A bold new lesson in Delhi schools: Mentors to teach, upgrade teachers
200 mentors to improve learning in 1,000 govt schools with 16 lakh students.
“DON’T look at the textbook. Talk to me.” In
a newly built classroom in Sarvodaya Bal Vidyalaya, Sector 3, Rohini, Janmejay
Sharma has his students slightly puzzled. Not with his questions — Why should
we learn history? How do you think humans started farming? — but with his
insistence that the students, who he has divided into groups of Pink, Green and
Blue, consult among themselves and speak, and that they need not stand up to
have their say.
Sharma is one of 200 “mentors” — an elite
cadre of Delhi government teachers — working to improve learning in 1,000
schools under the Directorate of Education, with 16 lakh students. They
comprise an interesting experiment in the Aam Aadmi Party government’s larger
plan to revamp government schools.
On Tuesday, Delhi Education Minister Manish
Sisodia published an open letter to Delhi’s teachers, in the form of full-page
newspaper advertisements, congratulating them for the “wonderful performance of
Class XII students in government schools” but also pointing to “the biggest
stumbling blocks”.
They
included, he wrote, teachers in one school using abusive language, employing
corporal punishment and sending students on menial errands like fetching tea.
Three teachers were penalised in another school for being habitually late, he
wrote.
The Delhi government says that while in the
first year of its rule, the focus was on infrastructure issues, it has now set
its sights on training teachers to get children to learn.
“Many teachers know how to teach, but they do
not know how to make children learn. The mentor teachers will help plug this
gap between teaching and learning. These are teachers who, if their class has
40 students, are capable of teaching a subject in 40 different ways,” Sisodia
told The Indian Express.
Chosen after two rounds of tests, the
mentor-teachers go through several training workshops, in association with NGOs
such as Pratham. Their job, in this academic year that started April, is to seed
practices of innovative and child-centric teaching.
In the first phase, the mentor teachers were
sent out — in groups of two to five — to various schools: to take two classes
and observe other teachers take classes, as well as to conduct baseline tests
that measured the aptitude of students in Hindi, English, maths and social
science.
From July, each mentor will be entrusted with
five-six schools. They will train other teachers, as well make suggestions on
syllabus, pedagogy or school administration. The emphasis is on activities and
interaction, rather than a one-way transmission of knowledge.
In a room in Dwarka recently, 29 mentors
regrouped to share their experience, where Priyanka Singh, who teaches Hindi,
showed a video of excited children writing on strips of yellow paper. Their
assignment was to write a poem and draw a picture on the words in the text:
baarish, mela, jalebi, etc.
Each of these videos were shared on WhatsApp
groups — an attempt to crowdsource a pool of innovation that all teachers can
tap into. Natural science teacher Bipin Bihari, for instance, brought in
colourful kites to teach a class about air and wind; another taught the concept
of force through a tug-of-war between a pair of girls.
Many of the teachers dent the stereotype of
the uncaring, sarkari, absentee teacher and Sisodia believes that their
commitment is “crucial”. “Until now, we have been injecting information. We
test children on what they don’t know, instead of dealing with what they know.
So that ends up destroying their confidence,” said Dharminder Dagar, who was
deputed as a mentor teacher to a Dwarka government school.
Dagar spoke of four students in his class who
could not read. “I told them, from now on, I will let only you read in class. I
will help you. For about 14 days, I did that. By the end of it, they were
reading, maybe not very fluently, but without fear,” he said.
It is unlikely, however, that it is going to
be that easy to change entrenched practices. There are about 40,000 government
teachers in Delhi, and about 20,000-odd posts to be filled. “There are schools
in the East and North East districts, where about 80-90 posts of teachers are
vacant. What can mentors do?” said C P Singh, president of the Government
School Teachers’ Association of Delhi.
Suman Lata, maths teacher at Government Co-Ed
Senior Secondary School, Dwarka, Sector 6, for example, was appreciative of the
methods used in her class by the mentors — teaching them odd, even numbers
though games or geometric shapes by lining up children as triangles or circles.
But she said the problem of children with widely different abilities remains.
“In a class of 60, if we focus only on the 10-15 children who are lagging
behind, won’t we be neglecting the talented ones?” she said.
A mentor teacher, who did not wish to be
named, said that the most common problem they face — students who have come to
Class VI but can’t read, write, or do basic math — will not go away without
fixing the rot in the 1,700 MCD schools, where a large number of children
(about 7 lakh) spend their early years.
Sisodia’s high-profile initiatives such as
sending teachers to Oxford and Cambridge and IIMs have also come in for
criticism. “It is nothing but a waste of money. The government should
decentralise teacher training practices,” said Ambarish Rai, convenor of the
Right To Education (RTE) forum.
Sisodia admitted that the mentors are too few
and, most likely, will be met with opposition. “There will be resistance, for
sure. But there will be some teachers who will be encouraged. Those who don’t
respond, we will fix accountability, though I don’t have a sure-shot formula,”
he said.
Source | Indian Express | 26 May 2016
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