Aawaaz In School – Aawaaz Education Services

Aawaaz has been working with schools on various fronts over the past 4 years, approaching different methods of curriculum design and execution, to make the curriculum to suit the needs of the student rather than setting a standard that all students have to follow. At Aawaaz, we are well aware of the delivery of education having an impact on the learning of a subject. So, there is constant development in the delivery of curriculum in order to make it more interesting and make very complicated topics palatable to the minds of students. Our facilitators are trained to take a class in a manner where disciplining is given up in order to give way to the ideas students have. In expressing those ideas, students have a lot more potential to grow

We do this by executing curriculum in the following ways:

Board curriculum modification:

One of the major problems faced when trying to execute Board curriculum in India and ensuring effective learning is the reliance on rote memorisation to gain merit. Rote memorisation doesn’t engage the students as effectively in terms of understanding the curriculum, since the focus remains on learning “how to memorise” and not on “what to learn”. In wanting to make education more interactive, we take the curriculum of social science subjects and condense all the information for the students and give it to them. Following this, we engage them in debates and discussions that makes students question the things they are being taught, and gain more perspective instead of approaching it in the limited way textbooks can present topics to be. For example, Civics in class 6th has a chapter pertaining to the Panchayat System. After giving students notes on the entire chapter, an Aawaaz facilitator will then pick out the various debates and ethical dilemmas that arise when studying the topic(in this case, debates like “Should one be educated to stand up for Panchayat elections”). This system is actively carried out in Bluebells School International, with grades 6th to 8th having classes in Civics, that aim to make the students interact with their curriculum more, and be more informed about the topic.

The Aawaaz Module

After identifying critical thinking, general awareness and Public speaking as the core skills required to make education holistic, we set out to design a module with a focus on just these skills in order to involve students more actively in class. The mode of delivery of our sessions differs from that of traditional teaching mechanisms, as we make it a point to be mere facilitators for the ideas of the students instead of telling them what to think and learn. By designing various activities that help in imbibing the skills of critical thinking and public speaking in their learning, school or otherwise, we try to ensure that the students are able to apply it in different scenarios, giving them full scope to ideate, while teaching them how to logically view different situations. This module is executed in two different batches, grade 3rd to 5th(junior school), and grade 6th to 8th(middle school), in several schools like Shri Ram Millennium School(Noida), the Mother’s International School and Shiv Nadar School(Gurugram), among others.

Skill Training for competitive activities

With both co-founders being proficient debaters, there remains an appreciation at Aawaaz for the ability to argue and debate in order to bring forth your point. As students reach higher classes, they become elligible to compete in activities that need you to critically think while being socially and politically aware. With this Aawaaz started to train students from grades 9th to 12th in the different formats of debating, alongside training in Model United Nations, to help students put to use critical thinking and public speaking skills that they have learnt. These training sessions are helpful as they help students understand argument structure, methods of logical deduction in a debate and other concepts that also help them perform more articulately in other critical thinking aspects of their lives(for example, writing college essays, articles etc). These training sessions are used by students in Shri Ram Millennium School(Faridabad), Bluebells School International, Mother’s International School and Neerja Modi School, among others.