District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States
management structure. It led to new textbooks for Stds. 1-5 and training
programmes for teachers to help them with the package’s underlying principles:
• Children should acquire competencies against MLLs rather than do rote
learning of specifics
• The teaching-learning process in elementary schools should be child-centred
and activity-based
• All academic inputs at the elementary school level should not be seen in
isolation but as part of a larger pedagogic intervention.
This training was delivered at block level by DIET staff, and Master Trainers and
Resource Persons who had had cascade training from the DIET. The classes were
mostly lecture-based, and the focus (contrary to the programme aims) was to
complete the modules. In some cases this was observed to involve transmission of
incorrect content. When asked about this, DIET staff said they are not allowed to
change the module’s content.
Teachers, interviewed on the sixth day of the programme, were dissatisfied with
the competence of the trainers. The discussion of Master Trainer competence
reflects tensions at preceding level of the cascade – the DIET’s training of those
Master Trainers:
T51 MTs are not very efficient, I am not enjoying it. Actually these MTs have
been given a 5 day training. Whatever they got in those 5 day, they have
to present before teachers in 12 days so they are not able to do it.
T52 Here not all MTs are efficient enough to teach the class V syllabus
(MP/DHA/10.7.99).
Of all the teachers in the sample Districts, those in Dhar District seemed to have
the least faith in the training’s relevance. State-designed packages needed
considerable adaptation to fit local situations. In this largely tribal District many
children are first generation learners, and did not speak Hindi, which is the official
language of instruction. Reluctant even to make corrections to wrong subject
content, DIET staff did not engage with this requirement. The fit between
package contents and prevailing circumstances also emerged as a prominent
concern in the responses teachers gave to the DIET’s action research project (see
chapter 7); even so, this was felt by the DIET to be a problem of the State level.
The training episodes described here reflect the dominance of the transmission
model of teaching within in-service training approaches, as well as in pre-service
training and school teaching. Teachers were making it clear, either by articulation
or through body language, that this training was not engaging them, yet in each
case, the trainer pressed on without regard to their learning. Such examples reflect
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