Choosing the right coaching for your children
If you are considering a tutorial or coaching centre for your child to strengthen the concepts and make them more competitive, I want to share with you some of the factors that you must consider. Putting your child in a wrong place may result in making them lose interest and completely overwhelming them.a tutorial or coaching centre for your child deepen the concepts, making them more competitive
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Active Engagement
Perhaps the most important feature of Cogitare is the way the teacher actively engages with the student.
The teachers do not use the forum to exhibit their knowledge rather they use multiple forms of inquiry based learning techniques making the students think, participate, discuss and learn the concepts along the way.
Relevance
While teaching a concept, the students would like to know why they are learning a particular concept – How is it useful in daily lives? Providing this information and spending some time on the relevance of the topic brings about increased interest in students.
Motivation
Relevance and Motivation are closely linked. While Relevance is more around how is this useful in the real world, Motivation is about how the students can use their knowledge gained to work at the highest levels – making innovations and improvements in the associated fields.
Feedback
Timely feedback to students and parents helps in course corrections and sustained improvements. Feedback should include students responsiveness in class, timeliness in completing assignments, specific areas the students should focus and improve.
This goes hand in hand with how Cogitare teachers are able to engage with students on a 1 on 1 basis and have a good understanding of students strengths and areas of improvement.
Repetition and Practice
A good class imparts conceptual understanding to the students. However if this knowledge is not cemented by regular practice and deepening of the knowledge, this gain in knowledge is bound to decay.
At Cogitare, the teachers are cognizant of the knowledge decay and therefore design assignments that are administered at regular intervals that test knowledge gain in increasing levels of difficulties.
Chunking
Chunking refers to breaking down a concept / competency to smaller chunks i.e. “micro competencies”. Teachers ensure that the students have a good understanding of all the micros before exposing them to a question / assignment that looks at how all these come together in answering a question / assignment.
For example solving questions in Time and Motion that involve graphs would involve students to know:
- Basic formulae involving distance, time and speed.
- Understand conversions.
- How to plot a basic graph.
- What do different shapes in a graph mean – “interpret a graph”.
- How to correlate inclination or slope of line in graph with velocity, acceleration etc.
Transfer of Learning
This is a very critical aspect of learning. This refers to being apply to concepts learnt in one field in another.
Students should not learn concepts in silos – They must be trained to apply knowledge gained in one area while solving questions in a different area.
There is a huge interplay between Math, Physics, Chemistry & Biology.
- Concepts & techniques of geometry, trigonometry, algebra are extensively used in modelling problems in Physics and likewise concepts learnt in Physics are used to understand chemistry and vice versa.
- Biology, Chemistry & Physics are also so very closely linked, that we cannot do one without the other.
- One cannot understand the digestion process without understanding chemistry.
- One cannot understand respiration without understanding how gases get exchanged using osmosis, a concept in physics.
Collaboration
Collaboration is a real world skill. It is impossible to succeed in a career or solve real world problems without collaboration. Students must be encouraged to collaborate, respecting each other’s ideas and working together as a team in solving a project or a problem.
Metacognition
Students should be aware of their own progress. They should be setting Goals on a weekly, monthly basis and they should be trained to manage time effectively in meeting their deadlines and goals.
