System of Teaching Should Be More Simulated - Sandeep Mukkara Joshua Daniel

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1. Tell us more about your experience as an educator.

I train & coach executives, management & Engineers across enterprises primarily around organizational transformation, Agile & DevOps. Founded a couple of meetup groups, “Live Agile forum and meetup group” in Singapore & “Agile India Community” in India to help industry leaders share practices and problems during their transformation journey.

2. What is your opinion of the Indian education system and how would you like to change that?

Education systems across different countries are based on their prevailing culture. In India, it is primarily based on Democracy, a failed model itself. The fear of allowing the British to enter the business in India had prevented India’s growth for 5 decades. So we are not taught to share with others and be open-minded & tolerate failures. We built a system to compete like contesting in the elections. We grade students against a benchmark of contestants, not individual achievements. This practice limits innovation. We don’t encourage failures. A new idea with a thousand failed attempts is better than producing the same already proven results over a million times.

3. What changes in the teaching methodologies have you seen in recent times?

Not significant many apart from the usage of technology.

4. How does education help one do well in their career?

Education plays a vital role if the learning is based on practice, not reading. The irony is we use a phrase like “I’m studying“ to represent our action of reading a book because it was added into the dictionary due to community usage. If you notice other forms of the meaning one can easily draw the conclusion a book can be read and a system can be studied.

5. Do you think teaching as a profession is viewed at par with corporate jobs?

Probably yes but I think it is irrelevant for one to choose to teach, just like gender-bias doesn’t prevent women to take up corporate roles.

6. How can we adopt technology to make teaching more effective?

We use technology to teach, in fact, we need it for students to learn. Teaching piloting a plane with the best of the tools wouldn’t help one to learn to steer an airplane. If you simulate controlling a flight over some software would help you learn most about a pilot role. This has to change in the system of teaching.

7. Why does India need more educators like you?

Learning is an art, we need to teach how to effectively learn. There are very few who can create a long-lasting impact while they teach. We need more of them recognized and help them shape up our education system.