The trajectory:
2011 - Science Clubs – These happened twice a week, with children of class III & IV (each class has on an average 140 children all sections) through July to October, 2011. The modules were designed to enhance science process skills. 16 children worked with one facilitator, so there was space for conversations around the children’s hands-on experiences with science concepts. The Science Clubs have initiated a long-term relationship with the school.
2012 - Sharing ideas with teachers: We started the Year-long Science program in the school with a 12 day Science Teacher’s Training Workshop (March 19th to 31st 2012) on Teaching Science through Inquiry based methodology. Three follow-up workshops have been conducted since then to share the experiences of teachers along with some self-evaluation activities. These workshops also helped to chart out the future scaffolding requirements of the teachers based on their evaluation and experiences.
A learning spiral: The teachers came to a decision to strengthen the process of inquiry based science teaching in the school. A process was charted out, during this workshop, in which the teachers would prepare their lesson plans, with help from CEVA team; try out their ideas in the classroom; plan the next phase based on their learnings in the earlier phase and so on.