Latest pedagogy, research based and alignment with expert views.
"Reading is the gateway for children that
makes all other learning possible" -
Barack Obama, 44th U.S. President
Turning Pages does not operate in a silo and is designed to support a school's core curricular objectives. It incorporates guidelines from the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and has a unique combination of structure and enjoyment for the children.
“Exposing children to a range of children’s literature for independent reading, shared reading as well as read aloud is critical for children to develop sustained literacy skills as well as develop critical thinking, imagination and creativity.”
National Council of Educational
Research and Training
"Pupils who can read are overwhelmingly more likely to succeed at school, achieve good qualifications, and subsequently enjoy a fulfilling and rewarding career. In addition to its substantial practical benefits, reading is one of life’s profound joys."
UK Department for Education
"A good reader is most often an independent learner. It is not enough to offer a good selection of reading texts, this will not ensure that the child will become a good reader. A conscious attempt needs to be made to help children to relate to the text in a
meaningful way."
Central Board of Secondary Education
in India, CBSE
“Research shows that children who read well in the early grades are far more successful in later years; and those who fall behind often stay behind. Reading opens the door to learning about math, history, science, literature, geography and much more. Reading is undeniably critical to success
in today's society.”
The US Department of Education
As an important input into the content of our programme, we looked at Learning Indicators defined by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). The expectations and pedagogical practices appropriate for a certain grade have been defined keeping in mind the principles of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF). We also studied Learning Indicators from Common Core Standards, USA and from Educational Initiatives, India, to further understand how to incorporate critical engagement with literature in an elementary classroom.
It was evident that a programme such as Turning Pages could be strong support to the defined learning outcomes. We distilled out the key indicators that we were confident our programme could support, given the limitation of a weekly engagement, as compared to the nearly daily engagement with an English language teacher in the school.
The result is a programme design that is, at the minimum, a strong support to the school's academic learning objectives for its primary grades children.
Hierarchy of questions/discussion topics that lead the children from simple recall of the facts of the story right up to higher order critical thinking and problem solving skills. (Deploying Bloom’s Taxonomy)
We are mindful that there are multiple watch-outs in how Bloom's Taxonomy is used and ensure that we take only the best from the framework
Alignment with Socio Emotional Learning: No learning can happen unless a child is socially and emotionally well adjusted. We have adapted relevant elements from ISELF (Indian Socio Emotional Learning Framework) to weave in key themes into our discussions.
ISELF is the result of extensive research by The Teachers' Foundation that looks at socio emotional learning in the Indian context and with an age banded approach. An eminently practical and user friendly framework, which we have found is a natural fit in our choice of books and discussions.