District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

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District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States Training packages such as those described here do not take into account teachers’ existing attitudes and skills, or their appropriateness for existing classroom contexts – the ecology of teaching. Very many teachers in our sample felt that implementing activity approaches in crowded classrooms is very difficult, yet this is widely dismissed by officials and DIET staff as teachers making excuses. The burden of blame for implementation failures falls on teachers; yet teachers will inevitably struggle to be motivated to adopt changes until the state ensures that they have conducive circumstances to work in (adequate numbers of staff and rooms, and adherence to the stipulated 1: 40 teacher: student ratio) and good quality support. The skills- and knowledge approach, with its weak regard for contextual issues, does not engage with what is widely acknowledged to be a key challenge in elementary education in India: teachers’ will to implement change. Hargreaves and Fullan (1992: 6) make two important points about this approach (emphases in the original): It is too frequently treated as a matter of non-negotiable technical skill, rather than as an issue of professional will or of something whose worth should be discussed or debated. Some teachers in training programmes did make efforts to initiate discussions about the value of some aspects of their training, but as the examples given here (e.g. the Operation Blackboard discussion, the need to talk when bored in a lecture, silence when unstimulated to respond) illustrated, this is interpreted by trainers as a personal challenge to the lecturer, and/or poor teacher behaviour. 5.7 Policy implications Some trainers adhere rigidly to a lecturing approach and are not capable of demonstrating or modelling the concepts they are attempting to impart. The extent to which their suitability as trainers can be enhanced through professional support requires further consideration. Teachers have a right to expect that trainers can themselves lead the way through example and competence; training by persons who cannot do so undermines the training experience. Other trainers are however trying to work in a more participatory and involving way with teachers, but the underlying aim of training is similar: to impart externally generated knowledge, even if the focus is knowledge about how to do things. This approach is also not needs-based and struggles with relevance, although the process is more interesting for teachers at the time. At present, the discourse generated through such approaches tends to focus more on ‘traditional’ concerns such as content issues. Further support for trainers can help them develop skills in facilitating discussions that focus on conceptual aspects – so for instance DFID 111
District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States moving conversations on from content detail to discussions of the curriculum in relation to student learning. These accounts illustrated that some trainers feel it is not appropriate to ‘deviate’ from the module. This contrasts with the expectation of module writers that DIET staff make local adjustments to provide contextual relevance. Unless DIET are supported to develop their capacity to provide that relevance, training within this centralised model will continue to have many problems in relation to relevance. However, there is a need also to consider whether this approach to training can, even if its quality is improved, respond to the need for much greater ecological validity. The once-off and out of school, decontextualised nature of the training programmes described here and observed throughout the project may in itself be one of the greatest barriers to teacher’s adoption of change messages. None of the training programmes observed had a strong focus on children’s learning and children’s achievements: they tended to focus on providing teachers with information, knowledge, and activities. The end is, in this way, subsumed by the means. How information, knowledge, and activities relate to children’s learning need to be stressed throughout training episodes. This might begin, for example, in programme formulation, by providing learning objectives for training sessions that are shared with trainees and form a framework for evaluation. This would model for teachers ways of doing the same things with children. 112 DFID
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District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

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