World Champion Chess Master Trains Newman Teachers
Most of us have heard about the correlation between playing the classical game of chess and the resulting improvement of cognitive skills. Newman believes this to the degree that we actually have time built into our students’ schedules every day for them to learn this amazing game, and we have seen very positive results from this practice.
To ensure that our teachers are capable of training our students to understand and play the game effectively, Newman recently held a symposium, featuring Dr. Ebenezer Joseph, who has been competing in World Chess Championships for the past 30 years. Dr. Joseph is India’s first Certified Chess Trainer and Candidate Master of the World Chess Federation.
Dr. Joseph did his doctoral work in psychology on the “Impact of Chess Training on the Cognitive Skills of Children”. Funded by the Indian Government’s Department of Science and Technology, he is currently training 300 teachers in the tribal regions of India, where the children have been separated out of normal society by the caste system. Over the four years that he has been working on this project, he’s seen remarkable improvement in the children’s critical thinking skills.
Two hundred students were in the study group for this project, and the findings are very significant:
· Chess improves overall IQ of students
· Chess improves students’ creativity
· Chess improves students’ processing speed
· Chess improves students’ working memory
Dr. Joseph created the chess curriculum that Newman uses called, “Winning Moves”. Since its implementation, we have seen improvement in students’ cognitive skills, ADHD, learning disorders, and dyslexia. You may wonder how we assessed this: Dr. Kursheed, a top psychologist in India who now works at Newman, tested students with other cognitive difficulties to prove that chess was, indeed, the reason for their improvement.
During our symposium, Dr. Joseph spent four days travelling from campus to campus, training our students to understand and play chess more effectively. On the fifth day, chess teachers from all over the District gathered to learn more about the game and how to train their students more successfully. One of those teachers, James Strickland, has been playing since he was just six years old. He said this was one of the most “eye-opening” experiences he’s ever had! He learned that “the number of squares has so much meaning; the numbers and letters of the squares on the board works in unison to get you a better board position.”
Coach Strickland continued, “I never thought about the proper names for the rows…it’s ‘ranks’. I knew the directional movement of the pieces on the board, but I learned that the board itself is the more educational part of the game. It will help me teach the four cognitive skills: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creative thinking. If we don’t teach this to our students, how will they learn these skills?”
We all knew that chess is a great game to teach our students, but this symposium really underscored all the reasons that makes chess training so valuable. Each of us is more passionate about our opportunity to impact the cognitive abilities of our students through chess training than ever before. After all, the whole reason Newman exists is to “Raise Warriors of Wisdom, Stature and Favor”, and learning how to play chess correctly definitely checks the Wisdom box!