primary school teachers the twists and turns of everyday practice

Version 20 Oct 08, edited final
they did supervise, they rarely went beyond checking records. A teacher’s comment on
the last visit of the supervisor was typical: ‘He chatted with the teachers and checked the
records regarding midday meals. He did not ask for any information about teaching or children’s
learning levels.’ (…) Concerns about TLM centred on the misuse of money, and not on
obtaining and using relevant materials in the classroom. In Andhra Pradesh, a
‘handbook’ that listed various important questions and answers had been prepared at
the district level. This was obviously a signal to the paper setters as well as teachers to
focus on certain questions to ensure that too many children did not fail.
When formal supervision and monitoring systems do not engage with teaching
and learning processes, the message that runs through the school system is that
these do not matter.
There are, of course, islands of hope. There are instances where stricter monitoring
along with effective on-site academic support has made a difference. A 2006 review
of promising interventions from different parts of the country revealed that most of
the successful interventions for improving the quality of education have worked
around some generic principles (among others detailed in the report):
One, coming to terms with reality on the ground through a realistic assessment of the
situation with respect to learning by teachers as well as their immediate superiors. This
implies that the teachers and administrators acknowledge the problem and do not
brush it aside. Acknowledging the problem in all its complexity and with all its
imperfections represents a cognitive break with the past.
For example, when the Chennai Corporation began to look at the issue of learning
levels in Corporation schools, it started with a participatory exercise where the
‘maladies’ in the educational system were identified by education administrators
(Mahapatra 2006). This exercise revealed, among other things, that children’s
learning of basic academic skills was not ensured and that the teacher dominated the
classroom all the time with little flexibility for children to learn or develop on their
own. It was assumed that all children learn the same thing at the same time and in
the same manner, leading to a failure to address the multi-grade and multi-level
nature of a classroom. Teachers acknowledged that evaluation methods were not
scientific and that neither the process nor the results fed into classroom transactions.
Similarly an intervention in Andhra Pradesh enabled the supervisory mechanism—
meaning the block/cluster/mandal level academic resource persons—to directly test
children and assess schools for themselves. Sharing this information at different
levels highlighted both the scale of the problem as well the need for a collective
engagement with reality. The Andhra Pradesh QIP (Quality Improvement
Programme) and CLIP (Children’s Language Improvement Programme) enabled
both teachers and administrators to move away from impersonal numbers, grapple
with the learning levels of children in schools and honestly share lessons with each
other, including the Village Education Committee (VEC) and parents (Patni 2006a).
Two, creating open communication channels between education
administrators/implementers and local officials, teachers, parents and children. This is more
difficult in a hierarchical system, yet there have been fledgling initiatives that have
demonstrated some promise. Assessment has always been a contentious issue feared
by both teachers and administrators given its potential to ‘expose’ the real picture. At
the same time, assessment of learning outcomes is integral to monitoring quality. It
is in this context that the Learning Guarantee Programme (LGP) strategy of
20