At The Heritage School, Vasant Kunj, work on interpersonal skills and character development happens is done in numerous ways: This important aspect is catered through extensive training for teachers on how to work with students around life issues and personal development and workshops are conducted by our counselling staff as well as by professional facilitators and experts from the respective fields.
CIRCLE TIME/CREW TIME/CLASS TEACHER PERIODS
We work extensively with students to nurture personal qualities such as empathy, authenticity and accountability. Students from kindergarten through senior programme meet regularly to discuss a range of interpersonal and social issues ranging from bullying to test anxiety to social pressure and life balance. Teachers are trained to conduct the less formal sessions where academics is not the primary focus, the strengthening of strong relationships is established among students in class groups and also between students and their class teachers.
LIFE SKILLS WORKSHOPS
At the Heritage School, Vasant Kunj, we work with our counselling team and class teachers to create a professionally facilitated session on Life Skills, Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Development. Life Skills are the skills that one needs to build a happy and successful life and to equip young adolescents with a set of tools, skills and winning attitudes, which can help them to become all that they are capable of becoming. Life skills development is centred around a dialogue and a conversation which begins within the self and then moves outwards to the other members of the class. The dialogue is both ‘intrapersonal’ as well as ‘interpersonal’, thus facilitating and enabling children to line their daily times confidently by managing their desires, making appropriate choices and dealing with difficult situations & emotions without being over whelmed or defeated by the challenges of life.
ADDITIONAL PURPOSE-DRIVEN WORKSHOPS
Throughout the year, we work with highly reputed partners to facilitate workshops on study skills and adolescent development issues, with focused sessions which help in stream selection and ultimately making wise college and career choices. We also work individually with each student throughout the school, using assessment data (both internal and external) to set goals for their own development and, more importantly, to believe in the fact that they can succeed.
INTEGRATION OF OUR DHARMIC PRINCIPLES
Dharma or Values guide all our philosophy, curriculum, pedagogy, processes, policies and most importantly – Our behaviors.
Our core values include, Freedom to be, learn and grow; Attentiveness; Authenticity; Excellence; Inclusion and Respect.
Freedom to be, in this sense, would naturally be freedom to learn and grow, to evolve into one’s highest and deepest potential of being. The school therefore ensures that it’s learning and living environment remain free of guilt, shame, fear, judgments and expectations.
Paying attention is giving oneself, giving one’s consciousness, to life, work and relations. Attentiveness demands a certain degree of quietude, focus and discipline. The day in Heritage begins with peaceful community prayer; sharing of students opinion on a topic through an appropriate medium selected by them; some reflective time by the thought of the day and National Anthem. Having a meditative time done by playing a soothing collection of Instrumental music does ending of the day. This time is called, “Silence Time”.
Inclusion is the principle of embracing and celebrating diversity, differences and even contradictions towards the creation of a just and equal system and culture where each is free to live, discover and express his or her own fullest potential of being without being discriminated against or marginalized.
In action it implies equal opportunity and equal attention for all who come to Heritage without any discrimination on any ground.
Authenticity is not possible without integrity. A person with integrity is one who is integrated within him or herself. An integrated person feels what he thinks, and acts what he feels and thinks. In Heritage there is complete transparency in working at all levels.
The respect for oneself, and for all others; respect for what one is and can become; equally, respect for what others are and can become. The respect for space and time; the respect for all things that we use for our work; the respect for the environment we live and work in. Respect for one’s own and other’s time.
Excellence, as a value, is the constant insistence on the best possible in any given circumstances; the urge to strive for the highest and the best in that entire one is and does. This implies equally the firm and persistent rejection of all carelessness, mediocrity and laziness in work, behavior and relations. It is only when there is such a universal insistence on excellence in the culture and environment of a school that excellence can become an embedded value into be lived.
