Activity based learning as part of SSA : Chennai's focus + time to debate

I think there was a co-incidence of sorts on this topic. Just yesterday, as part of the Sikshana Outreach program @ Kanakapura, we were discussing this with some NGO's out of Chennai ....
ABL is the structure that essentially came out of Rishi Valley (and earlier from Neel Bagh) - not that I knew of this much earlier, I've read and learnt about this recently.

Why is this relevant ?
Simply because, yesterday I was surprised at the numbers that was being talked about at Tamilnadu's ranking in the ASER tests. I would have expected them to be in the top 10 if not the top 5. However, I was told that they are probably not even in the top 25 !!??


I think I'll have to look at ASER results and match that with the ABL results that gets published to find out where the difference is.... some work for the coming weeks.




NEWS ARTICLE from yesterdays HINDU - what a co-incidence !


Sibal to visit activity-based learning schools
Special Correspondent CHENNAI: Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal will visit activity-based learning (ABL) schools in the State next week.
In the wake of the commendations the implementation of the ABL scheme has received across the country, the Ministry had conveyed to the State Education Department that Mr. Sibal wanted to extensively spend time on July 14 to learn how the implementation in Tamil Nadu differed from those in other States. The idea was to involve the Human Resource Ministry and prepare a compendium of best practices that could later be implemented across the country.
State Education Minister Thangam Thennarasu confirmed that Mr. Sibal had expressed desire to visit the schools. “We are lucky to have a dedicated team of officers and teachers who have spared no efforts to implement both activity-based learning and the active learning methodology (ALM). It is a recognition of their efforts.”
The ABL and ALM are being implemented by the School Education Department as part of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), a nationwide effort to improve capabilities of all children through provision of community-owned quality education in a mission mode.
The broad aim of SSA is to provide useful and relevant elementary education to all children in the 6 to 14 age group by 2010 and to bridge social, regional and gender gaps, with the active participation of the community in the management of schools.
The SSA wing of Tamil Nadu carried forward the ABL of the primary classes into middle school or upper primary — classes 6,7, 8 through the ALM.
In 2007, 10,000 middle schools across Tamil Nadu underwent a dramatic refreshing learning process, empowering the learner to break into knowledge systems effectively, whether in the textbook or in the world around. This came as a relevant ‘chapter two' to the implementation of the ABL in nearly 40,000 schools prior to that.