Every morning at school was a challenge. As teachers we handle youngsters of different age groups each with a mind of their own, different learning styles and range of understanding abilities.

On that particular day I was to take up Writing skill in classroom. As we all know it is one of the most difficult skills to teach. Writing is something students hate doing. One of the boys, Rajan in my class would always say, “Ma’am can I tell you the answer? Why do you want us to write? Each time I would patiently tell them, “Your writing gets assessed in tests and exams”. With a sullen face they would retreat.

I entered the class that was absolutely silent. Twenty students and not even one was talking. This was unbelievable. I got a cold response to my ‘good morning’. I looked at them and all of them shouted in chorus ‘no writing class today, can we go out to the playground’? At that point I said ‘yes’ to them and we all went to the playground.

Next day when I entered the class, one of the girls, Keerthi got up and said, “Mam can we do ‘writing task’ as a group activity”? I was pleasantly surprised. My answer was a spontaneous and resounding ‘Yes’. At that moment I had a brainwave, I told them, I am putting down a couple of topics on the board and they have to write a 100 words paragraph on that topic. One paragraph per group was the mandate. I told them they could call me if they had a doubt. To my surprise, each group decided on a topic, they wrote the vocabulary required, the verbs and some conjunctions and prepositions in their notebooks.

In one group each student gave a sentence using words from the list and they continued this way and completed.

In another group all of them worked together for each sentence.

It was indeed an eye opener to me, I realized if they are trusted and given free hand students can do wonders.

Next day I asked one person from a group to write the paragraph on the board. Then I asked others to check for spelling errors, grammar errors and see if sentences were in an order that made the paragraph interesting to read. Believe me this was such a satisfying exercise, of course it took us three days to complete but at end it was their planning their strategy and the finished product was theirs. There was a sense of ownership.

Never did they want to go to the playground after that day.

Learning:

• - Trust the students, they will trust you
• - As teachers our role is to make students autonomous learners
• - Patience is the key