primary school teachers the twists and turns of everyday practice

Version 20 Oct 08, edited final
help in real classroom situations. Once again, educational policy needs to be based
on ground realities rather than on wishful thinking.
Most important of all, teachers will tend to teach as they themselves were taught,
unless they are provided with opportunities and incentives to analyse and question
their own experience and thereby construct a different conception of what classroom
processes should aim to achieve. At different points throughout this booklet we have
described how teachers typically ‘follow orders’, ‘cover the syllabus’, ‘fill out
formats?’, and so on, irrespective of children’s learning outcomes. It is hard to think
of a more damning indictment of the education system than this single fact: teachers
do not even conceive of their work in terms of creating an environment where all
children can learn.
Obviously, these issues have profound and far-reaching implications for the quality
of teachers that we produce and for the learning outcomes that they are able to
ensure. The explosion of private teacher-training institutions in many states
complicates the situation even further, given that huge numbers of ‘trained’ teachers
are being produced by institutions with limited interest in educational quality and
over which state governments have little authority. Currently, the teacher-training
certificate is a piece of paper which is required in many states for appointment to a
teaching position, and has no more relevance than that.
Are there alternative models available? As described in Chapter III of this booklet,
there certainly are. The Rajasthan Shiksha Karmi Project was based on an entirely
different conception of what it means to be a teacher, and therefore on who could
become a teacher and how teachers should be trained and supported. The B.El.Ed
course offered by Delhi University, while starting out with a different set of
assumptions and objectives, offers students an opportunity to grapple with real
issues involved in teaching and learning rather than reproducing educational theory
in examinations. If states and institutions have failed to take advantage of the rich
learnings generated by these and other initiatives, it is because they fail to prioritise
educational processes over administrative requirements.
Conclusion 2. Once teachers are appointed, not only does the education system
fail to identify, much less reward, good teaching practice, it actively discourages it
in a variety of ways.
Above and beyond what beginning teachers bring to the job, the education system
acts in a number of ways to shape what teachers do in the classroom. These include
the nature and amount of in-service training they are provided, the kind of
supervision and support they receive and the incentives the system offers for
dedicating more or less effort to teaching. In addition, the degree and nature of
teachers’ accountability—to their employers, to their students, or to parents—affects
what they are willing to attempt, while their degree of autonomy impacts their
ability to adapt content and methods to local needs. We briefly discuss these issues
below.
In-service teacher-training
State education systems rarely if ever bother to ask teachers what kind of training
would be useful to them. It seems quite difficult to comprehend that an in-service
training programme on teaching in multi-grade classrooms or on the special needs of
first-generation learners, to name only two possibilities, has (to the best of our
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