The United Nations Volunteers

Rediscover your life - Part - II Somehow as adults, we stop asking these questions, we go about our lives in such a robotic way. However, for the young ones, these questions do matter, deeply, and they need to be addressed. They are struggling to find meaning in their life. There are times when I come back from work feeling so worn out with this nagging question, ‘What’s happening to these young people? What can I do?’ According to a World Health Organisation (WHO) study in 2015, Depression is the leading cause of ill-health and disability worldwide. Over 600 million people are now living with Depression and/or Anxiety. The WHO study also showed that one in four people might struggle with mental health problems in their lifetime. I am sure by 2019 these numbers would have grown exponentially. In India, suicide is the leading cause of death among the youth. In fact, a student commits suicide every hour. Nearly 40 per cent female suicides occur in India. Across the world, more...

How to develop confidence level in the students? 1 Model confidence 2 Be prepared to teach 3 Accept your students mistakes with grace . 4 Praise and encourage your students. 5 Help your students to take up challenges. 6 Provide  your students several opportunities. 7 Foster creativity in the classroom. 8 Affirm your students . 9 Give your students tasks.  10 Teach your students how  to be well organised  before hand . 11 Be an example as, a teacher before your students as a role model. Becoz do not forget that your students watch your every action . 12 Make your students social by organising regular activities.

Nurturing self  confidence and self respect in young children. Prior to teaching tiny tots learn to write or read, it is very essential for a school personnels to nurture self confidence and self respect.  Children need to feel good about themselves. A positive self-image has long-term effects on behavior, achievement, and even health. Below are some ways to encourage the development of self-confidence, using “Touch, Talk, Read, Play” techniques from the Urban Child Institute: 1. Create a sense of safety and security. Tinytots need to feel safe and secure. Mother ,the first teacher protects her child from all odds. This caring and protecting assures the child safe and secure and also have a sense of being loved and important. As child grows, this frees to explore its environment because child trusts that mother will be there as its “home base” that it can return to if frightened, frustrated, or simply eager to share the discoveries. When the child enters the sch...

Creativity: An Indispensable tool for effective Classroom Teaching Learning …. There is no denying the fact that the creativity has taken a back seat in the schools for many reasons, some are beyond and some within the control of the teachers. Imagine that an inquisitive child comes to the classroom with lots of questions in his mind as he has just seen a flower blooming in his garden this very morning. Incidentally, this is also the topic for teaching in the Science class today. He very keenly raises his hand to share his new found experiences with the teacher and also to get cleared some of the doubts which he has in his mind, when he is snubbed very harshly and is told very sternly to focus on the topic in the text book. Poor child , disheartened and discouraged, is unable to do so as he is not able to coreale the things which he has seen in his garden and the things which are being taught in the classroom through the text books. So, here the question arises: What is m...

Great impacts of positive thinking or positivity Positive thinking has grown to be seen of having great power in improving and curing illnesses. There are larger effects that positivity empowers. Positive thinking doesn't mean that you keep your head in the sand and ignore life's less pleasant situations. Positive thinking just means that you approach unpleasantness in a more positive and productive way. Positive thinking often starts with self-talk. Self-talk is the endless stream of unspoken thoughts that run through your head. If the thoughts that run through your head are mostly negative, your outlook on life is more likely pessimistic. If your thoughts are mostly positive, you're likely an optimist — someone who practices positive thinking. Researchers continue to explore the effects of positive thinking and optimism on health. Health benefits that positive thinking may provide include: 1. Increased life span 2. Lower rates of depression 3. Lower lev...

Challenge Your Thinking        The major secret of billionaires is their ability to find solutions to the challenges of humanity. All of them created solutions that brought the billions. Presently, Bill Gates is spending millions of dollars in search of renewable energy. By the time he finds one and becomes a major player in the electricity industry, we will say he is lucky. But we forget that he didn't pray for financial breakthrough, he only found a solution to a global problem. Wealthy people don't necessarily look for money, they create solutions, and money will follow them! Larry Page and Sergey Brin went all out to help humanity find things faster on the internet, they created Google and billions of dollars followed them. Mark Zuckerberg created platforms for socialization, Facebook  and over $71 billion followed him. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak went all out to reduce the size of computers, develop slick and beautiful systems Ap...

Owning Our Light Fear, shame and guilt are predictable companions to Depression and Anxiety, as are hopelessness, helplessness and worthlessness. That’s how Depression and Anxiety work. ‘I am not good enough’, ‘I am not worthy’, ‘I do not belong’ become the incessant chants in our brains. It is declared with such conviction that it is no surprise that we start believing them. Darkness is a typical metaphor used for Depression—dark clouds, dark shadow, darkness within, surrounded by darkness, thick fog. Hope is always seen as light—ray of hope, light at the end of the dark tunnel, light in the sea of darkness. We keep waiting for that light to come and dispel the darkness and despair. In this blog , we will explore how rather than waiting for the light, we can connect and own the light that is there in each one of us. Owning our light is about mining (what I call the art of panning for gold) our buried strengths, resources, skills, abilities that help us carry on from day-to...

DEALING WITH HARDSHIPS Whatever you’re struggling with, here are ...tips to help. Acknowledge and feel your feelings. “Avoiding your negative emotion may feel like an effective stopgap measure, but in fact it simply postpones, and perhaps escalates and exacerbates, a flood of negative emotion sometime in the future,” said John Duffy, Ph.D, a clinical psychologist and author of the book The Available Parent: Radical Optimism for Raising Teens and Tweens. Ignoring your emotions is “like trying to run away from something that’s right on your shoulder. The only way to truly be free is to stop and face your emotions,” said Hibbert, who also specializes in women’s mental health, postpartum issues and parenting. Still, you might worry that your emotions will be too overwhelming. While this can happen, people tend to get stuck because they’re actually not feeling their emotions, Hibbert said. “Instead, they think about, wallow in, and replay events. But they are not letting themse...

Skills For Digital Age     1. Problem solving Students need the ability to solve complex problems in real time. 2. Creativity Students need to be able to think and work creatively in both digital and nondigital environments to develop unique and useful solutions. 3. Critical thinking Students need the ability to think analytically, which includes proficiency with comparing, contrasting, evaluating, synthesizing, and applying without instruction or supervision. 4. Collaboration Students must possess the ability to collaborate seamlessly in both physical and virtual spaces, with real and virtual partners globally. 5. Communication Students must be able to communicate well not just with text or speech, but in multiple multimedia formats. They must be able to communicate visually through video and imagery as effectively as they do with text. 6. Ethics This includes adaptability, fiscal responsibility, personal accountability, environmental awarene...

Unconditional love In our society there prevails paradoxical situation; we don’t know how to stay in euphoria forever. As adults we fail to realise that most of the time we superimpose our feelings, our likings on our children.  We want them to accept our perception of success and failure. Contrary to it, we also want them to act maturely. Parents feel satisfied when their children act as obedient servants. Aren’t we hampering their creativity? How come then we can expect our child to grow up as an innovative dynamic independent leader? We adults are over judgmental and impatient. In our social circle when we learn about the achievements of our colleagues children we feel envy. We immediately determine to make our kids follow the same course. Why can’t we accept them the way they are? Why can’t we celebrate their every small achievement? Teach them to innovate, involve, engage, commit mistakes, and make them confident to be honest what may come. If we run down our m...

Making Learning More Entertaining   Sure, being a teacher is hard, there is a lot of pressure these days to make our students learn much more than we were ever required to know. But, if we want our students to stay motivated and engaged, then it is essential to make learning fun. Here are five easy ways to try. 1. Incorporate Technology When you incorporate technology into classroom instruction, students are going to have fun. Think about it: When they are at home, what are they doing? Playing video games, texting their friends, playing on their tablets and iPads. Children love technology, so if you’re looking for the perfect way to make learning fun, then be sure to incorporate it somehow into your everyday schedule. 2. Follow Up Lessons with a Fun Activity There will be times when you just can’t make a lesson fun. Or, some students may think it’s fun while other may disagree. For times like these, follow up the lesson with a fun activity. Some st...

Importance of ethics to life: Ethics should be considered as a set of principles by which to live; a code of conduct for our relationships with all whom we come in contact. Ethics encompasses social mores, usually expressed today as good manners; our behaviour towards our fellow humans and fellow creatures; and trust. Without ethical behavior in particular, one cannot relate in a reasonable way to yourself nor to others. The world operates on trust. Trust is a belief that others will act in accordance with ill defined, but generally accepted standards of behaviour and respect for others.  To differentiate good from bad. To have good instincts or bad instincts. To behave like a human or animal To be trustworthy or unworthy to believe To be moral or immoral To be accepted or ignored To be generous or cruel To be genuine or two-faced To be liked or hatred. Just like humanity, ethical situations are evolving.  Without ethical behavior in particular, one...

Psychology and Creativity ‘Is creativity a property of people, products or processes?’ (Mayer, 1999). Psychology folklore has it that, following his address to the American Psychological Association in 1950, J. P. Guilford (the APA president), ‘almost single-handedly’ rallied support for creativity, which was until then described as ‘one of psychology’s poor orphans’ (Sternberg & O’Hara, 1999; Sternberg & Lubart, 1999). From this watershed event, American Psychology led the research into creativity, establishing as early as the 1960s its own journals devoted to the subject: The Journal of Creative Behavior and Creativity Research Journal. Psychology’s research has focussed on defining creativity by endeavouring to locate its source: is it found in people and their personalities or cognitive processes, or is creativity located in products? The creative product provided Psychology with the basis for defining creativity. Teresa Amabile makes the point that ‘most expl...

What is the best method of teaching kindergarten children. Everyone likes to have the readymade stuff to use rather than the raw materials given to make a fantastic stuff. Keeping the related textbooks, yearly planning is done followed by monthly planning and weekly planning.  In macro-planning [yearly], one can find the  broad learning outcomes listed, which focus on overall development of a child during the learning process. In monthly plan, the number of chapters that can be completed along with the learning outcome related to the topic a child is expected to gain are listed. In weekly or daily plan,the outcome is focussed on the questions related to the topic. Here one can clearly understand that the broad learning outcomes are not mentioned or is having a scale or parameters to assess. Finally when it comes to the assessment, teachers focuses on list of questions put in various ways to elicit the required answers and score accordingly. At the end of the y...

Habits that changes our life. Tame Your Environment  :If you’re not in the habit of keeping a creative schedule, you’ll encounter mental resistance when you try to do your work. Go easy on yourself by setting up an office or studio with mental triggers. Remove anything from this environment that distracts, for example, television or a games console. You could even go as far as disconnecting Internet access in advance. Willpower is a finite resource, and you don’t want to expend it wrestling with distractions. Remove anything from your environment that has nothing to do with your big ideas.Leave visual clues about your work and ideas. Write notes to yourself each night about what to work on the next day. Ease Yourself into It: To cultivate lasting creative habits, prepare your work in advance.This practice ensures starting work each day takes a minimum amount of effort. If you’re writing a research paper ,thesis, for example, open the paper in your computer, connect you...

The School as a Change Catalyst The schools should be empowering young learners by equipping them with core skills such as empathy, teamwork, leadership and creative skills. Skills for a Changing World, a collaborative project, know how a new generation of skills can best be developed and enhanced in young children and students so they can navigate education and work in the face of changing social, technological, and economic demands. The focus of Skills for a Changing World is breadth—breadth of skills, breadth across ages, and breadth of learning opportunities, both inside and out of school. The Change Agent The change agent in any process of innovation may be defined by the number of roles he is expected to fulfill. For example he may be regarded as a 'trainer, consultant, counselor or therapist' (Chin and Benne 1976). Alternatively the change agent may be simply defined as 'the helper, the person or group who is attempting to effect change' (Bennie 1976)....

In what we may term "prescientific days" people were in no uncertainty about the interpretation of dreams. When they were recalled after awakening they were regarded as either the friendly or hostile manifestation of some higher powers, demoniacal and Divine.With the rise of scientific thought the whole of this expressive mythology was transferred to psychology; to-day there is but a small minority among educated persons who doubt that the dream is the dreamer's own psychical act.  But since the downfall of the mythological hypothesis an interpretation of the dream has been wanting. The conditions of its origin; its relationship to our psychical life when we are awake; its independence of disturbances which, during the state of sleep, seem to compel notice; its many peculiarities repugnant to our waking thought;the incongruence between its images and the feelings they engender; then the dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust i...

PREPARING CHILDREN FOR THE FUTURE How can we best prepare children for success in their lives and livelihoods? From hunter-gatherer societies to early civilizations, and into modernity, generations have grappled with this key question. As they do, our definition of what counts as a high quality education has evolved, as have the sites used to prepare children for their future.Our current world presents a specific set of challenges. Technological innovations, changes in the work force, and the global nature of many problems we face require a big shift in our approach to how education is delivered. Information is exploding with some suggesting the global information base is doubling at a rapid pace soon every 12 hours. Pink and others have argued, the integration and navigation of information will be as important as the learning of content.Young people will increasingly need to focus on making use of what they know and less on just mastering bodies of knowledge. In the wake of ...

Successful People Initiate. Are we the Initiators? Most people only do what they are asked, doing only the minimum requirement. They need specific instructions on most things they do. Conversely, those who become successful are anxiously engaged in a good cause. They don’t need to be managed in all things. They don’t just do the job, they do it right and complete. They also influence the direction for how certain ideas and projects go. Most importantly, those who become successful initiate. They reach out to people, ask questions, make recommendations, offer to help, and pitch their ideas. Being successful requires being proactive and not waiting for life to come to you. It means you’re on offense, not defense. You’re active, not passive. Summarized…they make things happen. The idea of the “initiator” is something that I have not only looked for in myself but in others. I wrote a post about the “4 Attributes of a Great Assistant Principal”, and I wrote something simil...