Since its inception in 2002, Zeal Education has been developing and conducting programs for teachers. Zeal programs differ from standard programs in many ways:
- Our programs are called interactions rather than training programs, as we believe that our job is to understand the needs of the teachers and then try to address them.
- Our programs concentrate more on "how to teach" than "what to teach". We believe that teachers are aware of subject matter, how to solve problems, etc., while usually they need help in the actual process of transferring this knowledge to students.
- Our programs pay a lot of emphasis to hotspots, where, based on our own experience with students, we see that students face difficulties or have a tendency to develop misconceptions. Some of these would include:
- Not understanding the difference between heat and temperature.
- Not understanding the precise reasons for the formation of seasons.
- Not understanding how to balance a chemical reaction based on simple algebraic equations rather than the trial and error method given in books.
- Not understanding why the product of two negative numbers is chosen to be a positive number.
- Assuming that evolution is "Survival of the Fittest" and that organisms strive to be fit!
We help teachers by pointing out these hotspots, discussing what goes on in a student's mind while she is learning the topic and how to ensure that her misconceptions are replaced by the correct concepts.
Over the years, we have a conducted a large number of such programs. Our preferred mode of interaction has been regular interaction rather than one-off workshops, but in pre-COVID times, distances and reluctance to adopt online sessions have forced many of our interactions to be of the one-off kind.