Revamping teacher
education
Unless
average capacity of the existing teacher pool goes up, we will not see clear
improvement in education for 20-25 years
One
of the few matters in Indian education on which there is substantial consensus
is the urgent need for a complete overhaul of pre-service teacher
education—that is, the B.Ed (bachelor of education) and D.Ed (diploma in
education) college system. The Union government has agreed to implement the
recommendations of the Supreme Court-appointed Verma Commission on teacher
education. While some of the envisioned changes are inadequate, many fundamental
changes are to be made; for example, institutional, curricular and regulatory.
The
committed changes are happening at a glacial pace, constrained by inadequate
financial resources and human capacity, and resisted by entrenched players with
direct commercial and political interests. Be that as it may, the importance of
the matter and the directions are set. This should immediately make it clear
that developing the capacity of the existing eight million teachers is
critical, since they have all gone through the same woefully inadequate teacher
education system. But there is no consensus and agreement on this matter.
The
estimated average teaching tenure left before retirement for the existing
population of teachers is between 20-25 years. So, even if pre-service teacher
education were to miraculously improve immediately, unless the average capacity
of the existing teachers pool goes up, we will not see clear improvement in
education for 20-25 years. Other efforts to improve the existing situation in schools
are like tinkering at the edges or are limited by the capacity of the teacher.
Teachers
are not in any way an unusually disengaged or truant lot. As I have repeatedly
written in these columns, and everyone who works on the ground experiences, the
large majority of teachers try to do a decent job. A sizeable minority of
teachers are deeply committed and engaged, while a noticeable minority is
completely disengaged.
This
distribution is not very different from any large organization and system. If
anything, there is a greater proportion of deeply committed teachers than the
proportion of workers with comparable commitment in any other sector. This is
probably because of the natural human reaction of the teachers to the
inescapable responsibility of children’s present and future placed in their
hands.
Some
teachers through sheer determination tackle their own capacity issues, but for
the vast majority, it becomes the key limitation to their effectiveness. The
other equally significant challenge is the environment they operate in.
Individual capacity and the environment also have a significant impact on
motivation and engagement. If someone can’t do something, leave alone do it
well, they inevitably become disengaged.
Even
those (not all) who have a valid assessment of the issues of our teachers shy
away from prioritizing the actions to help improve capacity of existing
teachers. Some others have such a naive notion of what needs to be done that
most people within education write them off immediately. Those who shy away,
often do so because of a realistic understanding of the extraordinary
complexity of the issue. What is this complexity and what causes it?
First,
it is the sheer scale and distribution. We have eight million teachers across a
few hundred thousand villages and towns, with the attendant geographical
challenges. Second, we must remember that they are all in full-time jobs,
leaving little time to be invested in their own development. Third, they have
differing needs, and even within that, a wide range. Fourth, they are adults
with already formed priorities, views and personalities. They can’t be herded
to a place and told what to do with any real effect. Fifth, the gaps between
required capacities and the actual are vast as a result of the woeful teacher
preparation programmes; this is not a situation which can be corrected by some
narrow and superficial continuing professional development efforts. These vast
gaps are in content knowledge of subjects and pedagogical matters, as also on
overall social and educational perspectives, which deeply determine the way
they play their roles.
All
standard training approaches, with their centralized determination of
curriculum, cascade model of training the trainers, rigid modules and modes of
interaction, have been abject failures in dealing with the teacher capacity
issue. In fact, the generally understood notion of training in itself is very
inadequate.
What
is required is difficult. It requires offering teachers multiple modes of
learning as options, for example, workshops, in-school support, long-term
projects and exposure visits. It also requires creating platforms for peer
learning and support with the proximate availability of experienced mentors.
And all this must tie together in a coherent curricular framework. The only way
to make all this happen is to have small, distributed, high-capability teams
across all the districts in the country. That is very hard to put together and
sustain. Even harder is to let the teachers determine their own path of development,
which is the heart of the matter. This requires trusting the teachers. In our
culture, this is harder than almost anything else.
Being
very difficult is not a good reason to avoid this all too important of tasks.
For the sake of the generations ahead, we must muster the grit to begin and
sustain the effort.
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