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FAQs
what is the school's vision ?
We seek to build compassionate and responsible global citizens who contribute to a peaceful and sustainable future. With awareness that we are interconnected, we aim to shift the focus from “I” the individual, to “we” the peers, to “us” the community and ultimately to “ours” the world we share.
what is the school's mission ?
The mission of Chettinad - Sarvalokaa Education (CSE) is to provide a high-quality educational programme that maximizes students’ intellectual and personal potential whilst instilling them with a deep understanding of the world to better prepare them to tackle its environmental and social challenges.
what is the
curriculum
followed?
CSE is a Waldorf-inspired school, affiliated to Cambridge Assessment International Education. It currently offers Cambridge Primary and Cambridge Lower Secondary programs, and intends to take up Cambridge IGCSE and A-levels in the near future. As a Waldorf-inspired school, we seek to foster reverence, appreciation, and gratitude to the cosmos and nature, and foster acceptance, respect and understanding of people in the immediate cultural, geographical local environment and in the larger world. Children learn through a journey of creativity, imagination and self-discovery, and develop as free human beings with purpose and direction to their lives. To prepare children for the new millennium, we aim to develop individuals who are creative, collaborative, adaptable and resilient. Our humanistic approach empowers students to discover the joy of learning, embrace challenge and use earth’s resources mindfully. Much emphasis is placed on allowing children to blossom naturally, especially in the early years. The Kindergarten program is based on readiness to learn and follows natural child developmental patterns and milestones. Right from Kindergarten, throughout their years at Sarvalokaa, students are made consciously aware of their natural environment, and learn to treat all of nature with reverence, mindfully. They learn to respect their fellow human beings and show care and compassion to fellow creatures with whom we share our planet and its resources. Our eclectic educational program brings the best of curricular approaches to provide holistic teaching-learning experiences. The school is affiliated to Cambridge Assessment International Education (CAIE). The Cambridge Primary program provides the basis for a joyful, vibrant and trans-disciplinary program. The Cambridge Lower Secondary program provides the necessary rigour and skills in Middle School from Grades 6 to 8, to build students into independent, life-long learners. The school continues to integrate subjects through an inter-disciplinary approach at Middle School level to making learning relevant and based on real world issues, trends and phenomena.
why was
cambridge
chosen?
The school’s founders, right from the very early formative days of the institution, felt that education at Sarvalokaa must prepare students to contribute to a better and sustainable future, with a deep understanding that we live in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world, and that no community or civilization or nation can succeed in isolation. Given the increasingly inter-woven, inter-related global culture and economy, it is imperative that children in our country and other nations too learn to respect their own and other cultures, explore local as well as global issues, and engage in innovative ways to solve real problems facing their own communities/nations and as well as the larger world. This calls for a program of education that would provide a platform that offers not only the necessary knowledge, understanding and skills for academic achievement at a global level, but also the flexibility for students to freely explore and go beyond the boundaries of specific subjects or locales. The programs offered by Cambridge Assessment International Education (CAIE) right from Primary school level all the way up to High School level (Grades 9 to 12) form a world class curriculum, preparing students in the 21 st century skills of communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking. Schools are given the freedom to shape the curriculum around how they want students to learn – with a wide range of subjects and flexible ways to offer them. CAIE helps students discover new abilities and a wider world, and gives them the skills they need for life, so they can achieve at school, university and work. Sarvalokaa thus saw agreement between the kind of world class education it wished to offer that would make its students responsible global citizens and the curricular approaches and programs of CAIE. Learn more about Cambridge here.
what is the learning environment like?
CSE provides a safe and joyful school environment where children are free to question, engage in dialogue with peers and teachers as they explore to construct their knowledge and extend their learning. They are under the able supervision and care of deeply involved educators, who are themselves engaged in a continual endeavor to enhance their professional knowledge and skill sets. Education at Sarvalokaa is joyful and relevant, coupled with the right amount of rigour to ensure academic achievement as well as real world learning.
how is
learning made
holistic?
Emphasis is on the whole child. Committed educators at Sarvalokaa strive to enable every child realise his/her true potential in all areas of development. Physical and motor development is promoted through an age-appropriate program in Physical Education, games and formal sports. Social development is fostered through mature, safe interactions with peers, adults within the school space every day, and also with outside experts or kids during school visits, special events, inter-school events or cultural programs. Day-to-day learning is made collaborative, as are long-term projects , enabling social development through sharing and exchange of ideas, and exploration of diverse and challenging topics. Spiritual development is fostered through consciously enabling a deep reverence for the natural world, larger cosmos, and realizing our place and role in the inter-connectedness of the Universe. Cognitive development is no doubt fostered through the age appropriate, well-researched, challenging curriculum, and learner centric teaching methodology.
what is the core methodology?
Learners at Sarvalokaa engage in experiential, inquiry based, trans-disciplinary/inter-disciplinary, active learning.
how does inquiry
-based
learning progress?
Inquiry-based learning at Sarvalokaa makes students develop a love and passion for learning as they engage deeply with the materials/topics in the curriculum in their own way, each of them getting multiple opportunities to capitalize on their individual learning styles. Instead of just reading or listening to facts, students ask questions, engage with real life scenarios and issues, experiment, investigate, discuss, debate and solve problems. Students thus collectively explore six themes every year of Primary and Secondary school, thereby constructing their knowledge and understanding of the world in which we live. The themes are based on the topics suggested in the Global Perspectives curriculum of the Cambridge Primary and Lower Secondary Programs. As they progress year-on-year through the structured, inquiry-based program at Sarvalokaa, students not only expand their depth and breadth of understanding, but also enhance their skills of communication, collaboration, research, analysis, evaluation and reflection. The school’s abundance of resources – natural outdoor environment, structured-classroom environments, technology-enabled collaborative learning spaces – and the involved teacher and parent community, all serve to enable inquiry-based learning.
how is learning made trans and
inter-disciplinary?
Learning in Primary school is trans-disciplinary, integrating various subjects together seamlessly, by exploring research-based questions that are raised collectively by the class of students around a central theme. These themes are identified from the Cambridge curriculum, in particular from the syllabus for Global Perspectives and Science. The Literacy (English), Numeracy, Second Language and ICT lessons are also woven around this common theme identified for a particular Unit of Study, as are the co-curricular subjects such as Music, Art and Design, and Theatre. Even some of the lessons in Physical Education link to relevant research questions and skills such as collaboration. Both the indoor and outdoor settings are fully utilised by children as they engage in their lessons across various subject areas. For instance, trans disciplinary learning in Primary school across many subject areas for a particular theme about local / global food problems and sustainable farming, could involve observing and collecting samples/data from the school’s gardens and grounds, planting seeds and saplings in the organic garden and caring for them as they grow, recording plant growth data, graphing their growth against various factors, harvesting the crop and engaging collaboratively in fireless cooking to share a meal with fellow students and teachers. The Unit of Study spanning six weeks could include songs on seasons and plant growth in their Music lessons, Art and Design lesson in designing an ideal garden path, Science lessons in using their senses to observe and record data, and Math lessons in Measurement. In Secondary School, Math, English, Second Language, Science , ICT and Global Perspectives are taught as separate subjects, but clear links are made to make learning relevant and inter-disciplinary.
what is active learning?
Students are not merely listening passively in class or just orally repeating or reading after the teacher or copying from the board. Also, learning at CSE is not just activity-based, but seeks to engage students deeply in their learning making them responsible and accountable for it. Students are engaged in their learning by listening actively, participating in structured and unstructured discussions with peers and teachers, raising questions, taking notes, representing their understanding through graphic organizers, sharing view points and debating, reading a wide variety of genres in both fiction and non-fiction, writing a wide variety of genres independently and creatively, playing interactive games as they learn concepts and skills in Math, ICT and Languages. For example, students in Grade 4 engage in discussions to collaboratively write the outline of a story that they would like to write as a play-script. The topic could be based on the theme under study in that Unit. Then, students learn to write play scripts independently, which is facilitated by the teacher gradually in a scaffolded and structured manner in Literacy classes. In the Theatre classes, students refine play-scripts, perhaps working on writing details of setting, direction and dialogue-delivery, and then finally work towards producing and performing the play. In the Art and Design classes linked to this, students prepare the props for the setting and costumes. In ICT, students could engage in making posters or pamphlets relevant to the theme and actually use them for campaigning within the school and/or their home communities.
how is experiential
learning
developed?
At Sarvalokaa, learning is not confined to the indoor classrooms. To mention a few ways in which learning is made experiential : students go on age –appropriate field trips relevant to the topics and themes they are exploring, making the city itself a learning resource; they visit farms, museums and cultural centres, watch live performances in theater and music, interview real people in the community, collect data from authentic sources, experiment in labs, and engage with children and adults from other countries through face to face interactions and technology enabled safe platforms of interaction. The learning-from-doing and actual experiencing leads to reflection, conceptualizing and further experimentation or application in the real world, thus completing a cycle of experiential learning.
how is learning made relevant
and real-world?
Real world scenarios are addressed throughout the school year right from Grade 1. Examples and situations are extensively drawn from the child’s immediate environment in the early years in day-to-day teaching and learning. As students move up the grades, they gain exposure to real-world phenomena, wonders of the natural world, real local and global problems and issues are explored, from various angles and perspectives. The importance of Indian as well as world cultures and traditions are stressed at Sarvalokaa. Students learn about Indian culture and also cultures of other nations through stories, music, theatre, celebrations, projects, cultural festivals and actual interactions with people of other nationalities.
