Creating Independent Learners

The role of a teacher has dramatically changed in the last 20 years, owing to easier and wider access to information through the internet. At Plaksha teaching is designed to cultivate core skills that enable learners to enquire critically, analyze and synthesize information, apply rational thoughts and construct new knowledge from rational sources at the click of a button. Effective teaching can no longer be a monologue directed at the students but must be a dialogical, argumentative, reflective activity inside or outside the walls of a classroom.

For historical reasons, we club all the learners born in a year into a class, yet everyone has their unique style and pace of learning. In reasonably sized classrooms, it is immensely useful to gauge the learning style of the group and design class discussions customized to the learning styles of the majority while also being mindful of the minority. Not surprisingly, most of the students are audio-visual and kinesthetic learners. Thus, incorporating animations, videos and dynamic activities increases class participation and improves information recall.

Today, students have easier access to information via internet. This is a great opportunity to steer them towards self-directed learning, which is a foundation for creating life-long learners. Self-directed learning provides time in the classroom session to involve students in dialogues, arguments and debates as interactive classrooms in various formats thus integrating technical education with communication skills and personality development.

Conceptual understanding can only be assessed by application and critique of the concept and not memorization of the concept. Our continuous and end semester assessments are centered around hands-on or ideation projects that are simulations of real-world problem solving.

In my course, Personalized Healthcare & Medicine, discussions are around cutting-edge research in genomics that is making gene therapy and personalization of medicine possible. While it is a great feat that today genes can be edited to treat diseases, some very important aspects like consent, data privacy, data ownership, discrimination, policy and finances need to be understood and discussed. To emphasize that everyone associated with the course needs to be the ambassador of this knowledge, I designed an end semester survey to gauge if a lay person with at least 12 years of school education (with or without biology education) is equipped to give an informed consent about any genetic testing and personalized medicine.

On paper, a survey does not sound very exciting, but this one was an eye opener for students. They realized how much work needs to be done to implement technologies in a meaningful way. Academic semesters have rolled on, but I continue to get emails from students wanting to explore how we can create an impact.

By adapting and developing new pedagogical frameworks – novel ways of engaging with students – faculty become facilitators of learning and in the process create independent learners. In the courses Genetics & Genetics Engineering and Personalized Healthcare & Medicine, Prof Arshdeep Sidhu engages with students outside the classroom conditioning to help apply concepts to real world situations.

This article was first published in our 1729 Newsletter July 2024 - Jan 2025.

Arshdeep Sidhu

Prof Arshdeep Sidhu is a protein biochemist with a specialization in single molecule/conformation imaging using atomic force microscopy. Her research interest includes studying conformation-function of intrinsically disordered proteins and to develop protein-based materials for diverse applications.