A teacher needs to be the owner of a very creative mind. If the teacher doesn’t have a creative mind, it is as good as cooking food without knowing whom to serve.

The guru or teacher reflects two things, the creativity of a teacher, and the freedom or the learning independence that the teacher gives to the children. If you examine the Indian epics, guru Dhrona is an example of a good teacher. He was an expert teacher on warfare. However, he never asked any of his children, the children of the Pandava family or the Kaurava family, to learn what he wished to teach them. All that he did was to talk to them and show them the various warfare. After which he asked them to select what they wanted to learn. This is the creative thinking of a teacher, to give the freedom to children.
How can children be given the choice to learn? This is the biggest challenge. And how can children find their choice?
The Pandavas and Kauravas learnt warfare. And they learnt different types of warfare and each focused into one specialty in which they were more prominent and comfortable. The learning destination was war.

Similarly, when children come to a classroom, the learning destination is the attainment of knowledge and skills along with a language to express it, a character to benefit out of it, and an ability to support a community later. This should be the goal of any classroom.

How can a teacher become a creative person in the classroom? A teacher is like a movie director who creates a movie for. These millions of people with different mind-set focusing on one story. They are taught and entertained through the movie. Just like movie directors, teachers need to convey messages to children. For which teachers need to connect to the real life.

It is from touch to the real life.

When children are able to connect to the real life, the urge to learn will be evoked in them. So how can the teacher connect to the real life? If a teacher has the experience of connecting herself to the real life, then bringing a concept of learning from a curriculum and connecting it to the real life is easy, because the teacher has experienced and experimented it. A teacher cannot teach a theory to any child because he/she has not experimented and experienced it, and has not applied it in real life.
Imagine, if you are going to teach something and if you have applied it in the real life, you are connected to the real world. Even great actors like Mohanlal or Mammotty cannot act unless they have really experimented and taken a feel of the characters in the real world.

Having said that a teacher has experimented and experienced real-world connection of a concept, how can a teacher build that real life situation in the classroom?

Real life situation can be built in a classroom through what is called an environment of learning. For instance, to learn about animals if the teacher can take the children to the zoo it would be fantastic. The child will learn more about an elephant than from what the teacher describes and from pictures. There would be no difficulty a child is asked to identify the eyes and the trunk of an elephant because in real life, the child has connected with it.

After the child has connected, it is now time for formative questioning. The child is asked:
“Why does the elephant need eyes?”
“Why does it need a trunk?”
“Is its height and inability to raise hands is compensated by its trunk to take food to its mouth?”

Finally, in the real-life exploration, the child will understand how much an animal has adapted to its life by its creator. So, rather than just learning to draw an elephant or what its weight is and what its height is, the child will learn why the elephant is created like this and how it adapts.

The learning environment has to be created or connected, otherwise the real life connection is lost and the classroom becomes a very boring place. Either take the child to a zoo if it is an animal world, or hundreds of digital platforms are available today to bring real life connection.

History is a very important subject and every child should know history and politics. And the subjects need to be taught by creating the learning environment.

Man’s life from BC to AD is history and it will show humanity has grown over the years, from the brute to the modern sophistication. By learning history one learns how the ancestors lived, the activities they carried on, and how they were known in the communities. This teaches what we can do, what we should not do, and what we should modify.

If a child doesn’t know the history of mankind, history of continents, history of countries, history of the religions of the world, how they progressed to the modern way of living, then whatever he/she learns cannot be complimented well.

Politics needs to be taught in the similar manner. Children need to be told how humanity progressed from tribes and how tribe leaders turned into the most modern governments. So, understanding an environment in the real world and connecting to nature through a digitalised world requires a teacher to be very creative.

There are hundreds of ways for creating an environment of learning. You don’t need to have the best facilities in a school because the best facility is the environment. Everything is there. Nothing comes beyond environment, nothing shall happen without environment, and everything shall end in an environment.

Connecting to a real world through an environment is the core requirement of a good learning but it also needs something more. What is that? It is current news.

How much is the teacher aware after the current news? Because of modern communication media – televisions, news channels, newspapers – every child gets updated with the world news in one way or the other. So, the teacher needs to be updated with the current affairs in order to blend it with. Such a blended learning gets children to think in a formative way. Children will have their choice to think but will reach one destination. This is exactly what guru Dhrona did. He gave the child the choice who reached the single destination of fighting.

Accordingly, an important quality of good teaching is real life connection through creating learning environments and the teacher needs to be aligned with the current affairs of the world. The blending of all these is a good starting point for an excellent teaching.

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My last article was on critical thinking which we sometimes interpret as the ability to discover something and the ability to think in a different way to think from the bottom up. All these are critical thinking.

One of the main things of thinking backwards is something very important in our life. In fact, if I refer to my personal life, when I organised the engagement of my daughter. I did everything but I failed miserable. At the culmination of the event, many things failed. I learned from the mistakes I made when I organised the engagement. I was very careful in organising my daughter’s wedding. Everything went on so well.

Why did the function we organise fail to finish the way we wanted? We did everything but failed. We had teams, sub teams, groups, and we held meetings. Despite doing everything we fail at the culmination point.

How many times the Indian cricket team failed? Individual batsman played very well, but the fielding was bad. Or during other occasions, the team fielded very well but they didn’t bat well. At the culmination point the other team took the game away even though India was well-prepared. So why does this happen in our lives?
The answer is simple. An organisation fails due to the lack of critical thinking. And what is critical thinking? Critical thinking is where we take the ownership of a thought. Even though it was passed on to us by someone else, maybe a leader, the boss or the parent, or a friend, but we own that thought. That’s called thinking critically. This means you were disconnected to this thought early, but now you have connected it, you own it, you interpret it. Now you do it in your own way. In such a situation you don’t need somebody to order you. Somebody to tell you do this, do that, because you know. You have taken the thought to yourselves. This is the way I think about critical thinking and this should start from a school where the teacher transfers the thought to the children. Then collaborate to share the thought. Together they own the thought, together they know how to do it. Individually he/she owns the thought and does it independently. If that habit is cultivated, then later in our life we will become productive people.

Critical thinking also has another aspect. It cultivates the ability to organise events in later life as well as in my present day life. Every event is an organisation for me, even the breakfast in the morning is the net result of the ability to organise. The way I get ready for office is the net result of the ability to organise. Was I planned with the dress to wear, With my dressing style? Did I plan my time for doing different things, such as the time for commute?
Many times I was not planned for anything. If I start thinking of going to office 20 minutes before I have to go, I will be in a mess. Because I don’t know where the dress or other things are. Then I grab everything, have a quick breakfast and I run to my car. Out on the road, I am faced with a traffic snarl. Somehow I reach office late, put on a blushed smile and enter the office and I start the day. Half the day is gone and my mind is 70 per cent disturbed.
Isn’t this an organisational inefficiency?
Critical thinking is the path to how to organise ourselves. The biggest thing a teacher should do in a classroom is to give the child an answer. Please give the child an answer. Let him find out the question.

Why should this be done? Is it to understand a concept? No. Understanding a concept, a context, connecting to the real world, connecting to the real skill of life, all these are necessary. But when all these are done, why give the answer and ask the child to find out the question? To understand it? No. The teacher should know that this child in tomorrow’s world should be an efficient planner of time. He/she should be good at organising his/her daily events.

How is it possible for a child to organise the events in his/her personal life in the future? The child has to develop the skill of thinking backwards from the finishing point. From the end to the beginning. There are many things you plan from the beginning to the end as it happens in many projects. If you have to run from the beginning to the end of a project, of an event, then you should always know how to run backwards in your mind. This is the answer. What could be the question? If you have to think this is the answer, what types of questions should we address to reach this answer?

This is what we learn in a classroom when we do a project work, when we do a collaborated work, when the teacher gives you a question. In an examination, you give a question and ask the child to find an answer. That could be to address the child’s level of knowledge. But there should be innumerable formative question. For the answer is, for example, plants make food. Now ask the child, ‘why do plants make food?’ That’s a thinking challenge. To give the answer the child has to think backwards from the formation of a seed to roots to stems to leaves to flowers to fruits.

Critical thinking should become embedded in one’s life. One should have critical thinking and planning abilities which in effect is thinking ahead from the finishing point backwards. When you have both these organised well, you will have a 360 degree understanding of the whole thing. And you become an efficient person wherever you are in the world.
A teacher should teach his/her students how to own a thought as well as forward and backward thinking because the teacher creates the next generation. Teachers create the personalities of the future world. If anything in today’s world is not happy and good for us, it is because teachers failed to focus on developing critical thinking in children. If teachers understand the huge role they play and try to develop critical thinking in the children, then the future generation will have a fair chance at a good life.

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