Soon teachers across the government schools in India would have to undergo mandatory training to teach students better in order to bolster the foundations of the Indian educational system.
Every year teachers would have to undergo 30 to 60 hours of training in pedagogical methods. Teachers would have to take this training till they remain in service.
On the intervention of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the Quality Council of India (QCI) is all set to roll out a training module for teachers after they pass the BEd examination and enter teaching service. The move comes as availability of teachers with adequate teaching acumen remains a major challenge in the way of providing children with quality education. The idea is part of the larger scheme in PM Narendra Modi’s mantra of ‘Make in India’ and the subsumed necessity of adequate skill development.
“Training the teachers is a major challenge in India, mostly in rural areas where teachers from the primary level up to the higher secondary level are ill equipped to teach students. This is the reason why this year there was such brouhaha in Class 12 exams when the question paper did not turn out to be as expected and the students could not answer properly. We need to strengthen the foundation of the teaching mechanism if we want to emerge as a superpower and realise the ‘Make in India’ motto,” said QCI secretary general RP Singh.
“We have already prepared a vertical of 30 to 60 hours of training a year for teachers. We are going to concentrate on the pedagogical aspect of the teaching business and not on the curriculum of schools. The reason is that teachers must know how to communicate with students better and not just stick to the age-old technique of negative reinforcement by way of the stick. Continuous evolution of teachers is necessary in a dynamic educational environment,” Singh added.
On the other hand, while educationists welcome teachers’ training as the basic necessity of the field, they also voice their concern about lack of adequate will and funding in the educational sector that would attract the best of talent to the field of teaching. “Any programme to teach the teacher is welcome. The idea of parateachers that evolved in the 1980s has done much harm to the educational system of India as substandard people entered the field of teaching. But the real change will come when enough funds will be pumped to hike the salaries of those entering teaching so as to attract the best of the talent pool to train and teach the future generations,” said Nandita Narain of the Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA). In this regard the QCI has already submitted a proposal to the National Council of Teachers Training (NCTE). As part of the proposal, it has been suggested that a centralised website be launched that shall include exhaustive database regarding number of teachers in a school as also the number students, to be accessed by anyone.
Further, an accreditation model for BEd colleges has also been prepared. “We are going in for benchmarking and grading around 8,000 BEd colleges across the country. The government can then see what they want to do with those which are towards the lower part of the scale, close them or upgrade them. Also, students will get to know about the colleges,” Singh added.
