Background The health of children and adolescents can be promoted through schools as they spend most of their time in school. The Health Promoting Schools (HPS) framework provides a set of policies to be followed in schools for improving the health status of school-going children and adolescents. The current study was done to assess this framework among schools in rural Puducherry. Methods Key informant interviews were done with the teachers under the six World Health Organisation (WHO) HPS framework domains to develop an observation checklist for the assessment of schools in the study area. After the survey, in-depth interviews were conducted as an approach to explore the existing health promotion activities, facilitating or hindering factors in the implementation of health promotion framework and suggestions for improving the same. Results A quantitative survey on nine schools showed that almost all the schools were lacking in domains such as health promotion policy, behaviour counselling and mental and social support. Physical education, facilities and policies for nutrition and community collaboration exist in only some of the schools. Qualitative interviews also showed similar findings and most of the teachers suggested to include training for general health emergencies and behaviour counselling. Conclusion The current study showed that most of the schools were lacking in almost all the domains under the HPS framework. Hence, stakeholders at all levels should be made aware of this framework and develop a strategy for uniform implementation of it in all the schools in the region.

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Drawing can be a useful tool to elicit student thinking and is a widely-used method for communicating scientific ideas. The task of drawing requires students to identify and recall necessary pieces of information they assimilated over a period of time and construct a mental model. However, millennial generation learners, owing to their immersion in 3D technologies, lack interest in practicing and learning from diagrams. This impairs learning and retention of visually-oriented subjects. In this perspective, we reflect on the cognitive and metacognitive processes associated with drawing to emphasize the important role of drawing in present day anatomy education.

The Teacher Education Institutions plays a crucial role in improving the system of education by training, educating and inspiring the future student teachers. A teacher requires understanding and mastering of skills to make his classroom interactive. For this purpose the exercise of instructional designing or lesson planning becomes very essential. Although innovative lesson plans based on behaviourist, cognitive and constructivist approaches are introduced in teacher education, the learner today, who is more ICT-enabled requires modern 21 st century skills and competencies. The classroom interactive process, used by studentteacher during the professional experience programme, needs a critical analysis and the recent trends in education need to be explored to modify the age old traditional approaches to meet the challenges of the present. This evaluative study explored, developed and ascertained the effectiveness of a hybrid micro-skill called developing and using blends. A number of skills, instructional designs and blended learning literature have been critically analyzed to finalize the components of skills. After conducting primary and secondary data analysis, the effectiveness of the developed skill was checked on high school students selected for this purpose. It was found that in science and social sciences, there is a significant effect of developed micro skill on the academic achievement of high school students, but no significant difference is found in teaching effectiveness of student teachers teaching with and without hybrid micro skill.