On 28th November 2017, 4 Psychology students attended a Prosocial Peer moderator program held at Fortis Hospital (Bannerghetta Road). This was a unique platform for students to be trained as peer moderators in a 3-hour application based skills training session as a part of the Fortis School Mental Health Program. 3 students from IB1 and 1 student from AS participated . The workshop was called ‘Study and Exam Skills Initiative’. Dr. Samir Parikh, Director & a renowned Psychiatrist, started the workshop with a few questions about the participants daily routine. 28/24 hours, students spend travelling, eating, sleeping, outdoors, on gadgets, then when do they get the time to study? There are only 24 hours a day and they spend 28, doing everything but studying. In the chaos of other activities, students miss out on sleep and don’t do outdoor activities and mainly tax themselves. That’s what Dr. Parikh wanted to change, by giving them a few study tips.
The rest of the workshop was conducted by Divya Singh,a counselling psychologist. A few tips given were which included-no multitasking as dividing one’s attention never works. This was demonstrated by a divided attention activity, where all the participants were asked to listen to a song and simultaneously draw a picture of a lion. After drawing the lion they were asked to recall the lyrics. Few other tips were to not make a rigid schedule because one never knows what might happen and that one’s attention span is not more than 45 minutes. To increase one’s concentration, ‘Zoning in’ was also suggested and methods to zone in like cancelling a chosen letter from a paragraph and concentrating on a single instrument while listening to instrumental music was suggested. The participants were told how to revise, what helps the brain retain information better and what taxes the brain.
The workshop overall was very useful and very engaging. The workshop was also recreated in Candor by the trained students. The response received was overwhelming. It was done individually for each grade from 6 through 12 and few of the activities done in Fortis were recreated. Overall the workshop was useful for everyone. We thank Fortis Hospital for having us.
