The average score of a grade 10 student in mathematics was 220 out of 500 in the National Achievement Survey 2021. In science, the average student scored 206 out of 500, and 277 in English, as per the survey.

Experts agree that the key to improving these figures is with good teachers. As of March 2023, India had 15,896 teacher education institutes in the country, offering 22,706 courses in education.

In addition to what they are taught in these institutions, teachers are required to attend five days of in-service training which consists of workshops and specialised modules, such as the use of information and communication technologies, or ICT, in classrooms.

Beginning 2025, the Integrated Teacher Education Programme will replace the existing degree in education in the country. It is part of an overhaul of the education system that the National Education Policy 2020 envisions, and is described as a “dual-major holistic Bachelor’s degree” administered in a “multi and inter disciplinary academic environment”. The teacher training curriculum will be revised, first in 2025 and then every five to 10 years.

The framework document for teacher training, the final version of which was released in 2009, was called “National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education: Towards Preparing Professional and Humane Teacher” (or NCFTE). IndiaSpend spoke to aspiring teachers, teachers and teacher trainers to understand how the framework was working in practice, and what they felt they needed from the revised version in order to teach their students (and student teachers) better.

Training does not help with actual classroom situations

We met Saniya* during one ICT training module in a government school in a small town in Uttar Pradesh.

A government school teacher with 19 years of work experience and limited resources at her disposal, Saniya does not expect the training module on using smart TVs to play videos from the internet to be of much use in her class(es) because her school does not have a TV or an internet connection. Her plight is not unique: Of the 2,58,054 schools in her home state, in 2021-22, less than a quarter (54,554) had an internet connection.

“I teach grades one to five at the same time, and all my students are children of domestic helpers and street vendors,” Saniya said. “These children pack their bags at the end of the day only to open them the next morning in class.” Her students’ parents can barely provide them clean clothes or comb their hair, much less help them with their homework.

“The parents use the school as a means of keeping their children safe while they work,” Saniya pointed out. A teacher in her situation needs to spend more time with the students so that she can alter her teaching and testing methods to make them suitable for all the students in her charge.

Saniya was pleased with the various programmes conducted at the District Institute of Education Training, or DIET, and the regional teaching institute in her town. However, the reality of her classroom was not addressed in any of those sessions, she said.

Of the 1.48 million schools in India, around 7.88 percent are single-teacher schools, government data from 2021-22 show. Taking cognisance of this, NEP 2020 says that areas having large numbers of socio-economically disadvantaged students will aim for a pupil-teacher ratio or PTR of under 25:1, as opposed to the 30:1 prescribed by the Right to Education Act.

It takes the support of the entire community to engage the students, according to G Shankar, principal of DIET Begusarai in Bihar. “They need to create processes that respond to and include the diverse range of children and contexts, enhance capabilities and institute performance assessment accordingly,” he explained.

Can a teacher be trained to handle multiple classes at the same time? 

“There are two schools of thought on this,” said Firoz Ahmed, a teacher at a Municipal Corporation of Delhi school in North Delhi, “one which believes that teachers should be trained to handle multi-grade classrooms and the other which argues that doing so would legitimise the government’s failure to provide teachers to the students.”

Teachers are trained to teach their students irrespective of their capabilities or backgrounds, especially in the public education system, he believes. “A teacher’s role is very important in the educational attainment of a child from a disadvantaged background, but the teacher cannot demand that the student possess any social or intellectual capital to begin with.”

Staffing situations notwithstanding, teachers can be taught to make their classrooms more inclusive, and training impacts their attitude towards educating children with special needs, as this 2023 study from Karnataka found. Teachers in government and private schools did not perform differently, found the study.

Another area that needs attention is the development of empathy for the ‘economically weaker section’ students, said Arvind Mishra, a professor of psychology specialising in education, who teaches at the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “The RTE Act makes it compulsory for schools to enrol 25 percent of their students from the EWS population, which is something that school administration, teachers and students do not like, but schools must resist the regressive practices prevalent in the society.”

Syllabus unclear, needs to be updated more frequently

In 2021-22, the latest year for which data are available, there were 1.7 million students enrolled in education-related courses at the bachelor’s level – in Bachelor of Education and Bachelor of Elementary Education degrees – and 272,120 students enrolled for postgraduate courses in education, as per the All India Survey of Higher Education Report 2021. Master of Education is a teacher educator training programme.

Ideally, those with graduate degrees and diplomas should teach students in schools, while those with postgraduate degrees and higher should train the teachers and undertake research for education, explained Shankar. In the B.Ed course, teacher trainees spend time as interns in schools, while M.Ed is more academic and does not include learning on the job.

B.Ed courses are supposed to teach learner studies, contemporary studies, educational studies, pedagogy, etc, according to the NCFTE. Postgraduate courses should focus on psychological, social and philosophical foundations of education, education research, counselling, curriculum planning, etc.

However, the curricula at both levels were not found to be different in five states (Delhi, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Jammu and Kashmir), whose teacher training syllabi were reviewed as part of this May 2012 study.

The courses at the graduate level will be replaced by a four-year Integrated Teacher Education Programme starting from 2025. IndiaSpend wrote to the Ministry of Education to inquire about the changes to the existing syllabus and the faculty who will be employed to teach and research for the new course and the colleges where these courses will be taught. This story will be updated when they respond.

Aspiring teachers need more than just professional skills and dispositions, said Arvind Mishra. “For teaching younger students, teachers need to have an imagination about the imagination of the student.” 

Creativity is an asset, and the use of dance or drama techniques can help engage the students, provided their use is not frowned upon by the principal, he added.

NCFTE 2009 recommends that trainee teachers develop story-telling skills through drama workshops. It also recommends that they study how students learn. To increase student engagement, trainee teachers are given lessons in communicating with techniques of theatre, said a student of a teacher training institute in Delhi. They also attend workshops on the use of ICT in education, but the lab is out of bounds for most of the time, she added.

Both Saniya and the student from Delhi, who did not want to be named, are aware of the concept of feedback from learners and the need to modify their teaching methods based on that feedback. However this concept, called meta learning (adhyayan-pradhyayan in Hindi), is not emphasised enough in the syllabus for teacher training, as per Shankar.

“As an educator, I recommend that parents ask their children about what they asked their teacher in school instead of what they learnt, because that is a better gauge of the students’ and teachers’ performance,” Shankar explained, pointing out that rather than being dogmatic, aspiring teachers need to be competent to learn about any situation they may face in a classroom, as well as empowered whatever comes up, instead of being told what to do. “Neither the training in colleges nor the school administration allows them to make decisions by themselves,” he pointed out.

Quality of training institutions suspect

There were around 9.5 million teachers in the country in 2021-22, as per the UDISE+ dashboard. Some of these teachers are less educated than the students they are meant to teach, as IndiaSpend reported in July 2024.

Teaching does not always attract the best and brightest talent, said Mishra. “It is a job performed by those who do not have the wherewithal to develop and pursue their professional ambitions.” This makes it imperative that the training imparted to them in the teacher training institutes makes them competent for their job, he added.

Of the 2,882 teacher training institutes surveyed for the AISHE report, only 718 (24.9 percent) were government-run. “We have allowed private colleges that impart teacher training in absentia (to students who do not attend classes) to mushroom all over the country,” said Shankar.

Government teacher training colleges, such as DIET of which Shankar is the principal, perform other jobs too, like providing in-service training to teachers. Originally, they were tasked with school development (such as school management, providing learning resources, programme implementation, etc) but that is now a prerogative of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, he explained.

A teaching job offers job security, but those who land the coveted job after completing their degree are then assigned to do other jobs, such as Saniya’s colleagues who work as booth level officers to update data on the electors in the area. “The government spends so much money on training us, in addition to the time and money I spent on getting my degree. Why are they wasting my talents and expertise on doing the job of a BLO?” she asked.

For best results, invest in teachers and students

The education ministry has developed the DIKSHA portal, which has learning material for teachers on foundational literacy and numeracy and games for younger learners. Saniya says the games and videos help with engaging the students, but not when she is not around to supervise.

“If I turn away for a minute, the children will switch to a cartoon video instead of the instructional material I play for them on my tab,” she told IndiaSpend.

Saniya and the other two teachers in her school got tablets from the state government. With no internet in their school, they operate these tabs using their own SIM cards while waiting for the smart TV to arrive. “When I am not using it to mark myself present or upload the students’ data for direct benefit transfer or mid day meal scheme, I put on a video and let the children crowd around the screen to watch,” she explained.

An ICT-enhanced learning environment can improve students’ performance by using unique pedagogical approaches, as per a 2023 study from Romania. ICT and school infrastructure should be used as a supplement to the human experience of teaching, but they cannot be substitutes for a teacher, agreed all the teachers and teacher trainers IndiaSpend spoke to. 

“These apps and learning materials will be more useful if the teachers are allowed to make the decision based on their pedagogic discretion, instead of being forced to follow top-down and micro-managing commands. Also, these interventions need to be mindful of both the unequal conditions that students come from and their diverse needs,” said Ahmed.

A 2020 study from Spain suggests that the use of ICT in education does not increase students’ scores in reading and mathematics, though it does increase their science test scores. “We cannot make teaching more effective through innovations, projects, glamour events, training teachers without assessing their needs,” said Shankar.

In 2009, the year the RTE was passed, students from Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu were assessed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment. Both states finished at the bottom of the list of participating countries on tests of reading and mathematical skills, finishing ahead of only Kyrgyzstan. On the science test, students from Himachal Pradesh were at the bottom of the list, ahead only of Tamil Nadu and Kyrgyzstan. 

Fifteen years later, the results from the NAS 2021 report indicate that learning outcomes have not improved significantly. Students should not be blamed for these poor results, believes Mishra.

“The RTE Act is a very progressive piece of legislation,” said Mishra, “but it should strive to provide free and compulsory quality education as a fundamental right, and education quality cannot be assured without improving the quality of teaching talent.”

This report is republished with permission from IndiaSpend, a data-driven, public-interest journalism non-profit. It has been lightly edited for style and clarity.

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