Anu's session

Teaching a chapter on stress that was both content-rich and content-heavy Anu found out that the last lesson which she made an interesting one based on brain based strategies to motivate learning was perhaps the most successful of the lot. She showed us a video of the class in which she had made use of Nina John as a subject expert.
Her consequhent reflection led to this unexpected key question - unexpected but relevant for many of us teachers who deal with lots of content and concepts in a year's syllabus - :
How - through what methods (tools) -can direct teaching be made interesting?
Direct teaching, she explained - and we concurred - was the only way to teach large chunks of theory whichroug was needed as background for the discipline - those dry but necessary sections.
For someone like me who had majored in direct teaching the question came as a pleasant surprise - because it made me rethink how it could be made interesting.

Intriguingly, of the six sessions we have held so far only two dealt directly with assessment of student work. Two dealt with motivating students to work/learn better and the other two dealt with questions connected more with improving our teaching practice as professionals.
The range is what makes this exercise worthwhile.

My suggestions for improving direct teaching included bringing in the lement of performance - body langugage, jokes, gestures, eye contact, use of movement and space by the teacher in the class, preparing rigorously beforehand for the lecture, timing things perfectly , including the pauses and the time and places for discussion in the course of this kind of "delivery".
Other suggestion I made were that tech tools like video files, audio files and powerpoint presentations be made use of in direct teaching classes to enhance content rather than as media for building the student's potential to learn. Thus interviews with famous personalities - subject experts - , case studies etc could be projected making the classroom a serious space and the things shown and heard would be a documentary nature .
The idea that Anu took to most was that of personalizing the content, because however dry the topic is, if the students find a genuine link in it to their own lives, it will enthuse them.

Bala facilitated the session ably.

During the collaborative strategy building session we formulated a strategy that helped all of us
in its definitiveness.
Bala's role in insisting that the collaborative strategy sessions should really move towards a single combined strategy is worth noting as a concrete and positive move.
So is his role in making for us a document in which we can easily write down our session notes. If fine tuned this wil be of lasting importance to future CASW Sessions.
The debriefing did not contain anything much of note except the suggestion that contextualizing
the key question sometimes get confusing becasue the presenter is busy not only speaking but also handing out notes etc.
The necessity to be punctual was also stressed.
Anu was quite happy with her take-away.
All of us heaved a big sigh of relief, having completed the first round.