It has been a couple of years now that the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) scheme has been in existence but the nitty-gritty of it continues to raise questions among CBSE schools across the country. On Saturday afternoon around 250 principals and teachers from 140 schools across the state gathered in Nagpur to attend a daylong seminar on CCE. Organized by the Nagpur Sahodaya Schools Complex, the seminar was conducted by senior educationist Priyadarshini Kelkar from Vadodara who tried to address concerns about CCE.
“CCE is similar to treating a medical patient,” said Kelkar who is also the principal of New Era School in Vadodara. If my medical reports confirm I have high blood pressure and my doctor reads it but simply sends me home then it is not right. The correct method is to prescribe me some medicine and review my health after a week or fortnight. And this is exactly what CCE intends to do,” she said. Kelkar explained that CCE’s focus is on assessing a student, providing remedial feedback and following up at regular intervals.
“With CCE the aim is to evaluate all areas of development and review the progress at regular intervals,” she said. Building up to her detailed talk on assessments in CCE, Kelkar talked about the need for CCE. Education in the 21st century requires a different approach. Teachers need to be dynamic learners themselves if they have to be the catalyst for change. We as teachers have to accept that students have different learning styles and different intelligence types,” said Kelkar. She hinted that part of the resistance to CCE from teachers is due the ‘resistance to change’ factor. “Nobody likes change and hence we question it. I cook a certain dish perfectly and when my husband wants me to experiment with the ingredients I refuse. My logic is that what I am cooking is perfect so what is the need to change.
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In a sense I am a conformist too just like numerous others, but we have to understand that change is necessary. If we don’t change then we will become obsolete and this will be a disaster for our country in the 21st century,” said Kelkar. Assessment plays a major role in CCE as it helps understand how the student is faring. “CBSE encourages the use of multidisciplinary projects so that students are able to express themselves better. We have to make students learn to think creatively and be inventive, hence questions must be open-ended,” she said.
But many things are easier said than done, and the bane of CCE has been the increased paperwork it has brought upon teachers. Kelkar agreed by saying teachers are ‘submerged in paperwork’. She said, “It is common to see project works piling up in the staffroom and it is quite a task for teachers as they teach more than one section. Evaluating each one and entering data in more than one place increases the workload. One solution is for managements to provide their teachers with laptops or palmtops so that they can enter the data immediately. “
