New Delhi: Travelling all the way from Lucknow to the nation’s capital, a dozen tiny tots from Kindergarten to Grade 2 addressed the press and media at the Press Club of India here on Wednesday.
Their demand is 100% literacy for all of India’s children. The little ambassadors from Lucknow read the day’s newspapers with fluency in both English and Hindi. They also demonstrated their onegrade-up mathematical skills. The witnesses were awe struck. They have learned these foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) skills in just 30-hours over three months, then practiced for fluency. This is while the schools nationwide are trying to close the two year learning loss.
To acquire these skills rapidly, the children have used the reverse methodology of Global Dream Toolkits and a paired learning process of Accelerating Learning for All or ALfA.
Former Chief Secretary Uttar Pradesh, Alok Ranjan, said: “When I was coming down from the corridor, I went to the various classrooms and talked to these children and made them read, and they were reading as fluently as they are reading in front of you, almost all of them. So that is remarkable.”
Sunita Gandhi, a well-known educator and the program creator of the disruptive learning pedagogy says, “The main problem in education has been that of speed. When children learn rapidly, India can become literate in months, not years. We need to begin now. One more year without rapid gains can be disastrous. The good news is we have the National Achievement Survey coming up in March 2023, and we can showcase dramatic results using Global Dream.”
To the question, how will the same teachers deliver a new result, Dr. Gandhi said, “When teachers witness rapid growth, they are encouraged. Their beliefs change. Instead of training teachers as in the past, we can now try learning while doing. ALfA prompts are a crash course teachers have never had, and urgently need.”
Menka Sharma, a teacher using these disruptive methods said: “Global Dream is dramatically different. We do not teach the alphabet. We go straight to words. Children decode by themselves. Teachers do not teach or tell. Global Dream has made our job far easier, and learning by the children more effective. We can never go back to the tedious methods of the past.”
The children were accompanied by their parents. Kanika Jain, mother of 5-year-old Riddhima said, “This is working like magic. Children learn and understand many times more. Wish all children in India can learn this way, and my child can be an ambassador for change.”
Please find attached for your reference the Press Release and the images from the conference.
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