Working With Doorstep – CAS Article

One of the things I really wanted to do since my childhood was teaching. I have a passion for
teaching and love the concept of gaining and sharing the knowledge to others. When I thought
of service where I will be working with an organization to teach the underprivileged students,
I wanted to share my knowledge of the things that I am passionate about.
One of the reasons I choose to teach art was because in the real world, the young students
sometimes face the problem of expressing their feelings to others due to many different reasons,
hence to help these students express their feelings I think art is the best way to share thoughts
through paints, colours and the drawing itself. Therefore I decided to continue my passion and
at the same time help the underprivileged students improve their talents in art by working with
the doorstep organization.
I started this service in the year 2021, the year full of challenges, experiments and majorly the
opportunity to self-learn. I remember being appointed as the leader of this service group, with
a group of other school community members. One of the biggest challenges I faced was
teaching young students different skills of art through an online platform. I started with
experimenting my teaching methods in order to know which method will help students learn
effectively during all the service sessions. Every class I made sure that students get the
opportunity to learn differently with the help of presentations, self-teach YouTube videos,
icebreaker questions etc. The preparation for these service sessions was with equal teamwork
with my school community members, in order to provide the best learning opportunities for
the underprivileged students. One of the aspects I noticed and realized through preparing the
session plans with my group members, was the need for collaboration and communication to
have an effective and smooth session during service. When I started my year with this
experience I faced a lot of challenges with getting my teammates together, and organizing my
plan accurately, which further lead to an ineffective service session. However over a few
months, through various types of feedback from students and teachers I was able to improve
the planning and take the initiative to collaborate, contribute and communication my ideas to
the group members for a higher level of planning and preparation for the service session. The
next stage was action, where as a group we taught the students a wide range of artworks, which
helped students learn the basic and move towards the intermediate stages where they applied
their basic knowledge to create a final piece. Service gave me an opportunity to realize the
importance of making a connection with the students, so that they become comfortable and
equally learn with enthusiasm and perseverance. During the start of this experience, as a group
we were still figuring out how to have a smooth and an effective service session online. There
were various ups and downs due to lack of clarity, communication and engagement between
us and the students. However, personally, the determination and innocence of the students
helped me to gain the confidence to improvise my teaching methods by trying new types of
methods every service sessions based on the difficulty level of the artwork that I was about to
teach. To understand what I personally needed to improve on, I made sure I asked to students
about how well was the session, to deepen my understanding and improve my teaching skills
as I progressed teaching the students. Over a few months I got the opportunity to teach the
students offline, one goal that we created as a group was improving our communication skills
so that we take the opportunity to teach students a wider range of skills. At the end, as a group
with commitment and perseverance we were able to teach students different type of artworks
and help them improve their talents.
Overall, I would say working with the Doorstep organization not only gave me the opportunity
to fulfil my passion for teaching but also helped me learn the skills for life, for e.g the
communication methods with various types of people, the importance of collaboration and the
willingness of becoming the risk-taker that gives you the opportunity to become more self –
aware about the strengths and the weaknesses.

– Nidhi