Policy reforms and teachers effectiveness...(My brief talk at ASER Policy Dialogue)

Let me first of all go through what we are doing with the prospective teachers...when we use the word teacher education we usually mean teacher preparation programs which included PTC, CT, B.Ed, B.S.Ed and M.Ed etc and now includes ADE an B.Ed Honors as well. What do we do for teacher preparation...first of all they have their own 10, 12 or 14 years of schooling and then we add one, two, three or four years teacher education to it. They already have the content knowledge to some extent and what we give them in these TE programs is three more sets of knowledge, 1- more content knowledge, 2. Pedagogical knowledge, and 3. Professional knowledge. - what i see missing here is the set of skills they need for becoming effective teachers...even in the new four year program most of the institutions have not been able to fill the gap between theory and practice, they have not been able to adopt the model of short term observations and practice teaching throughout the program, rather mostly there is a long term practice teaching at the end of two years or four years. I feel like we are making the same mistakes again n again, while planning the four year program we have not been able to think through and have developed a four year long version of old B.Ed and M.Ed scheme of studies...

once they complete their teacher preparation program then comes the step of teacher recruitment in which we usually test their knowledge and not skills...once they are there in classrooms they have knowledge of teaching and learning but they don't know how to bring it into practice....

Then we try to bring effectiveness through professional development interventions...can we take a quick look at how we have been trying to do this...if take Punjab's example we tried out CASCADE model at DSD and then we moved on to the CPD model which included the development of cluster centers and we are using the word "mentoring" but doing everything else and not mentoring...I have made this claim in my PhD Thesis and I stick to this claim that we only use jargon but don't really know the meanings hence we cannot interpret the concepts into practices. We only give labels and titles as we adopt it from elsewhere but over simplification of every process ruins it...CPD has the most important word i.e. Continuous but we are trying to do it in bits n pieces...

I shall give here one example from my own research where I was conducting interpretive analysis of the teacher education curriculum reform at institutional level, the reform claimed to remove the text book culture ...i asked the teachers what are they doing and in one semester they told me they searched online and used reference books to prepare their course readings but when i went back next year they showed me their folder from previous year and mentioned that for a few years they don't need to search for more materials as these are enough...so I conclude that the text book culture is still very much there all that happened was that teachers prepared a text book in the form of their folders...

Let me now come to the point where I find one reason why the reforms fail...to me the biggest issue is that we plan for teachers and never include teacher in this planning....policy makers look down at teachers just like the teachers look down at students with a belief that "we know and they don't"...if we really want to plan professional development and teacher education reforms then we need to include teachers voices in it...a top down approach will never bring the desired outcomes...we can include teachers if not through any other way then one possible way is to make the teachers unions and teachers associations realize their role and enable them to bring teachers' voices into policy reforms...and I have initiated a PhD research study in which one of our own EPM student will be working with the teachers unions in Punjab, I see this as a possible way of including teachers voices in Policy planning.