Using art as a medium, participants explore small activities and reflective tasks. The session starts with an observation of a few photographs of children of various ages from various settings. The idea is to reflect on each of the photographs, specifically in terms of what the child could be thinking or feeling in the picture, their current stage of development and its relevance to the way they are in the picture.

During this process, participants are expected to identify specific behaviours of children who are in primary grades and higher and state their reasons for it. They examine drawings made by children and nuances in the role of context and its influence in the way children think or feel. This is followed by a discussion on the importance of understanding the children we work with, beyond what the curriculum specifies.

Then participants work on a reflective art therapy exercise of colouring the heart, putting down six values, attitudes or dispositions that they would like their students to develop at the end of 10 years of schooling. Values could be honesty, punctuality, respect, kindness, humility, care, responsibility, empathy. These values are categorised under ethical, emotional, social and the cognitive domains. Participants are expected to explain in details the reason for the colours chosen for the values.

In this session, participants think about ways to nurture well being in children through structured school processes and teacher practices. They work in groups to explore specific approaches, such as approaches to discipline, diversity, learning, community, collaboration and so on. Through group discussions participants are expected to articulate specific school processes and teacher practices for each of these categories with the guidance of the facilitators and then present their understanding to the larger group in the form of group presentations.

In this session, participants are given a few qualitative reports of students which articulate students’ values and attitudes which highlights their ability to collaborate, their empathetic nature and their ability to problem solve. They are expected to identify the kinds of assessment they would require to collect information relevant for the report which help them to come up with assessment methods and strategies.

Some of the methods shared by participants so far were role play, in depth discussion, checklist, anecdotal records and questionnaires.