Teacher Efficacy - Get this wrong, get NEP 2020 wrong
The NEP 2020 is India's major national education policy reform guideline. It suggests massive overhaul of the PreK-12 and HigherEd systems. In addition, it has certain provisions for teacher education reform too. While I am thrilled by what is being proposed for students, I am mighty underwhelmed and quite disappointed by what has been prescribed by teachers. The boldness and visionary nature of the policy vis-a-vis students seems to have been all of expended by the time the policymakers decided to think about teachers. Resultantly, it is a weak attempt at only marginally correcting the pervasive and dangerously precipitous issues surrounding teacher training today.
In this edition of this newsletter, I bring to you the sheer enormity and importance of teacher education reform, the key elements of the policy in this regard, and then, my thoughts on what really needs to be done if any of this has to work in reality.
While my previous articles on NEP have been upbeat and optimistic, this one is liable to carry a muted note, as it reflects my worry about the inadequacy of this aspect of the reform.
1. The Relative Importance of Teacher Training
Some of key elements of the NEP2020 reform are:
These require that there be more teachers available across schools in India, including rural areas. And that these teachers be upskilled to meet the higher order competencies required to enable the above changes. Even existing teachers are not equipped to transact curriculum of this level of sophistication. New teachers who come out of the teacher training system need to be equipped with these skills from day one. And overall, we need a lot more teachers than we have at every grade level, but especially the higher classes.
In the Higher-Ed segment, teaching staff need to be augmented:1) in numbers 2) with proper degrees (doctoral) and 3) with teaching skills appropriate for millennials and GenZ students and 4) expanded 21st century curriculum. There is a whole host of administrators also required to create frameworks and systems that enact the principles of multi-disciplinary university education.
The teachers' training colleges run woefully outdated curricula and even to do that, there is rampant corruption. The number of fraudulent teachers' training institutes mass-producing so-called 'teachers' is not trivial, and some states are more vulnerable in this respect than others. It goes without saying that those are also the states with rather poor student learning outcomes.
In all manner of teacher provisioning, we are hugely unprepared. The NCF calls for specific abilities and numbers of teachers from ECE to HigherEd in ways that we need to urgently ramp up and prepare for.
2. State of Teacher Education in India
Momentarily setting aside the competency of available teachers, let us first look at how many teachers are even available in the first place.
How many teachers are there in India today?
Approximately 97 lakh teachers currently are active in India.
How many are needed?
The 2021 UNESCO report, titled, 'State of the Education Report for India: No Teacher, No Class' provides the following information:
Abut 20% of teacher positions lie vacant in the country. In rural areas, about 70% of teacher positions are not filled. Over 11 lakh schools have open positions for teachers.
Keep in mind that nearly 3 lakh teacher positions become open each year due to retirement, early quitting of career etc.
Overall, we can say that about 10 lakh teachers are required immediately, and thereafter, about 3-4 lakh teachers being inducted into the system every year to compensate for retirements, exits and provide teachers to new schools being set up.
How many are being produced each year?
About 10 lakh teachers appear for the Teacher Eligibility Test in India each year. The percentage of them who passed ranges from 2% to 10% across states. (Some rare states like Karnata have seen 19% pass rates, but that is due to leniency in marking with the specific intention of allowing more teachers to get into the system.) This is an obvious shortfall. What is worse is that many schools today have employed unqualified teachers, and teachers are being trained in sub-standard colleges resulting in extremely poor training even for those who claim to have a qualification.
What is the extent of teacher shortage today?
We may thus say that we need 3-4 lakh competent teachers to be inducted each year into the system, and about 15 lakh competent teachers to be infused into the system in one-shot in the beginning to make up for the shortfall of supply today.
How many will be needed when NEP is implemented?
Since the student: teacher ratio is likely to get more stringent and now, with early childhood grade levels also being introduced, more teachers are needed. Let's roughly estimate that (conservatively) at about 1 lakh more teachers each year.
How many will be created when NEP is implemented?
I am unable to estimate this as there are plans to close down or merge some of the existing colleges, and create new. But details on these are missing in the policy.
Competency of available teachers
There is no objective measure of the competence of teachers in India; there is no official mechanism anyway. So we use surrogate measures.
The ASER report of 2019 observed that only about half the students of class 5 could read a class 2 level text. Less than half the students of class 8 could do basic division. This may be due to a number of factors including social, economic, genetic etc. However, the quality of the teacher also plays a role. Given that regions with the number of fake teacher training schools positively correlates with regions with adverse learning outcomes of students, this data is relevant.
The fact that only a single-digit percentage of Teacher Eligibility Test takers successfully pass it speaks to the preparedness of people taking the test. Consider that many people giving the test have already passed B.Ed or D.Ed! The test isn't all that hard, nor is the pass criterion draconian.
The fact that B.Ed students are unable to pass the TET speaks volumes about the course and how it is administered. Further, the curriculum is antiquated. ICT skills are all but lacking.
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Overall, most teacher education institutions are dull places of deep-rooted orthodoxy and intellectual stagnation. The teaching community is now plagued by people who worship the idea of obedience a lot more than they celebrate the idea of critical thinking and questioning. Teacher-training mechanisms (notwithstanding that the policy on this has long been to encourage innovation and debate) have little to no critical thinking elements, and the examinations are just tests of information regurgitation and old-school thinking. The problem is made worse by the fact that the wealth of experience that real-world teachers experience in actual classrooms does not get fed back to the teaching colleges or the curriculum. Therefore, the curriculum and teaching methodology does not accommodate or adapt to realities in the changing world of students. It remains disconnected, ancient and irrelevant - stagnant in concept, and in the educators' mindsets.
Absence of quality research in the matter combined with the absence of infusion of real-world experiences combined with the absence of critically thinking bright young teacher-trainees who question the current methods actively, together, lead to the aforesaid stagnation.
Aside from this, there is a great need for teachers to be trained in handling more diversely enabled classrooms. With children now displaying more variety in terms of learning difficulties and special needs (be it those with neurological challenges or an excess of ability and genius), teachers cannot just come in prepared to deal with the average and expect to send out some cookie-cutter model of good student out of the school. Teachers now need to be able and empowered to handle precocious early geniuses as well as those with dysgraphia, dyslexia or other more generalized learning or social disabilities.
And pupil teachers are themselves seen as a homogeneous mass - undifferentiated, and destined to become cookie-cutter products of a factory production system of teacher-training. How will they ever learn what the words 'differentiated instruction' even look like, let alone remediation!? If they have special needs, who is addressing them? When their inputs, thoughts, ideas, and curiosities are not entertained and there is no room for constructive discussions, all that is being reinforced is the outdated idea of Behaviourism. Newer, and better, theories like Social Constructivism are merely lip-service... no, actually not even that. Just a dry "keyword" in the prepared answer to a 4-mark question!
In the Higher-Ed sector, teaching faculty have next to no training in the practice of teaching! And those trying to do research are often fettered by their not knowing how to design or conduct water-tight research studies. The quality of papers being often extremely poor comes from this root cause - no one taught or guided them correctly on the research method! No one held the bar high enough, or showed them the steps. How are they supposed to then know what to do, let alone how to do it right?
While norms exist, compliance is poor. Teachers are barely motivated to take these up, except for rudimentarily checking the boxes to adhere to norms - it is compliance in letter at best, not in spirit.
Motivational issues for teachers continue to be:
The less said, the better. Also, the quality severely varies by geography.
3. Aspects of the Policy Pertaining to Teachers
So then, what is provisioned in NEP 2020 for teachers?
To be fair, the policy does try to address these issues. At least some of them.
We continue to marginalize our specially needy folks - be they pupil-teachers or actual students they will graduate to teach. We have also pushed technology education under the rug with vaguely worded lip-service material.
But what I felt energized by in the policy are the following areas of focus:
NEP 2020 encourages schools to deal with a shortage of teachers by sharing teachers across campuses, especially for disciplines such as art, craft, music, and dance. The policy also recommends reaching out to local eminent persons or experts as ‘master instructors’ in traditional arts.
"4.43: Teacher education will include methods for the recognition and fostering of such student talents and interests. The NCERT and NCTE will develop guidelines for the education of gifted children. B.Ed. programmes may also allow a specialization in the education of gifted children."
5.14. Teachers will be given more autonomy in choosing aspects of pedagogy, so that they may teach in the manner they find most effective for the students in their classrooms.
5.18. Further, it will be ensured that career growth (in terms of tenure, promotions, salary increases, etc.) is available to teachers within a single school stage (i.e., Foundational, Preparatory, Middle, or Secondary)
5.19. Vertical mobility of teachers based on merit will also be paramount; outstanding teachers with demonstrated leadership and management skills would be trained over time to take on academic leadership positions in schools, school complexes, BRCs, CRCs, BITEs, DIETs as well as relevant government departments.
4. What has been Missed and Must be Addressed Quickly
All this is good, except, even the NCF 2009 spelled out nearly all of these things. We are far from implementing them. Worse still, even back in 2009, the gross mismanagement of teacher training institutions and their collective parochial mindsets had already been called out and addressed in the policy and curricular framework. What changed? I am waiting to see what the NCF for teachers 2022 (23?) will propose anew.
There is an abject lack of guidelines around teacher assessment, training teachers in the methods required by the NCF for the new crop of students, ensuring teacher attendance (biometrics in schools?) especially in Government schools, keeping rural teachers up to date and evolving locally manageable methods to manage the curriculum goals etc. While there is a vague reference to improving the standards of the TET and making the testing more relevant, it doesn't spell out how it will be made relevant. Neither does it say how it expects to improve the already miserable pass percentage of TET takers. We will have to see what the new National Professional Standards for Teachers and the NCF for teacher education come up with.
Even if they propose, how much will states implement them? Do they have the right talent and leadership to do the needful? I feel highly encouraged by the work being done by organisations like #Suraasa and #Chetana, though, in upskilling teachers. Even #LEADSchool is doing its bit in improving teacher standards in the B-rung cities. [ Look them up here: Suraasa , CHETANA EDUCATION and LEAD School ].
This brings me to the point about the private sector and what it can do.
Continual education is one area where the private sector can come in and make a massive difference. Continual education could expose teachers to practices being done in other boards (e.g. CBSE teachers may be able to learn the ways of the IB world, and vice versa), or even in other countries (e.g. practices from the USA, Singapore, Finland etc.), or even learn from other innovative teachers from within the country (those who win the award for it each year often display great ability to use locally available opportunities and resources in intelligent ways).
These sessions could be used to hear from the teachers, collate data from all over the country, and feed it back to the policy and curricular bodies to make changes as required. Teachers could also participate vigorously by debating, doing critical thinking exercises and intelligently questioning the teaching that they are being imparted. Communication skills - including polish in language, soft-skills, and empathetic handling of peers and students - need to be reinforced regularly.
These training periods can be places for teachers to bond - by sharing their practices and even resources in a common database, as well as by sharing human values by doing skits, declamations, dances, art fests, talent shows etc. together.
In any case, teacher training sessions can be highly informative, interactive, and a good break for teachers from their daily routine.
The Role of EdTech Organisations
Three specific ways EdTech companies (like HurixDigital ) can contribute are:
If you feel that I have missed something major out, or have good ideas about how teacher training has been successfully effected somewhere in India or abroad, please share! We would all love to know and learn collectively.