The Stimulus 'Ready' with a Sting

The ‘READY’ stimulus

The word ‘ready’ is a part of our routine communication that we necessarily do not value whether the respondent, the receiver, or the transmitter is prepared, willing, or suitable for action or use. For instance, a teacher's “are you ready for this” stimulus, can arise a question mark with self-readiness in some and an exclamation mark with self-readiness in others. There can also be a set of pupils who might not internally feel like responding to the stimulus word ‘ready’ but have to unwillingly fall in line with the majority's affirmative response. As humans we have various controllable and uncontrollable factors like fear, anxiety, unhappiness, happiness, ache, threat perceptions, excitement, curiosity, bravado, herd-mentality, and other such related to any immediate response against the stimulus ‘ready’. In computer languages like java a syntax ‘ready()’ would check in boolean terms whether the reader returns a value of 1 (Yes/True) or 0 (No/False).

The SYSTEM check

A ready() boolean value of 1 would imply a focus state of the user providing a text, voice, or video input as per the requirements of the interaction. While a return value of 0 would imply that the user is not ready to give attention to something. We have also experienced that while binge-watching episodes after episodes for long hours at a stretch and intermittently a message that comes on screen “continue?”. If the viewer doesn’t respond with a press of the remote key, then the system knows the viewer has returned a value of 0 and the screen will go inactive or off. The moot point, therefore, is why a pupil is always expected to return a value of 1 in agreement with the teacher’s ‘are you ready' stimulus. Be it a test, classwork, homework, theory and practical lessons, standards, or any directed activity.

READINESS in Education – A Model under test

There has been a plethora of good teaching-learning experiments in many institutions that had brought a high level of readiness in teaching, learning, and assessments. As teachers, there is always an urge to happily engage the learners and provide them with rich experiences. For example, flipping students to learn at their own pace, the readiness of the education system to come out of the traditional lecture model and offer a project-based or problem-based learning opportunity. In this regard, we are working with a 7-STEP model based on mixed approaches of reverse-engineering, lean, and query-based learning among other proven and our own experimental approaches. We have put more than 1500 students in interdisciplinary batches under extended learning courses in that model of ours. The early signs have been quite encouraging. Shifting from a wholly individual focus we have a group focus. The groups as a sub-set of an interdisciplinary batch are also an interdisciplinary mix of undergraduate and postgraduate students. And, the evaluation is group-based, where the group as a chain will be considered as good as its weakest link. Here are a couple of illustrations that are self-explanatory for reference.?

The 7-STEP model is basically to add more focus on making the END STORY better. It might not make all learners in the groups wholly ‘ready’ but it is expected to have a positive rub-off as far as preparing a willing mindset of an erstwhile tardy or inactive participant is concerned for the next such learning instance, with a different mix of peers and a different END STORY.

UTOPIAN ‘Readiness’

Can the readiness of an educational system be such that its participants are able to shift from a focus state to a hyper-focus state of flow (Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi), a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity? Where the participants can be trained to be completely immersed in a task, to a point where they completely ignore or tune out everything else. It might interest education researchers of positive psychology or researchers who are working in the context of autism, schizophrenia, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – conditions that have consequences on attentional abilities. Finally, coming back to the concept of utopian readiness the rough verdict shall most likely return a value of 0 for a utopian ready stimulus command.