The seminars "Opportunities and Potential Effects of the Application of Modern Russian Educational Technologies, Methods of Teaching and Education to Ensure Development of Preschool Children in Educational Institutions in India" and "Opportunities and Potential Effects of the Application of Modern Russian Educational Technologies, Methods of Teaching and Raising Schoolchildren at the Level of the Initial General and Basic general education in educational organisations of India", organised in Chennai (India) by experts from ANO The "Eureka" Institute of educational policy with the support of The Russian Federal Agency "Rossotrudnichestvo" were held on 18 and 19 August 2017.
Alexander Adamsky, Academic Advisor, said, "The Eureka Innovative Educational Network runs more than 1,600 schools in Russia. We try to give a chance to children so that they do not loose in a chaos, which sometimes comes with change, and find their own happy way of using new possibilities."
The team of experts of the "Eureka" Institute of Educational Policy, with the support of The Russian Federal Agency "Rossotrudnichestvo", organized and conducted a series of seminars aimed at educating teachers, students, teachers, parents and Russian developing educational technologies for teaching preschool and school children in a work full of diverse activities. The interest of the participants, the relevance of the problems of the Indian educational system discussed at the seminar today ensured a high activity and a rapid pace of immersion of teachers and parents in the problems of the seminar, which reveals the psychological and pedagogical foundations of Russian development technologies. During the discussions, the teachers came to an understanding of the main provisions of the cultural and historical concept of L.S. Vygotsky on the decisive role of learning, which leads to the development of the child, understanding the area of the child's immediate development that helps the teacher act within the child's empowerment, developing the universality of his actions, and helping him to appropriate cultural means.
Great interest was shown by the participants of the seminars to the issue of the development of children in the leading activities. An active discussion was about the specifics of the development of the play in preschool age, as the schools of India traditionally apply the academic model of education, believing that the child from the early years must immerse in adult culture, not considering the specifics of the development of a child of early preschool age. During the practical tests, analysis of photos and video materials, the participants in the seminars revealed the main features of the four types of games that are gradually developing and appearing in a certain period of maturation of the psychic processes of the preschool child. Reflection demonstrated that the possession of this material allowed the teachers to reconstruct their pedagogical worldview already within the framework of the seminar, considering the opportunities for the school day to live the play, as the activity providing the greatest development for a child of up to seven years.
Educational events designed and conducted jointly with the participants of the seminar allowed teachers to comprehend and learn how to design educational interaction with the child when a cognitive task is built into its playing activity that gives impetus to the unfolding of the event. Denoting with the participants of the seminar the environment in which the child develops and having considered the possibilities of organizing such environments in the educational spaces of Indian schools, the teachers have mastered the ways of interaction with the child. Taking part in the work of practical workshops on the development of methods for developing children's ideas about the various means of human culture – the theatrical, visual, cognitive and polylingual environments, listeners got acquainted with non-traditional universal methods of developing the child's abilities.
The success of the seminars is evaluated, first, by new professional acquisitions made by the seminar participants in the course of its work. In a short period of time, the experts of "Eureka" formed an understanding of the importance of the concept of "leading type of activity". Workshop participants encountered problematic tasks in the field of school and preschool education in practice and in practice they could feel the role of knowledge when emotionally lived and appropriated through immersion in various activities: theater, visual creativity, design of learning tasks for the formation of students' actions goal-setting, modeling, monitoring and evaluation, designing activities of teachers who support the development of playing activities in preschool education.
The experience gained within the framework of the seminars will allow its participants to master the key ideas of Russian educational technologies in self-study mode using the sources of information recommended in the framework of the seminars.