In its mission to achieve inclusive and quality education for all (SDG 4.7), UNESCO MGIEP conducted a capacity-building workshop to enhance the skills of special educators in identifying and addressing students who learn differently as part of  Government of Delhi’s project SMILE for its public schools. It was held on May 10, at Department of Education’s premises and attended by 60 psychologists from the National Capital Region.

UNESCO MGIEP’s Difference Learning Project aims to improve functional literacy rate by enabling teachers, special educators, psychological experts and parents to identify different learners, provide diagnosis and cater to their different needs in the classroom. Dr Nandini C. Singh, Head of the Difference Learning Project at UNESCO MGIEP, conducted the workshop in collaboration with Ms Geet Oberoi, Founder of Orkids, an organisation working in the field of assessment, remediation and teacher training of educators. The emphasis through the workshop was to train special educators and psychologists in the screening of all students in order to improve overall reading skills of students.

Participants were provided hand-on training on DALI in Hindi. DALI is the Dyslexia Assessment for Languages of India. DALI is the first indigenous  screening assessment tool to identify Dyslexia in India languages. It was developed by Nandini Chatterjee Singh at the National Brain Research Centre and has been standardised and validated across nearly 4500 children. It is current available in Hindi, Marathi, Kannada and English and work is underway to extend it to Tamil, Telugu and Bengali.

UNESCO MGIEP aims to conduct many such workshops both within Delhi and in different parts of the country. A number of such workshops were conducted in 2017, yielding fascinating results for government schools of the country.

In case you are interested in such a workshop being conducted in your school or centre please send an email to n.chatterjee@unesco.org