NIT Rourkela Conducts State-Level Orientation Program for Chemistry Teachers on Classroom Innovations

To make the life of school teachers easier and science education qualitative, National Institute of Technology (NIT) Rourkela conducted a piloting five-day chemistry teachers' workshop. Conducted under joint association with Council of Higher Secondary Education (CHSE), Odisha, the workshop was inaugurated on Sunday and is exclusively for those teachers who teach under CHSE board alone.

While so, over workshop-level personality development, the movement is vision-oriented, a sincere attempt towards re-intensifying pillars of science education of higher secondary level. NIT Rourkela, with its research-oriented, pedagogy innovation-oriented, and subject-enrichment-oriented education concordance, is enabling the facilitators to construct stronger pillars of theory and practice.

Volunteers from Odisha's distant areas — Angul and Bargarh, Ganjam, Jharsuguda, Sundargarh — with uneven exposure and common interest in teaching got attracted. Providing the participants so that they will be familiar with general knowledge of advanced subject matters of chemistry and newer class room techniques with higher participative students and simultaneous development between process of learning and student's life.

But one advantage of the program is getting a look at real practice. Teachers are being shown quality research equipment and quality research, some of it not even found in school lab facilities. "It's a special one-time chance for us to be working with equipment such as this," another of the Khorda delegates said. "The experience will definitely enable us to explain things in greater detail to our students."

NIT Rourkela chemistry faculty are conducting the workshops, which vary from organic synthesis and spectroscopy to curriculum development to student-centered pedagogy. The platform is also facilitating peer learning, with teachers across all locations sharing the issues and best practices with one another.

It's not books, one of the facilitators emphasized. "It's about empowering the teachers with the tool box to work the students, to experiment, and to kindle a fire for science."

Although the state was committed to improving science teaching, this kind of program has the capability to produce high-quality, effective, and confident teachers who will create scientists in the future.