The Academic excellence workshop was an one day programme conducted in Gudibande, Chikkaballapur District,Karnataka on 8th Nov 2022. The session were presented by Team AHEAD.(Sandesh, Tejaswini, Balakrishna and Dheeraj). The sessions was conducted in two batches. The first one was from 9.30 am to 12.30 and this session included only girls. A total of 95 students both from Kannada and English medium in govt. Schools participated in this session. The second session began at 1.30 to 4.30 pm and this was only for boys. A total of 120 students from both the mediums participated.
The topics covered were honesty and integrity. This was a video interactive session where students were shown the importance of being honest and the impacts of not being honest in the long term. The importance of being honest in life was explained to students in detail. This was explained through interactions and posing situations. Second session topic were goal setting and time management. In this, we made the students to think in a way to set their goals, the procedures they have to follow, the points that should be there in mind while setting a goal and how to execute their goals.
In Time management part, we made the students aware that they live in an illusion where they believe a lot of time remains to achieve their goal. Here, we made them understand how they are wasting their time with unnecessary things like phone, tv, etc. In this part, we made them count the days so they should understand the importance of time. We asked the students to respect value of time.
In the next session, we made them play few games called role model games. Through this, we made students aware that we don’t follow what we listen, we follow what we see. We made them feel responsible as people around are watching us and they should be more responsible.
The next is Study material. In this we made them understand how we learn things. We taught them certain techniques so that they could remember names, formulas, dates etc. easily.
We also focused on the distractions the students are facing these days. We gave them certain techniques which they can apply in their real life to get more concentration and results.
The final session is the video interaction. Here we showed a successful story which gives the message, if we have the hunger to learn more, to gain more and to achieve more, nothing stops us.
The main thing in the entire session is that we will make sure students break their pattern of low self-esteem. We made them to remove the barriers and made them believe that if we have to achieve something big, my background doesn’t matter. This is the final message of academic workshop.
The feedback to the session was excellent. Even though coming from a rural area like Gudibande students have big and unique dreams. There were many civil service aspirants too. This workshop helped them to work more to achieve their goals. Even though the sessions were aimed for students, many teachers also participated in it.
