District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States
Box 7.4: Prompts for transmission loss diary
What happened during the day today?
What questions came to mind?
Did I get a satisfactory answer to my questions?
Did I have my doubts clarified or are there still some questions – if so, what
are they?
Were there any points where I needed clarification but didn’t get it?
Are there any aspects discussed in the training that seem unlikely to be taken up
at schools – if so which?
Are there are points you can identify now where you think you will find difficult
to train other people?
This project intended to prompt reflection on the relevance of the training and on
the trainer’s own training needs. Overall, however, the cascade project was not able
to generate very much insight into problems that a trainer faces during cascade
training. The DIET staff themselves, who initiated the project, did not keep their
diaries accurately, pleading a lack of time. In part this can be traced to an
unwillingness to commit to paper, even in an anonymous diary, areas where
difficulties might be perceived to compromise prestige and status. Teacher
educators are not accustomed to writing for their own professional purposes since
as teachers, written records are used to guide planning and for inspection: the idea
of using a diary as tool for reflection and self-growth had to struggle against a long
history of making a written record for scrutiny by an inspector. For the DIET staff,
there was in addition a serious practical issue: they reported the quality of the
training at State level as so poor that their evenings were devoted to discussing
how they could improve on what they had heard during the day, rather than diary
writing. The State level training also only discussed the development of teachinglearning
materials without demonstrating it; and how teaching-learning materials
could be developed was another focus on DIET staff ’s evening discussions.
Further down the cascade, whatever writing was done tended to be a record of
activities, and a note of shortcomings in relation to content. Master Trainers
confined their focus to issues of content; the following citation from a diary was
one of the very few that considered practical applications and did illustrate, as the
research intended, a major flaw in the training programme that meant this trainer
had no faith in the applicability of the training in schools even as he took it:
In my mind I had a question as to how it could be simplified so that children
would learn it in a simplified way. To me, my questions were not answered
because the trainer was not clear how children could be taught and didn’t really
know how SSP [the Shikha Shikana package] works. If you teach according to
SSP you need staff, TLM and so on, and so the whole requirements of the SSP
DFID 145