Ms Srividhya Kumaran – GDP Gladiator

An enthusiastic explorer of digital teaching tools and a passionate advocate of economics and business studies, Ms Srividhya finds her greatest achievement in watching her students confidently understand and champion the concepts learned in class. She believes it is very important to connect with her learners to help them grasp the concepts taught in classrooms more effectively. She loves using powerful memes in almost every lesson and goes on to tell how effective such visual representations of concepts can be for students sometimes. 

As a student in the classroom, Ms Srividhya describes herself as a fast learner who learned about classroom concepts from her surroundings. She acknowledges, however, that her school and instructors lacked the necessary resources and expertise. Conversely, after moving to a convent school in grade 9, she became enamored with her history teacher, whose lectures had a lasting impression on her and made her fall in love with the topic. She acknowledges that after starting college, she participated in a variety of events and activities to discover her actual skills and abilities. 

Ms Srividhya thinks that critical thinking is one of the most important skills to be taught in the classroom. Her classroom discussions, bringing in real-life examples in the classroom, and debates help learners with application-based learning. As mentioned earlier, she loves sneaking in interesting memes and gifs with the help of digital tools in her lesson PPTs, helping students to relate to concepts more easily. She loves collaborating with other departments and coming up with new activities for her learners. She recently collaborated with the English department to help students understand the importance of evaluation skills – an essential ability that empowers commerce students to analyze, interpret, and make sound business decisions. She proudly mentioned business conclave, an event facilitated by her for three consecutive years for her learners that involves panel discussions across different departments on a common topic. She goes on to tell us how important such learning exposures are if we want them to progress in the direction of application-based learning. 

Ms Srividhya admits that while classroom lessons can be deeply impactful, they can also present unexpected challenges shaped by ever-changing classroom dynamics. She passionately describes one such classroom session on correlation in statistics, which is frequently regarded as one of the most tedious subjects. She chose to break up the monotony with a straightforward debating exercise in which students were split up into four groups according to the four distinct correlation features. Each team had to defend their superiority against the other. She thinks that basic classroom activities like discussions, group projects, or student-led presentations can make a big impact. Students’ participation and student-led class discussions are crucial to their learning. The “Atlas game”, in which each student starts with the first word and adds it to complete the sentence and revise the subject in the most efficient way, is one of her favorite revision exercises.  

Classroom experiences don’t always unfold like a fairytale where every well-designed activity guarantees success. Ms Srividhya remembers one such Jigsaw exercise that she had thoughtfully planned for a bigger group of pupils as a cooperative learning technique. This task was the focal point of the entire class plan, which required the students to solve it and then present it as a group. However, she found that her students were too distracted once the activity began, and no one managed to finish it, leading her to complete the activity on their behalf and then discuss the results with them. She acknowledges that there have been several occasions when lesson plans didn’t turn out as expected because of time constraints or students being frequently distracted by school activities or after lunch. During those moments, she frequently turns to using chalk and a blackboard. She believes that not every class will unfold as the teacher intended, but what’s important is that each session offers something valuable for the students to learn.  

When asked about her favorite movie hero, she chuckled as she reminisced about her beloved film ‘Mona Lisa Smile’. She immediately identified with the lead character, ‘Katherine Wilson’, portrayed by Julia Roberts. She elaborated on how this character is deeply engaged with the students, encouraging them to think beyond the syllabus and actively enhancing the learning journey for each student individually. Ms. Srividhya is already the central figure in her path as an educator, and we hope she continues to motivate countless more students by transforming economic theories into real-life lessons and making the world of business studies vibrant in every classroom she enters.