of learners where we are made aware of our surroundings, the past and the present, to develop an international or a wide viewpoint for a moral progress of society. With all the perceptions we have, we learn to break it down to the relevance of today and reflect over how we relate to it.
Beyond building understandings of the world, its institutions and social and political systems, Social Science at Ekya helps individuals engage with these systems both for self and the society’s benefit. In a democracy, this is crucial. Furthermore, Social Sciences teach us to learn from our mistakes, to make a change in society, to influence people and policy making, to forgive and be kind. It is in the Social Science classroom where we are allowed to be open minded, creative and share what’s in our mind and heart.
“When classrooms become a forgiving place where it’s okay to make mistakes, we see creativity spike and anxiety fall”
- Gavin Mc. Cormack.
Ms. Rovino Raikhan
Instructional Designer, Social Science Program, Ekya Learning Center, Ekya Schools
5 most useful online tools for teachers for a physical classroom
The pandemic has completely changed the way teachers taught and students learnt, and the sudden change from in-class teaching to on-screen teaching pushed us to change the tools we used to teach. Chalk and board became screen and mouse, “don’t talk in the class” became “mute yourself”!
While we transition back to our physical classroom, here are some tools that you can use. These tools will help you make your classroom more interactive and engaging.
Kahoot is a game-based learning platform that lets you create fun learning games. You can make a quiz on any topic and in any language, and customize the quiz with videos, diagrams, and images. Students participate in “kahoots” (games) by logging the game codes on their device or application. You can use this in your classroom for a Hook activity if devices are available in the classroom. If not, assign a Kahoot homework task to check their understanding or as pre-work before the start of a topic.
Quizzizz is a web-based assessment tool that allows you to present quizzes on Science, Social Sciences, Computer Science, Technical education, and Art to students as a timed test or homework with a specified deadline. Similar to Kahoot, you can use this tool to check for understanding, as a part of homework or as a hook to start off your class.
JeopardyLabs is an online service that enables you to build Jeopardy games without PowerPoint, by using a simple editor. You can also choose from ready-made games created by the platform users on such subjects as foods, cities, countries, books, and hygiene. This is a great tool for a fun check for understanding, or group work, this will not only engage your students but also ensure that there is a fun element involved. This also improves inquiry skills of questions as they reframe answers as questions.
Canva for Education is 100% free for K-12 students and teachers. You and your students can create and personalize your own designs from scratch, or choose from thousands of high-quality, copyright-free educational templates. This will help you design engaging, fun lesson plans that will ensure that your students are constantly engaged. Apart from lesson plans, Canva provides a plethora of templates through which you can create assignments, yearbook, asynchronous material, timetables and many more things.
Padlet takes the idea of the notice board and makes it digital, so it's enhanced. This creates a space for teachers and students in education to share but in a way that's actually better than the real-world version.
Unlike a physical notice board, this space can be populated with rich media, including words and images as well as videos and links too. All that and it's instantly updated for anyone sharing the space to see right away.
What do you need to know before creating digital material on these platforms?
Hope these platforms provide you with interesting ideas to make your classroom engaging and fun!
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