Our students are not learning enough. But are our
teachers teaching?
The good news is that most children now go to school. But our pedagogical practices require reassessment
Education at the school-level has
seen remarkable achievements in recent years. With the passage of the Right to
Education Act in 2009 and the universalisation of elementary education, more
children are successfully completing class 8. Enrolment trends suggest that the
gap in enrolment rate between girls and boys has reduced. While there are no
numbers to measure the functionality of basic infrastructure facilities,
schools now have access to drinking water (87%), electricity connection (61%),
and separate toilets for boys and girls (94%).
The good news is that most children are now going to
schools. Simultaneously, transition rates have improved and drop-out rates have
gone down. The student attendance rate in 2017-18 was 73.4%. Though the
ministry of human resource development (MHRD) has not furnished data for teacher
attendance, a 2010 World Bank study reported that a teacher in Indian schools
is absent every four days. The infrastructure seems to be in place. But despite
an upward trend observed in the National Achievement Survey (NAS) 2017 and the
Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018 suggesting improvement, learning
outcomes of students remain poor. Why are our students not learning
sufficiently? We have to pause here and ask: Is the teacher teaching? How well
is she or he teaching? Our pedagogical practices require serious reassessment.
The draft National Education Policy (NEP) recognises that
“the quality of training, recruitment, deployment, service conditions, and
empowerment of teachers is not where it should be, and consequently the quality
and motivation of teachers [is lacking]”. This has resulted in our failure to
translate access to schooling into years of schooling. About a quarter of our
teachers are qualified only up to the higher secondary level. A study to assess
subject matter knowledge of educators in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar found an
alarming deficit.
Untrained teachers, irrespective of schools being
adequately staffed, directly affect student performance. ASER and NAS results
make it clear that this isn’t merely a learning crisis; the Indian school
education system is going through a teaching crisis.
A Centre for Civil Society working paper concluded that
teachers’ unions can steer the fate of education by incentivising teachers. But
since increasing learning outcomes requires greater teacher accountability, it
harms the interest of unions.
Certain initiatives implemented with local commitment
deserve a mention. The Delhi government’s emphasis on teachers’ professional
development, and efforts made under the NITI Aayog’s Aspirational Districts
programme, must be lauded. In Uttar Pradesh, Pratham trains government
officials who, in turn, train teachers under the “graded learning programme”.
DIKSHA, a digital platform, to train teachers and provide resources and
assessment aids, proves that technology can play a bigger role.
The draft NEP acknowledges the dire need for a complete
overhaul of the teaching profession. The recruitment process should be exclusively
merit based. The draft NEP neatly supplements Teacher Eligibility Test scores
with National Testing Agency scores as well as mock demonstration. A minimal
four-year BEd degree can bring a radical shift in quality given that a quarter
of school teachers are not even graduates at present.
Next, the draft provides for a clear career progression
of teachers. A comprehensive recruitment process should be followed up with
mandatory certification every three years. A teachers’ outcomes appraisal, “NAS-for-teachers”,
can diagnose the nature of teaching. Teachers’ professional development is a
continuous process that must be assessed to strengthen content, pedagogical
knowledge and classroom practice.
Most importantly, apart from testing teacher knowledge,
there should be a mechanism to close the feedback loop. Informing educators on
what works in their classroom can improve instructional quality and nurture an
environment that supports teachers. Further, the in-service training provision
is grossly underutilised with only 13% teachers trained in 2015-16. MHRD should
redefine teacher training, benchmark it to global standards, and adopt a
national framework. The draft NEP calls for strengthening and equipping Block
Institutes of Teacher Education and District Institutes of Education and
Training to build knowledge networks.
Finally, MHRD should perform a Teachers’ Needs Assessment
to understand teachers’ motivation. A study conducted in Andhra Pradesh found
that incentivising teachers based on increase in students’ test scores led to
improved learning outcomes (Muralidharan and Sundararaman, 2009). Performance
bonuses are a productivity-enhancing measure and improve the effectiveness of
human capital. The draft NEP rightly proposes to put in place an incentive
structure with a promotion-and-salary ladder to mark achievements in the
profession.
Quality of
teaching is an amorphous and intangible concept. However, at some stage and in
some form, it has to be diagnosed, studied and improved. We must now shift our
focus from universal enrolment to universal learning. The sad truth is that if
the child is left behind in early years, she tends to stay behind. Bridging
this gap requires a productive revolution around the quality of teaching.
Traditionally, our education system has been built on faith where the child is
handed over to the teacher. Now we have to make our teachers cognisant of how
to respond to such responsibility.
Source | Hindustan Times | 27th
June 2019
Regards
Mr.
Pralhad Jadhav
Master
of Library & Information Science (NET Qualified)
Research
Scholar (IGNOU)
Senior
Manager @ Knowledge Repository
Khaitan
& Co
Twitter
Handle | @Pralhad161978
Mobile @ 9665911593
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