How to teach our teachers

On every Children's Day, a lot is said on children's right to have a joyful, creative education, and the need for a better future for under-served children, including girl children, among other things.

From November 15, it is “business as usual”. In a Government school a bright young child would be asked to read a particular lesson loudly, after which the whole class would repeat. Not many children would understand the content of the lesson – even less number of children would think about what it means. Caning of children by unscrupulous teachers would continue.

Individual learning needs of the children would not be identified and the gap in statistics between the forward class and backward class, or between the girls and the boys would continue to be twenty percentage points.

It is not that issues and solutions are unknown. Vital issues – such as radically reforming pre-service teacher education, revamping underperforming institutions such as the District Institute of Education Training, developing top class teacher educators, ensuring much higher and meaningful participation of parents in their children's education – are discussed from time to time. However, the biggest bottleneck is translating these concepts into practice.

TEACHER EDUCATION

Let us take the example of Teacher Education. Everyone accepts that “teacher” is the most critical component in making quality education happen. The way teacher education is currently positioned is untenable and does not result in top quality professional teachers. In order that to happen, we need to completely professionalise pre-service teacher education.

A study of some of the developed nations – including the Scandinavian countries -- reveals that they have immensely benefited by making it compulsory for every teacher to have a Master's degree in teaching.

It addresses three critical aspects of a teacher – content knowledge (subject matter), pedagogy and a social perspective of the process of education. Thus, a proposal of a five-year integrated course after 12{+t}{+h} standard for every teacher makes enormous sense. In our complex socio-economic situation, we need teachers who are experimenters, scientists and researchers, besides being top-notch content experts.

There is a fair amount of agreement on the fact that the teacher eligibility test (TET) suggested under the Right to Education Act is an excellent way to ensure that everyone entering the teaching profession is of a certain quality – this of course, is provided the TET is of a fairly high standard.

During the next five years, the country needs to appoint and certify almost 2.5 million teachers to comply with the RTE Act. This is an unprecedented opportunity to ensure that high quality teachers enter the teacher stream.

Everyone involved is convinced that these ideas, if implemented right, have a high potential to change the quality of education in India.

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

However, after arriving at this understanding, most discussions turn to ensuring that we don't ruffle too many feathers.

The strategies that emerge seriously compromise the original ideas. Under the garb of democratic and participatory methods, we dilute the actions so much that they are likely to lead to only incremental changes without addressing fundamental issues.

Even those who are convinced of the merit of bringing about changes in teacher education propose to retain the training period at four years (same as current), rather than agree to an integrated five year professional programme, since they “don't want to rock the boat”. Bureaucrats want to see concrete changes in their brief tenure of one year or so, and therefore reject any long term solutions. The administration prefers short-term programmes over fundamental changes to “show” some kind of change, rather than actually creating one. Nobody wants to bell the cat in convincing the teacher unions of the merits of the change required. In my opinion, the teacher unions would be quite reasonable in seeing the benefit to future generations.

We need to surely involve the stakeholders in deciding the best recourse in implementing policy decisions. But we cannot waste inordinate time in democratizing the process beyond a point.

The author is CEO, Azim Premji Foundation