Posts Tagged ‘Teacher Training’


September 11th, 2009

New learning, and reaffirmation in the vale of Doon

Teacher Training Programmes impart new learning and insights to both the trainers and participants, that is, if both let go of who they are to become what they might be.

These sessions are meant to reacquaint teachers with something that they know and believe in but put on the backburner once they get caught in the mundane, but essential, part of schooling. Slowly, but surely, the mundane takes over the meaningful.

In our first interaction with teachers from the Mecca of schooling in India, Dehradun, the teachers were extremely responsive and thoroughly engaged with the multi-sensorial experience of the workshop. This is rather rare when it comes to adult learning. The environs in the sprawling campus of a school just off Mussoorie-Dehradun road were ideally suited and conducive to sustenance of interest.

The two-day session revolved around the issues of Literacy and Numeracy, in the broadest sense as declared by UNESCO. Though from different schools, the first learning was the commonalities of issues that plague the teachers’ effort – very high student teacher ratio, paucity of time, individual differences and gaps in students’ learning and other non-teaching duties thrust upon teachers. It served as the guiding principle for our work in the two days, as well as a launching pad to share best practices and their adaptation, wherever possible, to the specs of participants’ classrooms. This worked as an icebreaker and energizer for the community of learners present there.

It was heartening to see that majority of these teachers came with a genuine interest in improving students’ learning, ready to make minor changes within their given realities. These were ordinary teachers from ordinary schools who sat through the weekend and through teachers’ day, missing celebrations organised by their school and their students, with the eagerness to learn and take back that one thing which seems attainable in their respective schools and situations. That, itself, made them extraordinary.

As for the trainers, it was an affirmation; those who want to learn from these sessions, will attend, irrespective of day or venue.

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August 14th, 2009

Text-books as curriculum

A long time ago I read, “Teachers are designers”. It has taken me years to understand the implications of that simple sentence. As a teacher who has taught across the grades and continents, I have struggled in designing curriculum (as per school, board, provincial and national standards), teaching-learning activities and assessment tasks. It takes a lot of time and creativity, both of which teachers find themselves deficient in! As an administrator, I have empathised with and supported teachers struggling to play the designer of their students’ learning.

So am I implying that textbooks have no place in a classroom? Certainly not! Textbooks are a tool, one of the many learning tools that a teacher/school uses to make students learn as per expectations/ standards. They are based on a certain syllabus but they are certainly not the syllabus. Textbooks are useful as sources of organised information about topics from the syllabus providing many exercises for reinforcing key knowledge. But they distort how understanding of an issue develops, since they present “only the cleaned-up residue”, “a simplified summation of findings”. The school in general and teacher in particular, need to use it as a resource for what it does well and compensate from other sources/ resources what textbooks do poorly.

Driven by convenience and profit motive, it seems that teachers/schools are abdicating their responsibility of designing students’ learning, passing it off to publishers, who have evolved into a powerful lobby. With the backing of the Who’s Who in the educational boards, they have successfully positioned and marketed textbooks as curriculum itself. Some publishing houses are also making inroads into training teachers about teaching. It’s simple quid pro quo, where the schools order textbooks in bulk from a particular publishing house who in-turn commit to train teachers about teaching learning. It goes unsaid that this training is a means to an end, the end being more sales for the publishing house.

It seems that convention has been turned on its head with teachers becoming a resource for the textbook instead of it being the other way round – textbooks being one of the resources for the teachers.

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June 1st, 2009

Differentiated instruction – Redefining teaching and learning

As a parent of a 3-year old son who is an articulate communicator and natural inquirer, I am currently facing a dilemma. If I put on my educationist lenses to view the issue, the dilemma assumes very serious proportions.

My son, who will turn three in a fortnight, goes to a preschool where kids are organised by age grouping with March 31 (DoB) as the date cut-off for determining the age grouping – a logic that pervades enrolment procedure for subsequent grades as well. Since he was under the age of 3 on the cut-off date, technically he will continue to be in the 2-3 years grouping even after June (when he becomes over 3 years of age). There is a huge developmental gap between a 2 year old and a 3 year old. 

It is not that this problem has just dawned on me; it was a concern I had expressed at the time of enrolment, but my mind was put at ease by assurances of differentiated learning within the same class. From training and experience, I understand the implications and benefits of differentiated learning so I decided to be patient and see how differently he and similar children in the grade would be taught. But now patience is running out as I haven’t seen much of the differentiated instruction in action during the past 2 months that he has been going to school. 

My dilemma stems from the fact that I do understand the working of schools and the issue of teacher training in differentiated instruction and assessment in schools, but how do I reconcile that as a parent of an ever-eager-to-learn soon-to-be-three-year-old.   

As I search for sorting the dilemma, I ask myself, using the powerful words of Karen Morrow Durica: 

Is it truly easier for all to sit and learn?

Should 8-years old all share the same ability and concern?

Does everyone learn better when there is silence in the room?

Do 50-min periods give all the time to bloom?

Is the only way to learn about geometry from a book?

Are having 5 neat paragraphs how each essay should look?

Does every brain work at its best at 7:45 am?

Do practice tests for seven weeks make everyone thrive?

Does every learner need a break at exactly the same time?

Are projects better if each one must have the same design?

Does only certain literature make someone a better reader?

Do only sports, or math, or speech make someone a leader?

Can everyone show what is known by way of written tests?

Does giving “points” inspire everyone to do their best?

Does compliance to school rules define a better student?

Is it possible the misfits are as able, bright and prudent?

Appears if we look closely at the structures we embrace-

Creating hardship for some students, making school a hampered place:

We’d understand that many problems seem to be our fault-

How we do school is often for the convenience of the adults.

If teaching were as simple as using the one best way to teach everyone, “one size fits all” kind of approach,  it would be considered more of a science. However, there isn’t just one best way to teach everyone and that’s why teaching is an art.

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May 18th, 2009

Inquiry-based teaching

“The school needs to have more student-initiated inquiries than teacher-driven ones”, was the observation of the visiting team of IB experts who had come to study classroom practices in the school that I work with. Teacher training is an important part of my job description and is one of the aspects of teachers’ professional development that I have struggled with for the past couple of years. Coming from veterans in the field, persons whose work I have been following for a number of years, made me reflective and empathetic to see it from the lens of the teachers in the classroom who are trying, with varying degrees of success, to adapt to the inquiry-based approach of teaching-learning. 

Our perception of adults in general and teachers in particular, is that they ought to know better than children. As adults, we have experienced life more and therefore ought to have all the correct answers. So in our interactions with children, we assign ourselves the role of “answer provider”. Since there is only one “answer-provider” in a classroom, by implication there can only be one correct answer. Also then only some kind of inquiries can be raised, the ones that the “answer-provider” knows the answer to, and the rest are discarded and disdained as “silly” or “impertinent” or “irrelevant”, no matter how intelligent and relevant they are to the question-poser. 

Even when we do, there is little patience with or faith in the child to facilitate his search for the answer or construction of meaning. It is so much easier and acceptable to provide the answers to the child. Then there is the other element of student led enquiries – how does a teacher assess the work of the student when there is “multiple correct answers”? I will elaborate more on this topic in my next blog. 

Some of the difficulty in letting children initiate and take charge of their inquiries stems from our difficulty in accepting that the child is an individual today with his own perspective, and education should bring out more of his individuality. The urge is to mould him into our image of “a somebody”, so that he can be “that somebody” in the future – with complete disregard to “the somebody” that he is a today. 

Teachers trained and raised with such beliefs, therefore, find it very difficult to adapt to the inquiry-approach which celebrates “multiple correct answers” as the child directs his inquiry and charts the course of constructing meaning. Unlearning the teacher-taught methodology takes longer and is more difficult than learning how to help students generate and find their own answers to those inquiries. But the latter cannot happen without the former. 

So, to the teachers who are working to adopt the inquiry-based approach to teaching-learning and adapting yourselves for it, I commend your efforts.

Keep up the good work……it only gets better!!

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May 5th, 2009

Chasm between teacher training & practice

Research is an existential attitude and therefore since time immemorial there have been facts established and theories propounded about education in general and learning in particular. This enormous body of research is varied in its scope and orientation. 

Over the years, certain pedagogical theories and components of this research have become very acceptable in teacher training courses:

• theories relating to child development primarily from the works of Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget with Freud and Pavlov on the periphery

• theories relating to curriculum development ranging from integrated to concept-driven

• theories about teaching – learning elaborating on learning styles, differentiated instruction, assessment and evaluation

Educationists who learn about this research and established theories in their teacher training courses, find themselves, right at the beginning of their careers, abandoning them and many a times working in contradiction to them. For instance, there is plenty of research available to support differentiated instruction, yet when teachers enter the school where they should ideally be applying and furthering these theories, they find themselves planning and delivering instruction to a class as a whole.

This would not happen in case of other professions like medicine, law etc. Can you imagine a doctor abandoning what he learnt during his training as a doctor as soon as he begins his practice? Certainly not! But not only is it accepted but also expected for a teacher to leave all sound pedagogy that that he/she has learnt about and adopt the schools agenda which usually is narrowed down to test scores. School systems are designed to suffocate the application of these theories which slowly die a forced death by making teachers work in stark contrast with the intended outcome.

I wonder how would our students learning and teachers’ job satisfaction be affected if schools were created and organised on the basis of available research about teaching-learning and as hubs of furthering this research.

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