District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States
8.8 Policy implications
This project demonstrated the care and time needed at the very first stage of action
research – problem identification. It took several workshops for teachers to begin
to reflect on their own practice, and to move away from locating problems in the
nature of the community and administrative issues. Facilitating this process is
demanding and requires gentle persistence in the face of the low expectations of
children that often dominated the discourse.
This also reflects the importance of doing research with teachers before designing
programmatic inputs, to identify with precision the aspects of professional
development that training is addressing. Had the project been input-led, it would
not have understood well what teachers are already doing, and how to build on
that. In this case, teachers were already doing several activities and using aids – yet
training continues to target this as though all teachers are not doing so. The areas
where teachers immediately needed more help were in developing strategies to
cope in very large classes with the varying speeds of learners; more technical
understandings of literacy acquisition to guide practice; and guidance on how to
develop language work to make literacy acquisition more meaningful.
As the project progressed, teachers began to appreciate that there are new skills
involved in offering supportive critical suggestions to colleagues. Another skill to
develop was the ability to direct those suggestions towards practical problemsolving
in existing realities, instead of an expectation of how things should be
according to a notion of ideal circumstances.
Helping teachers to see themselves and each other as resources, and to develop the
necessary skills to be so, is a challenging project – and particularly in circumstances
where, for many understandable reasons, teachers exhibit quite high levels of
disaffection. Yet it demonstrably made teachers view their own development, and
professional requirements, in a different light. This really emerged as the crux of
the difference between the reflection into action approach to teacher development,
and the dominant ‘input given by expert’ approach that appears legitimate
without ever really engaging with classroom realities.
The approach to teacher development that was undertaken here reflects the idea of
peer-learning underpinning the Cluster Resource Centre concept. The implications
for the Cluster Resource Centres from this experience are that for a peer learning
platform to be effective, it is essential for teachers to be able to describe, reflect and
comment supportively and critically on their own and others’ teaching. This
research project established that this does not happen easily or automatically.
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