Picture this. ⬇

Multilingual early learning classrooms boast a diverse group of learners. At least half of them are introduced to English as a subject. Most such children have a completely different home language than English. And most of their everyday environments are devoid of any English literature whatsoever. In some cases, even in environments not devoid of the language, these children are too young to have gained much exposure to English. Most have only learnt their native language correctly, and English then becomes a ‘second language.’

In this scenario—which holds true for most young learners across India’s early learning landscape—learning a new language, be it English or a regional language, is most fun through stories. While the languages themselves may be vastly different, with cultural, linguistic, and other distinctions, stories themselves are universal. These stories become a relatable bridge that help kids understand this new language in a familiar light. Additionally, stories for younger children tap into the main emotions all children will be able to identify — surprise, hunger, joy, anger, and even sorrow.

HOW STORIES BENEFIT ENGLISH LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

*and any other second-language acquisition

• When children listen to stories, they build their oral language skills. When they begin reading, they build their emergent literacy skills. They gain exposure and are able to practice sounding out letters and words—and later, sentences—in English. This is one of the most important steps in learning a new language — simply observing the language and allowing the brain to pick up patterns in the background. Once this initial process has been accomplished, the brain adds observations to specific types of patterns, like what some groups of words look like or sound like (i.e., word families), how sounds come together to form words, and how words can be split up into individual sounds. Every observation affects children’s perception and processing power of the language.
  *What are word families? ‘Word family’ can refer to any grouping of words based on a particular pattern. Square Panda’s educational games refer to word families that have the same ending sound and spelling, like SAP-NAP-TAP and MAT-SAT-PAT.
  *Why teach word families? It helps a young brain process information faster when there is a certain pattern to the knowledge they are exposed to. Word families are one type of pattern that helps children process words in their head more easily.

• A fun tale that is accompanied by clear illustrations and pictures—as found in most books for young readers—are crucial to develop comprehension skills. For children who have been exposed to vocabulary and words in their native language, these images give them meaning and context. For instance, vocabulary instruction for English language acquisition would include explaining the fact that ‘tree’ means ‘पेड़’ and ‘home’ means ‘घर’. However, their memory would struggle under the weight of too many new words being taught at the same time, especially if there is little repetition of certain vocabulary. Instead of stand-alone words, when children are exposed to a new language via stories and pictures, the context and narrative helps them remember new words more clearly.

• The above narrative also taps into another basic characteristic of stories—a good story is always emotionally engaging. When we are emotionally engaged with a story, it automatically hammers a place for itself in our memory. This is why the plotline of the Aamir Khan movie “Lagaan” is at the tip of your tongue, but you might struggle to remember the year the Constitution of India was adopted. This also means that children learning English find it much easier to remember a brand new language when presented in the form of an emotionally engaging story.

NOTE: ‘Emotionally engaging’ differs as per the age. A 34-year-old might like to read about the future of education in the age of AI, but for a 4-year-old, a little animal trying to find somewhere to nap is the most engaging story of all.

• Stories have also been shown to help children develop social cognition a.k.a. emotional intelligence. This refers to having an understanding of others in society and behaving in an accordingly cooperative way. For instance, stories can help children develop empathy, i.e., understanding that others are also people with feelings and emotions, thoughts and experiences. They merit being treated in a caring and respectful way. This concept of emotional intelligence—while basic and natural on the surface—is a complex idea that children have to develop and is not something they are automatically born into. Stories with a ‘moral’ at the end, characters that exhibit characteristics like kindness, thoughtfulness, and caring, all help children develop this understanding.

BUILDING A READING HABIT AS OPPOSED TO A SIMPLE READING LESSON

A reader can aptly describe the joys of sitting down with a book. How the words can take people to unexplored lands, how the thoughts expressed can encourage innovative thought, and how each new book inspires and uplifts people. This is not all that reading offers. A regular reading habit can enhance vocabulary, strengthen memory, decrease stress, and strengthen the connections in your brain in multiple ways. Bringing stories into the equation early on in a child’s life helps adults nurture the reading habit, turning these pre-readers into lifelong readers.

WHY SHORT STORIES ARE BETTER FOR EARLY LEARNERS

For children, most of whom have short attention spans at that age, short stories can optimise the learning process by hitting the balance between fun and tiring. Remember, most of them are just beginning to learn through the simple act of reading or listening to a story. As they start to explore various concepts like comprehension, social cognition, and patterns, short stories help them stay challenged and yet, not overwhelmed with too much information.

HOW SQUARE PANDA TEACHES CHILDREN FOUNDATIONAL LITERACY

An interpretive story forms the base for all of our educational games and apps. Two main characters, Panda and Cameo, are joined by a host of other animals accompanied by mini-storylines, for the purpose of driving learning through gamification. Each part of our curriculum is well-suited to engage a young brain, and adapts as per their individual learning levels. We carefully designed each part of our offerings with the understanding that children learn best when they are engaged, and there is nothing more engaging than a story.

To know more about our programs under the Aarambh initiative, visit our website ecce.squarepanda.in.

Early experiences during the period of rapid brain growth until the child is eight can influence future learning, health, and behaviour. Studies conducted by the Harvard Centre for the Developing Child show us that a child’s brain makes one million new neural connections per second in the early years. Subsequently, children deprived of developmentally appropriate stimulus in these early years are at risk of lagging behind their peers.

Given the widespread agreement in research and education literature that discovery-based methods could be more effective in academic and cognitive development, play-based pedagogy is a powerful mechanism to support early learning. Numerous researchers agree that learning through play builds a foundation for creativity, intellectual growth, and problem-solving ability in children.

*Why is play-based learning so important? Read this article to find out.

The importance of play-based learning has been recognised by the New Education Policy (NEP) of 2020, which outlines an educational transformation based on the principles of a play-based approach to early childhood education.

However, simply sending children off to play will not culminate in them acquiring essential foundational skills. Facilitators are needed at each level of the early education landscape, from administrators, to teachers, and parents, if we are to insert effective play-based instruction into daily activities.

THE BENEFITS OF PLAY-BASED LEARNING

A quick glimpse at how play-based learning strengthens many areas of a child’s development:

WHAT SKILLS DOES PLAY-BASED LEARNING DEVELOP?

Much of the early learning programs developed by experts include experiential forms of learning, including play-based instruction. 

For instance, Square Panda India uses our expertise in Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) to design a curriculum that strategically embeds play into our learning system. Our program weaves in gamification and storytelling as a part of our experience-based learning model, ensuring children are constantly engaged and enjoying their learning.

These play-based activities and learning games expose children to a new skill:

HOW CHILDREN LEARN THROUGH PLAY

By his own admission, Albert Einstein’s introduction to scientific inquiry came about accidentally, with play. This pivotal event occurred when he was just four or five years of age, stuck in bed due to an illness. Seeing his boredom, his father handed him a magnetic compass to play with, and Einstein spent hours twirling the compass this way and that, wondering why the needle kept pointing north. This experience left a lasting impact on his mind, leading him to believe that a greater truth was hidden behind everything.

“Play is a powerful instrument to guide knowledge and education, and is, in fact, the key to learning. We’ve seen the research, and have found through our own expertise and case studies, that play-based instruction enriches the early education experience while reinforcing essential skills like literacy and numeracy, inquiry, expression, creativity, experimentation, and teamwork.”

– Ashish Jhalani, MD, Square Panda India

Young children learn differently from adults, taking inspiration from pretense and their imagination. Play brings together the logical and creative parts of their brain. Children tap into various skills as they play, creating an outlet for stress and anxiety at the same time. They begin to communicate ideas, develop a foundation for literacy and math, understand vocabulary, learn about actions and consequences, build deeper understandings about social relations, and recognise how their initiative influences decisions and self-choice. Researchers have even found that play helps children regulate their own emotions, helping them think before they act. Their experience with play-based learning helps children become thriving adults capable of living in any range of personal and professional environments.

 “The heart (human values and ethics), the head (our minds), and the hand (our bodies), can be holistically balanced with play and activities”

Says early years’ author, educator, teacher trainer, and content developer, Sonia Relia

*Watch her educational series with Square Panda India, called Square Panda Thursdays, here.

The education space is evolving; early childhood educators, Anganwadi workers, and adults responsible for imparting education must strive to create a play-friendly learning atmosphere with an appropriate balance of play and academics to reach young learners naturally. This is the best way to bring tangible results to children’s growth. 

See how Square Panda India is helping ensure that today’s young minds become tomorrow’s visionaries: ecce.squarepanda.in

Share the learning; share this article!

WHAT IS EXPERIENTIAL-BASED LEARNING & TEACHING ?

The term ‘experiential learning’ is used to talk about learning that is gained by experience or ‘learning by doing’. 

Fun Fact: The experiential learning concept has been around for a very long time, and was first explored in the education and learning context by educationists like Jean Piaget, among others. It was made most famous by American educational theorist Professor D.A. Kolb, who showed that mastering expertise is a continuous process of experience, reflection, conceptualisation, and experimentation. 

In India, experiential learning can be likened to the Gurukul education prevalent since ancient times across India. The students learnt by performing various tasks under the guidance of the Guru (teacher). Schools across India have already been practising some form of activity and experience-based learning, but the Department of Education has taken this one step further by necessitating experiential learning including learning that has elements of enquiry, gamified, activity-based, story-based, in Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), along with parallel teacher training programs to help educators understand the right way to impart such instruction.

Read more about the crucial impact of teacher training on the NEP 2020 here.

Some examples of experiential learning in the classroom:

• The Rainforest Learning Centre in the USA includes experiential education in almost all aspects of their curriculum. Their daycare and preschool-age learners are introduced to environmental clean-ups and animal adoptions, where they not only clean garbage and play with pets, but understand the results of their actions on the environment and community.
• Square Panda conducted pilot studies with our early learning system across schools in India. We provided young students with access to our early literacy platform, where they were taught to start reading the English language using stories and activities. In a period of a few weeks, with no extra intervention at all, we saw a marked improvement in the students’ learning outcomes, in skills like word reading and sentence reading.
• Mahindra International School (India), takes its primary school children on field trips as a part of their academic learning programme. Incorporated during school hours, these trips introduce young children to physical learning environments like zoos and farms.

WHEN DOES EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING HAPPEN ?

True experiential learning takes place when learners get immersed cognitively, emotionally, behaviourally, while reflecting and processing each experience, which then leads to a change in perspective, comprehension, thought, and behaviour. The next step is the application of the newly acquired learning to real-time events, turning these students into individualised learners who are well on the path to future success.

WHY EXPERIENTIAL METHODOLOGIES ARE THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION IN INDIA

The pedagogical approach that is experiential learning has the potential to revolutionise early learning, changing the Indian educational landscape as we know it, for the better.

For Children:

• Future-Ready Skills: An experiential base of learning provides children with real-life experience to match textbook teaching, which can be applied to problems for more practical use of knowledge.
• Personalisation: Traditional learning in India works on a one-size-fits-all approach at present, which affects learning outcomes. With a more experience-based approach, the learning modules can be specifically catered to each child’s individual requirements, enabling better skilling.
• Increased Engagement: Fun stories, activities, games, music, and other aspects of experiential learning all serve to keep young children engaged and exhibiting high levels of motivation as they immerse themselves in the experience.

For Educators:

• Improved Teaching Skills And Competencies: Educators are a very crucial part of ECCE, being responsible for young learners’ development and growth in this foundational period. Personalised, experience-based instructions will help educators professionally develop at a much faster rate while strengthening their subject matter knowledge.
• Knowledge Of Experiential And Activity-Based Teaching Learning Techniques: When educators are trained using experiential methods, their capacity for imparting knowledge using those same techniques increases exponentially, improving the learning outcomes, creating a more holistic development of the students.
• Mindset Changes: Explaining to educators about various styles of teaching is vastly different from allowing them to experience it. Hands-on experiential learning activities have a drastic effect on the mindset of educators, allowing them to relate to the theory, and put it into practice in the classroom.

WHY BUILDING ECCE PROGRAMS USING EXPERIENTIAL TEACHING-LEARNING METHODOLOGIES IS A BETTER IDEA

To ensure a higher quality of foundational learning in ECCE programs across India, there is a need to incorporate the NEP 2020’s vision of a comprehensive experiential teaching-learning methodology. Here’s why we think integrating experience-based instruction into the early classroom has a higher learning outcome:

• Blended Classrooms Can Be The New Norm: Instead of rote learning and traditional classrooms, a new blended form of teaching takes its place, where digital learning is combined with physical instruction. Experiential learning will be interwoven with online learning, creating a virtual safe space for real-life simulations, increasing young children’s engagement, and overall learning outcomes. 
• Gamified Learning: An educational approach to get students inspired and learning via game-based elements, gamification increases the enjoyment of learning, and thereby, retention. When backed by a research-based curriculum, gamified learning develops critical and strategic thinking, supporting students across different learning levels.
• Educator Empowerment: It’s not just students who benefit from a holistic program that teaches via experience. Educators can be trained and empowered to deliver high-quality content, develop strong subject knowledge, and polish their professional skills, using experiential teaching methodologies.
• Playing-&-Learning Activities: “The importance of play-based activities, especially for young learners, cannot be highlighted enough. This approach to learning sees children develop essential life skills like critical thinking, gross and fine motor skills, and much more”, remarks the curriculum head for Square Panda India, Ms. Neha Shah, when asked about the impact this particular experiential learning method has on early childhood education. Even the NEP 2020 itself documents its importance, by stating, “The learning in the Preparatory Class (a class each young learner will attend before the age of 5) shall be based primarily on play-based learning with a focus on developing cognitive, affective, and psychomotor abilities and early literacy and numeracy.” 

This application of theory and academic content to real-world experiences within the classroom and other surroundings allows young children to learn, explore, and respond to situations appropriately. ECCE benefits from such experiential programs by promoting increased aptitude and cognitive development in the early years. India is shedding some much-needed light onto this teaching-learning methodology, increasing adaptation of 21st-century skills and techniques for a better, more literate India. 

Square Panda’s foundational learning program and educator empowerment programs have a holistic approach to teaching and learning, via experiential and activity-based methodology. These research-based techniques use multisensory elements, storytelling, music, play-based activities and other experiential elements to achieve better learning outcomes and optimal results.

What is your take on experiential learning in the Indian classroom? How do you think it benefits ECCE? Comment below.

The continued growth in information processing, and the advent of technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in education, is a game-changer for education, and consequently, the educators. The people we entrust with our children’s education have a very important role to play in their futures and the future of the country as a whole; to accomplish this crucial task, they need to be empowered with thorough guidance and training, with complete assistance in developing 21st century-appropriate skills. To directly quote research studies conducted over the years, “Students succeed when intensive, comprehensive, and high-quality prevention and early intervention instruction is provided by well-trained and well-supported teachers”*.

At present, the traditional method of learning in India involves a blackboard and reading from the textbook, a method of rote learning that is outdated for the changing educational landscape. To enable the well-rounded development of children, educators (especially ECCE educators), not only have to function as high-quality content creators but also have to understand the neuroscience behind early learning and the ecosystem that comes into play when a young child begins to learn.

Unfortunately, the teaching profession in India is faced with a multitude of challenges:

• A basic level of proficiency: Currently, educators across India only have basic skills needed to impart education and train young minds to be future-ready. The onus at present is on developing high-quality educators who help mould a stronger generation of future citizens.
• One-teacher-fits-all: Students across different grade levels study together in one classroom or Anganwadi, with only one teacher explaining all the subjects. Here, subject matter expertise is a problem, along with the appropriateness of curriculum as per the individual learning needs for every child.
• Administrative duties: An already burgeoning workload is further burdened by a host of administrative tasks. For example, teachers are required to handle extracurricular activities, data collation to help with the creation of physical reports, and more, along with teaching their young charges.

• Availability: A less than optimal pupil-teacher ratio, existing training curriculum that requires an overhaul as per the changing needs, and more challenges, see many opting out of choosing teaching as a profession. NEP 2020 has allowed for multiple provisions and considerations in its approach to teacher education, but finding and retaining a high calibre of educators remains a challenge.
• Other problems: Those in the education profession are also bogged down by limited resources (hardware and funding), a vast geographical area with many remote places, a lack of support, and, due to COVID, a drastic and sudden shift of the traditional classroom towards a more blended approach, which sees educators struggle to embrace technology like never before.

The Department of Education, in its latest National Education policy, states, “In all stages, experiential learning will be adopted, including hands-on learning, arts-integrated and sports-integrated education, story-telling-based pedagogy, among others, as standard pedagogy within each subject, and with explorations of relations among different subjects. To close the gap in achievement of learning outcomes, classroom teaching learning methodologies transactions will shift, towards competency-based learning and education”. 

This policy reiterates adopting new-age skills into the existing teaching framework, adding important experiential methods including gamification, storytelling, art, music, and more. The new education sector as envisioned by the policy aims for holistic, all-round development of young learners by qualified and trained educators.

To see a substantial positive shift in the Indian education sector, particularly in ECCE, educators existing and new will have to be trained in the pedagogy of today’s changing world while also gaining an in-depth understanding of a child’s neurological development as learning is imparted. And, as the coronavirus pandemic has taught us, to adapt to the changing educational ecosystem, educators across India must develop a strong understanding of digital literacy. 

The Impact Of empowering the Educators On Indian Education:

• Impact On ECCE: Robust educator training and empowerment programs have a strong impact on early childhood education. A deep understanding of subject knowledge coupled with an awareness of the neuroscience behind early learning results in powerful skill development in the young learners,  building a strong foundation for lifelong learning, setting them on a path for success. For example, an English language teacher who knows their subject can easily explain topics ranging from phonological awareness to idioms and puns, without any loss of understanding on the part of their students.

• Developing New-Age Methodologies Of Teaching: The National Educational Policy 2020 describes a whole new way of teaching, including a host of 21st century skills like ‘experiential learning via gamification and apps’, ‘holistic learning’, and more. These new techniques will entice learners more, enabling an improved attitude towards education, which results in an improved and enhanced academic performance.
• Subject Matter Knowledge Improves: A stronger grasp of the subject in question will see educators being able to explain concepts and ideas better, increasing the comprehension by students.

• Improved Performance Of Students: Studies have correlated teacher training to stronger student test scores, adding that the main reason for the improved performance was because the teacher had a better grip on the subject matter.
• Contribution To Economic Prosperity: High calibre educators who are trained, professionally developed, and dedicated, form the backbone of society, transferring knowledge and culture to batch after batch of learners. Forming an essential part of the radical changes we wish to see in our nation, these educators contribute a lot to the economic prosperity of a country.

“The quality of teacher education, recruitment, deployment, service conditions, and empowerment of teachers is not where it should be, and consequently the quality and motivation of teachers does not reach the desired standards. The high respect for teachers and the high status of the teaching profession must be restored so as to inspire the best to enter the teaching profession. The motivation and empowerment of teachers is required to ensure the best possible future for our children and our nation.” -NEP, 2020

A well-trained educator can not only mould a child’s entire future from the early years itself, but they also enhance their talents, helping them thrive in tomorrow’s world of work.

Square Panda is working towards the empowerment of educators via robust and innovative empowerment programs. 

*Reference: (c.f. Al Otailba, Connor, Foorman, Schatschneider, Greulich, Sidler, 2009; Al Otaiba & Torgesen, 2007; Rashotte, MacPhee, Torgeson, 2001; Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2006, Torgesen, 2007; Vaughn & Wanzek, 2014; Vellutino & Fletcher, 2007.).