Bihar government has approached the World Bank for loan to train school teachers in the state.

Teacher training and development is fast emerging as a key area where more attention and emphasis is required to ensure the educational standards go further up in Indian colleges and universities. The west has a fairly long history in focusing on academia development and perhaps for the same reason considered as a Mecca for students. Many institutes in the United States and Europe have devised short-term courses in learning, teaching and assessment to equip the teaching staff with techniques that help them deliver better.

As Elizabeth Jones writes in Growing Teachers: Partnerships in Staff Development (1993): “Teachers learn about teaching and learning by playing the teacher script, observing what happens, and discussing all the possibilities with other teachers. In this process, they come to see themselves as people who know thereby people capable of making appropriate choices for themselves and for children.”

In Training Teachers: A Harvest of Theory and Practice (1994), Margie Carter and Deb Curtis refer to the need for teachers to examine their own filters – the experiences and conditioning they bring to a teaching situation as well as examining their roles and strategies to see what role they play in their interactions with children.

In the United Kingdom, more teachers are to be trained ‘on the job’ rather than in universities, as announced by education secretary Micheal Gove recently. “The impact of these changes on initial teacher training will be revolutionary,” said Gove. A study by Graham Gibbs of Oxford University and Martin Coffey of University of Leicester – to see the impact of training of university teachers on their teaching skills – concludes that training can indeed increase the extent to which they adopt student focus. “Training of university teachers is now established in every university in the United Kingdom, Norway and Sri Lanka and is becoming increasingly common in many other countries. Click here to read more...

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Teaching is an art because each teacher has his or her own strength and own way to be effective.

Q. And, how can you gauge the effectiveness of the teacher?

A. We need to do simple and practical assessments of how students learn and by what processes they learn effectively. For instance, when Sesame Street started, the plan was to have people as instructors because it was believed that a focus on people would be more effective in creating learning amongst students. Since the people at Sesame Street were open to testing that question, they compared the engagement levels by replacing human beings with muppets. Contrary to their expectations, they found that a muppet was of much higher interest to students than people. Hence, we see all the famous muppets that are part of Sesame Street, like Big Bird and Elmo.

Q. Do you feel that curriculum today is an attraction to the youth or is there a change required to draw them towards making career in different fields?

A. Curriculum definitely needs to be changed. We need to modify it so that it has diversity built into it, which will enable people to learn in the ways that are most effective. With dynamic curricula, a teacher becomes an important practitioner who is helping to figure out the ways learning, goals and interests vary amongst students.

Q. What reforms in academia do you see as the need of the hour?

A. Most important – we need to move away from teaching everyone in one way and focus on how students learn effectively in different ways. I have worked with a number of schools and the most effective institutions have been the ones that deal with student differences. These are the schools that focus on each student and his or her most effective learning methods.

Q. Today best teaching and learning resources are available in English. Does language create a barrier between the seeker (not so proficient in English) and focus of knowledge on English? If yes, how can the teacher help?

A. There is research today that demonstrates that multilingual people are more flexible in their thinking skills. Evidence shows that they are more flexible and adaptable in their learning strategies. If teachers can honour different languages and build on the natural flexible thinking ability that comes from being multilingual, educationists can bridge this gap and take advantage of the cognitive flexibility that comes with being multilingual. Click here to read full interview...

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