District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States
appointees did not. The nature of induction procedures impacted heavily on DIET
staff ’s understanding of their roles, explored later in this chapter.
Box 3.1 If a teacher educator doesn’t have the skills…
“If you want to improve the quality of elementary education, you have to start
with teacher educators. It will only go further if they are of quality. Particularly
if you want to bring quality in elementary education. We think, bring quality in
teachers then in teacher educators. What you should do is bring quality in
teacher educators, only then would quality go to teacher. […] If the teacher
educator doesn’t have skills how is he going to give skills to teacher? Take an
example of teaching swimming. I am teaching swimming, I don’t know
swimming. I draw a swimming pool on the blackboard. Show the students the
pose for swimming and tell them, ‘children, this is the pose for swimming, push
your hands and legs’. This way I can’t teach them swimming. This is the basic
difference. If the trainer doesn’t have skills how can he teach the teachers?”
3.4.3 Professional development for DIET staff
Professional development opportunities for DIET staff were observed to be very
limited, although the need for such opportunities is recognised in policy
documentation from the 1990s onwards (e.g. NAP 1996). Some development
opportunities do exist: training for example in Planning and Management is
offered at the national level, as is training for DIET Principals, but such courses
are elective rather than mandatory. Effectively, as one former Lok Jumbish DIET
principal in Rajasthan pointed out:
Teachers in DIETs are assumed to be already trained and have the right to train
teachers, but are in fact untrained so you have untrained teachers imparting
training (personal communication Gupta, January 1999).
Occasional opportunities at State level tend to take the form of activities related to
specific projects or training programmes and are content-related, rather than
opportunities to enhance expertise and skills as a trainer. Typically, DIET staff are
called to participate at State level as Key Resource Persons in the initial round of
training for new programmes conducted in the cascade model. Another option is
when DIET staff are invited to contribute to materials preparation at the State
level. A trend observed across the DIETs was that usually the same small handful
of DIET staff attended such events. These were more senior people who had
established a good name for themselves, and whose input would be expected to be
useful to the successful execution of the proposed programme. There is no specific
provision for those who do not self elect in this way. Such opportunities tended
thus to be appropriated as avenues for personal development rather than seen as a
means of enriching the institutional portfolio. Surat DIET was the only DIET in
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