A Noble and Laudable Initiative...!

Vehicles – two wheelers and four, of all hues and shades, lined up or rather clogged up the entrance to Hotel Savera, Mylapore, Chennai, on the eventful morning of 07 January 2015. We were a tad late to the programme, and hence we had to squeeze our car in, mustering all the driving skills at our command, to masterfully manoeuvre within the pretty decent car parking lot at our disposal.

Making our way to the first floor of the grand Hotel which houses (or hotels) the Conference Halls we were ushered in by pleasant  and hospitable receptionists who got us our elegantly designed Delegate Badges and professionally made Office files.

It was indeed a packed hall with a beehive of academic activity, with the who’s who of academia being present in full strength.

Symposium in Progress

Teachers, Professors, Headmasters, Principals from various parts of the City and from the State – name them, and they were there. The reason was not hard to seek. They had all come by the dozen to witness and to cheer a noble endeavour from the portals of St. John’s Rajakumar Education and Research Trust: the establishment of a Centre for Teacher Empowerment on St. John’s Public School Campus in order to train inadequate candidates/teachers and empower them with the required skill set, competency and temperament. Academia was there in time (9.30 am) for the Educational Symposium on the theme “Teacher Excellence – School Excellence”.

The programme was divided into two sessions, and the members of the audience were indeed spell-bound by the commitment shown by the visionaries par excellence on the dais, who set paradigms of excellence for the teaching fraternity to emulate and to strive for, in their roles as dispellers of ignorance and nurturers of budding talents.

Dr. Latha Pillai

Rarely does one come across a Centre for Teacher Empowerment, especially in a developing country like India, wherein Teacher Training Institutes have mushroomed in every nook and corner, giving their candidates a richly made up Degree, sans the required skill base. Hence, the real challenge lies, not only in dutifully obtaining a degree in teacher training, but also in the ability to translate competence into performance, or rather, from being competence-based teachers to being performance-driven teachers!

Therein lies the phenomenal success of St. John’s Centre for Teacher Empowerment…!

Dr. R. Kishore Kumar, the committed visionary and passionate patron of St. John’s Group of Schools, whose passion for excellence and commitment to quality was palpable in each word and each sentence of his motivational talk, outlined the aim and scope of the St. John’s Centre for Teacher Empowerment. Ms. Latha Pillai, Director, Rajiv Gandhi National Institute for Youth Development inaugurated the Centre, inaugurated the Centre, and delivered the key-note address on the topic “Teachers’ Professional Growth – The Foremost Component in the Process of School Education”. Starting off with an anecdotal allusion, she said: “Forty years ago, we, as children, did not have air-conditioned classrooms when we were kids. We had forty to fifty students huddled up, sitting together, and we did not know which strata of society the students belonged to, and neither did we know the educational qualifications or background of our teachers. Those were not the days when you had computers and tablets. It is said that, nowadays you ask a student who has gone to his nursery class, and comes back home the first day, and the mother asks her young boy, “How was your class?”, he says, “All was fine, except that we did not have the WI-FI in the classroom or in the school”! So, today, stake-holder’s expectations have changed enormously. We should rise up to these challenges to sail with the times, she added.

A Section of the Delegates

Mr. Prince Babu Rajendran, President of the Kanchipuram District Self-Financing Schools, elaborated on the need for teachers to update themselves in the realm of knowledge to face the challenges ahead of them. He reiterated the need for specificity and being up to the point, which is the hallmark of a good teacher. Citing an example, he said, that, once he interviewed a potential teacher-candidate, and asked her a question: What are isotopes?” The candidate replied, saying, “Isotopes have same atomic number but different mass number”. She had forgotten the specific and crucial part of the answer, which is the fact that, “Isotopes are atoms!!”. This part is what is crucial for any teacher: to have an inductive reasoning ability to go from the particular to the general!  This is giving importance to specificity, he said, and added that, a guru is a person who dispels ignorance, and hence, it is the duty of a teacher to dispel the darkness of ignorance from the minds of the students.

Mr. S. H. Saleem, Deputy Commissioner, Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan, Chennai, offered his felicitations. Dr. A. Senthil Kumaran, Principal Counsellor – Education Excellence, Confederation of Indian Industry illuminated the august audience on the topic, ‘Quality – Prime Factor for Schools in Global Era’. The talk was peppered with lots of practical illustrations and pragmatic examples, and had all the ingredients of a good speech coupled with gusto and passion. Mr. Syed Sultan Ahmed, Founder & MD – Edu Media dwelt on the topic “The Blue Print for Progressive Schools”.

Prof. M. Winfred Chelliah, the Course Director, articulated with his characteristic amazing felicity of expression, the highlights of the Educational Symposium and dwelt on the long felt need for a Teacher Empowerment Centre in Tamil Nadu. Dr. K. Ganesh, Head, Department of English, MCC was also present on the occasion, along with a host of stalwarts from MCC.

To sum it up, the program was a rich source of inspiration and motivation to the academic fraternity who had their day’s worth and more!