CTET 2018 Study Notes: Time

CTET 2018 Study Notes: Time

Dear Readers,

NCF plays an important role in securing your success in teaching exams like CTET 2017 Exam, DSSSB 2017 Exam. Keeping in view the importance of NCF, today we are sharing a post on Time. Read the article for your sure success in upcoming CTET 2017 Exam. 

Time:

Earlier documents have all included a section on recommendations on instructional time. Important concerns that we endorse from earlier documents include the need for the system to ensure that the total number of instructional days are not compromised, and that the total number of days for the curriculum should be 200 days as recommended in NCF-1988. Within this, we suggest ways in which we can work out possibilities and methods for enriching the total time spent by each child in school from the point of view of learning. 

The school annual calendar is currently decided at the state level. Several suggestions have been made in the past that the annual calendar could be planned at a more decentralised level, so that it is closer to the calendar of local activities and climate/weather. The plan for such calendars could be decentralised to the district level, and decided in consultation with the zilla panchayats. 

Considerations for making any required changes could be based on local weather conditions. For example, where monsoons are very heavy and areas are prone to flooding, it is better for schools to remain closed and have a vacation period at that time. Parents in some areas ask schools to function during summer months as it is too hot to go out even to play. There are also areas where parents would prefer that the vacation coincides with at the time of harvest so that children can participate in the family occupation. Such adjustments would permit children to learn from the world in which they live which by acquiring important lifeskills and attitudes, instead of forgoing their lives in the local community and becoming alienated from it for the sake of attending school. Local holidays could be decided at the block level. The scheduling of various school events would need to be planned by all school faculty together, along with inputs from the village/ school education committee. Thematic learning across the school grades and excursions would also need to be planned in advance. 

Needless to say, we need to safeguard against the misuse of such flexibility. Not all communities are benign spaces for children. It would go against the educational aims of the school if the community takes advantage of such flexibility to perpetuate cultural practices that are discriminatory or stereotype children along the lines of gender, religion or caste. It also could lend itself to children getting drawn into child labour. Children have a right to leisure and to play, and have time for themselves. Some local traditions and cultures are supportive of such a childhood, others less so. Often girls are burdened from an early age with domestic chores. Increasingly children are under great pressure to study, and are placed in tuition classes before and after school, and hence they get little time to play. Schools must engage with children’s families and their communities in a continuous dialogue to argue for and protect these rights of children. 

The timings of the school day could be decided at each school level, in consultation with the gram panchayat, keeping in mind issues such as how far children need to travel to get to school. This flexibility is suggested only in order to facilitate children’s participation in school. While saying this, we strongly maintain that the time spent in school itself, and on learning in the school, cannot be in any way compromised or reduced below six hours a day (and three hours for the ECCE period). Where teachers and children travel to school from a far - off place, it would befit the overall societal concern for children if bus timings are changed to enable teachers and students to reach the school and leave at a convenient time, instead of compelling them to routinely come late and leave early. 

The school day, week, month, term and year need to be planned for as a mixture of routine and variation, as children need a little of both, and the kinds of learning we would like them to experience have different requirements. We share some organisational ideas that could form the basis for planning and enriching children’s time spent in school, and also some aspects that relate to institutional arrangements for the same. 

In most schools, the day begins with a morning assembly, when the entire school gathers to do things together. This time can be used for reading the headlines of the morning newspaper, performing some physical exercises and singing the national anthem. Other activities could also be added, for example, singing together, or listening to a story, or inviting a person from the local community or an outside guest to speak to the children, or hold small events to mark some significant local or national happening. Classes that have undertaken some interesting projects could also use this time to share their work with the whole school. If not everyday, such longer morning assemblies could be planned once or twice a week. In composite schools, depending on the theme, a junior school assembly and a senior school assembly could be held separately. News headlines that are significant, for example, the bus journey to Muzaffarabad, could provide a theme for a special session on that day, and be woven into the curriculum.

For more CTET 2018 Study Notes on NCF, Click here  

In most documents, a period has been presented as a basic unit of 45 minutes of teaching-learning in the timetable. Frequently, however, this is compromised into 30 to 35 minutes, which cannot constitute a meaningful length to engage with learning. A period can, in general, serve as an organisational unit for many text-based lessons. 

But there is also a need for the school timetable to allow for other kinds of longer periods lasting an hour, or one and a half hours (a double period), for other kinds of activities such as craft or art work, projects, and lab work. Such lengths of time are also essential for undertaking cross-subject integrated learning, and for effective group work. Needless to say, in a multigrade class situation, the teacher needs a more flexible way of planning for children’s learning time in sessions that are teacher led, those that are self-directed, those in which two or more grades could be combined, etc. While certain subject areas such as language and mathematics need learning time everyday, others do not. The weekly time table could allow for variation from the regular routine but should be balanced over the week. It is essential to take stock of the time spent in learning different subject areas and to introduce corrections if the teacher finds that more or less time is being spent or is needed, than originally foreseen/planned.


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Team Clear Ctet.

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