District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States
6.4.2 ‘Power-coercive’ and ‘pedagogical-authority’ approaches to change
The tension expressed by DIET staff about their lack of administrative power over
teachers is mirrored at the Cluster level. Traditionally, teachers have been guided
by inspectors, who have administrative powers over teachers and can therefore
adopt a power-coercive approach to change: an officer uses power to ‘persuade’ a
teacher. Unlike the inspectors, academic leaders at the Cluster or Block Resource
Centre does not have powers to punish or reward a teacher.
The idea of the Cluster Resource Centre is that the lead teacher facilitates exchange
of good practices among peers, and supports learning how to analyse practice by
constructive problematisation, reflection and peer problem-solving. In this model,
authority does not derive from power, but from demonstrable pedagogical
competence – a pedagogical-authority approach. In terms of teacher development in
general, a pedagogical-authority approach offers a greater likelihood of teachers
internalising change messages, rather than just being superficially compliant; but
in practice it has often been hard to make this strategy work with teachers. Across
the study sites, in DPEP and non-DPEP Districts (except Udaipur), Cluster
Resource Centre staff reported that they felt constrained by:
• A perceived lack of ‘legal’ authority so there are no sanctions for teachers who
ignore their advice. This makes many Cluster Resource staff feel that their visits
to such schools ‘don’t make any difference as teachers don’t take any notice of
what we say’.
• A lack of confidence in their own academic abilities, particularly in relation to
lack of content knowledge in the upper primary Standards and an inadequate
grasp of child psychology.
Gaps in these areas may mean they cannot answer teachers’ questions and this
undermines the Cluster Resource Centre role. Where there are real gaps in the
academic monitoring of classrooms, Cluster staff ’s practical resolutions of these
concerns have led to a trend in which they tend to involve themselves in
administrative monitoring tasks which are more appropriately done by inspectors.
In discussions with the research team, they emphasised their view that unless
Cluster Resource Centre staff are empowered by the legal mandate that inspectors
have, ‘making’ teachers change would continue to be very challenging. This was a
concern for DPEP officials, as one reported: ‘CRC’s role is academic monitor.
CRCs do not know their role, or if they do know it they don’t accept it. So they
perceive themselves as supervisors who gather data to feed upwards’ (GUJ/SNT
DPEP i/c 14.12.00).
Focus group discussions with Block and Cluster Resource Centre staff in
Santrampur District in Gujarat for example revealed a matrix of concerns
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