Ensuring teachers in every classroom

role model Becoming a teacher is often considered to be an inner calliing and are increasingly needed to ensure that future generations can participat

According to 2011 census there are close to 160 million children in India below the age of 7. Education of these children will determine the outlook and development of Indian economy in future.

There is a great urgency to ensure that the growing generation is educated and equipped to participate in modern economy.

Close to 68 per cent of the Indian population live in rural areas with limited access to basic services such as healthcare and education. While it is important to not compromise on global standards, we need to question and re-design ways in which services can be delivered in rural India.

Approaching these challenges from the private sector adds additional complexity, to make an operation low cost and scalable.

India is facing a shortage of 1.4 million teachers and they are hard to find.
Becoming a teacher is often considered to be an inner calling.

There are some truly enlightened teachers who have the innate ability to empathise with and understand their students. Their passion for their subject and teaching can influence a student for life.

A teacher’s role
Such teachers such are rare and no amount of professional training can help create them. We like to believe that teachers like this are born, not trained. There are also many such teachers in rural India who are educated but have no access to job opportunities within the village, espcially young women.

Their families often do not want them to travel far for work. As a result, these women are most often left to their duties within the home and in the field. Can these women become teachers? Teachers could be perceived as having three main roles:

n They set a moral example for their students. Children tend to interpret the adult behaviour as the standard and the norm. This taps into the personal qualities and values of the teacher his or her sense of justice, kindness, forgiveness and social responsibility. These are not qualities that people can develop through professional training.

n They facilitate the learning process. Skills such as how to keep students engaged and how to encourage their participation in class can be developed and they can be trained in using them.

n Teachers are sole caretakers of knowledge. It is commonly believed that a teacher is to share her knowledge of a subject with a student. However does the learning rest in the hands of the teacher or the student? If we were to look at learning from the point of view of a student, the teacher is only one source of information among many others.

A student can learn from the environment, discussions, books, parents, while interacting with peers. Looking at learning through the eyes of the student the teacher’s transforms from being the sole caretaker of knowledge to that of a facilitator in the process of individual and group learning.

Well trained facilitators
What is needed is a well-designed learning processes and materials and well-trained facilitators who can guide a group of students through the process. By working with a group of experienced teachers,  one can use their knowledge and experience to create those guided session plans. These are the teachers who have taught for many years have an instinctive understanding of how children respond to one activity or another and how to present a topic in a way that keeps them engaged and interested.

The local women selected are trained and are supported with daily session plans and materials that ensure learning happens in every classroom. The time and contexts we live in are calling for new solutions. The challenges of today are not the same as they have been before. We need to constructively question what was done yesterday and create new systems that work today.