District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States
limited in practice. Student teachers do not believe that they will anyway put into
practice what they have learned, and feel they most likely to imitate the models of
their own teachers regardless of their training:
S1 It does not happen in the way we are trained here, or the way we teach in
practice teaching, it does not happen that way in the field. The way they
are giving us training in different skills nobody uses them there. They teach
their own way.
NN Why?
S4 They get conditioned like other teachers and…
S2 When they go there they think – we will get the salary anyhow.
S3 The main problem is the mentality. Our teachers used to teach us in one
way. For twelve years, we watched our teachers teach us in the old method.
Sometimes teaching, sometimes not - then we will learn more from those
twelve years than these two years of our training. We have been
conditioned like that. Whether we want to or not we will just use that
(RAJ/UDR/1st yr sts).
Here we are forced to prepare a lesson plan. In the classroom we cannot go
beyond the lesson plan. I do not feel that lesson plan preparation is feasible in
practice (MP/I/ 2nd yr st 26.12.99).
Box 4.4: Learning to be a teacher: practice lesson by a second year trainee to year 6
students, SNT 5.9.00
T today we have to learn the lesson of ‘Talwar no varasdar’.
[He writes the lesson name and date on the blackboard: Subject: Gujarati; Sub-subject:
Talwar no varasdaar]
There are 20 students. 8 boys and 12 girls. They take out their textbooks.
T I am reading a poem. You listen. It is a long poem but we will read it.
3:16 He opens and reads out the whole poem. Children are looking at the book, some
are looking around. 3 boys do not have textbooks so they are sharing with the
neighbour. The poem was quite long.
[It is in a Kathiawadi dialect]. He reads out the whole poem. After this….
T what do you mean by sits and watches?
T [He answers himself ] it means watching while resting.
He begins to read every line again and explain the meaning of the words.
T ‘mara bapu ne be-be kuvaria’ means two brothers. ‘be-be ne padia bhag’ means
dividing between two brothers.
He explains all the sentences, giving synonyms of difficult words and writing them the
board.
3:23 Few students are listening to him or paying attention to what he is saying. Some
are are writing synonyms from the textbooks, some are talking, some are turning
DFID 81