Training Aid, not Trainer’s Aid

The schools of today take pride in calling themselves smart class enabled schools, as they have an audio- visual educational facility with educational content in multimedia format.

Research states that learning happens through different sensory organ and the most dominant is the through visual which contributes to 75%, listening contributes to 12% and the balance 13% through, touch, taste and smell. Therefore when multiple sensory organs are engaged in the learning progress, learning is enhanced and better retained in a child’s memory. I therefore, think it is a wonderful idea, to introduce such innovative ideas to classroom learning. Classroom becomes more fun and interesting.

So far the children have only used the listening to lectures, which certainly has a limitation for them to understand difficult and complex concepts. Now with this media, the students can see the process in wide detail, which helps them to understand better, ‘how things work’. For example, when they talk about digestive system, earlier the teachers would have found it difficult to explain, where each part of the digestion process takes place. But now a video can pictorially explain how the food travels in the digestive system and what function, each internal organ functions in aiding the digestion process.

My point of concern is that, these innovation learning systems should only work as a support to the student’s learning process and not a support to the teacher.  In other words, these systems are primarily aimed at making learning easy and not teaching easy. Teachers cannot therefore afford to totally rely on these fancy systems and go unprepared to class. These systems cannot be a replacement to the teachers, basic teaching skills.  You cannot assume that with so much of clarity in the teaching process, there can be no questions from the students. In fact, with more understanding comes more questions and the teacher has to be a level above to clarify the doubts, of the students.

Why am I saying this? It is because, one of the major problems a number of schools are facing today, is lack of quality teachers. When I say quality teachers, I mean the teachers who are 100% committed to their student’s progress. There are teachers who have taken up this profession, just for a livelihood, without actually understanding the important role they play in the lives of young children. A school cannot get away with the idea, that they can mask the inefficiency of their teachers, by using such novel systems.

Jci. Sen. K.V. Ratnam, Past National President and a leading trainer of JCI India, used to often mention in his ‘Train the trainers’ workshop, that LCD projector or any Audio Visual medium should be used as a training aid and not a trainers aid.

Now what is the difference? There is a tendency of trainers to heavily rely on power point slides which are either created by themselves or borrowed from someone or downloaded from the internet. Without any preparation they come and present these programmes. They run the power point slides and just read the text from the screen, and give a translation of each word (as if the ones listening are language illiterate). Just in case there is no power supply, they feel stalled. They are unable to proceed further, because all their preparation is only in the PPT slides and not in the mind. Such unprepared trainers face embarrassing situations, specifically when they have a questioning person among the audience. They are unable to give the participant a satisfying answer. This is the reason, Corporate training sounds so boring in the present context and people have developed an aversion to it. In fact, training could be made very interesting by right usage of audio-visuals. There is a saying which says, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. The trainer should take this clue. The picture or audio visual used should aid the training process and not serve as an aid to the trainer, himself.

So, dear Teachers and Trainers, please be aware that in this internet age, knowledge is in abundance. Every piece of information you provide is already available on Wikipedia or Encarta or YouTube. What should really matter is how well you are able to present the available knowledge, which is your valuable skill.

 D. Senthil Kannan,

Managing Trustee, PALMS, Tuticorin.

Author of "Transformational Thoughts" - A Journey of learning 

Email: senthilkannand@gmail.com