primary school teachers the twists and turns of everyday practice

Version 20 Oct 08, edited final
Why are most teachers unable or unwilling to provide this leadership? The crux of
the problem lies with what the ‘system’ expects from the teacher. Let us revisit
Malati’s story. When she joined the school she did not have any induction workshop,
no one told her what she should do in class or what was expected of her. The few
times when she did interact with her superiors, all they wanted her to do was to fill
out forms and to take the textbooks; later she was asked to do a household survey.
When she wanted to know what she should do or how she should tackle a particular
educational situation or problem, she had nobody to turn to. In this situation, Malati
had no way of judging whether she was teaching well or whether she could help
students learn more by doing things differently. Nor did she have any reason to even
bother to think about it.
Discussions with teachers in the five states we visited confirm Malati’s experience.
Academic support institutions in Kerala, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu (TN) were
engaged in some degree of academic monitoring and support, although these were
for the most part designed to ensure teachers’ compliance with predefined tasks and
procedures, rather than to encourage them to analyse their teaching practices in the
light of their students’ learning outcomes. In Rajasthan and West Bengal, on the
other hand, the signals from the top were often contradictory and limited to
administrative matters and data collection. Let us take a quick look at these two
states.
In West Bengal, primary schools are ‘managed’ by a number of different bodies.
Teachers are appointed at the district level but come under the administrative
control of the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE), their training and
supervision comes under the Directorate of School Education (DSE) and DI of
Schools, the funds are controlled by the DI of Schools. Under the Sarva Shiksha
Abhiyan (SSA) fund flow, monitoring (data gathering) and training is handled by the
SSA directorate and its district wing. The District Primary School Council (DPSC)
and the panchayat do not speak in one voice: the DPSC is partly nominated and the
panchayat, an elected body, has no administrative role in schools.
These various bodies were created at different points of time for specific reasons.
According to the DPSC Chairperson we interviewed and the SSA coordinators at the
state and district levels, the existence of multiple chains of command essentially
implies that the teacher is at the receiving end of instructions from all but effectively
accountable to no one in particular. The ‘school’ also comes under different bodies
and therefore there is no coherent/coordinated body that takes care of all aspects of
schooling. No one can be held responsible for this sorry state of affairs and everyone
passes the buck. Organisations like the Pratichi Trust working in the state say that as
a result there is no effective support or supervision and the schools are in a state of
decay.
Said Kumar Rana of the Pratichi Trust: ‘…Pratichi Trust’s strategy is clear. We
believe that teachers are a huge resource and they can contribute a lot and only they
can break the cycle of poor quality and high drop out rates. We need to demand
involvement of teachers in policy-making and in formulation of curriculum and
textbooks. Simultaneously we need to list what the teachers can do and what they
cannot do. This could be followed by a series of workshops on teaching methods,
English and science teaching. We can see visible change in Bribhum and some work
has also started in Malda, Jalpaiguri and Gopiballabganj’ (interview, July 2008). In
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