Teacher education in Pakistan went through a major reform in
2010 when after having the professional standards for teachers in 2009 a huge
funding was provided by USAID to reengineer the teacher education programs in
Pakistan. Teacher preparation in Pakistan was reformed in the form of 4 year
teacher education undergraduate degree programs. But soon after the launch of
two years Associate Degree and 4 years undergraduate program, the country wide
debate started about bringing the graduates of 14 and 16 years degree holders
in other subjects into teacher education programs. Thus some exit points and
entry points were recreated. Now cutting the long story short we have 2-3 year
ADE and B.Ed 4 year offered after 12 years of schooling, B.Ed 2.5 after 14
years of schooling, and B.Ed 1.5 after 16 years of schooling. I see myself
looking at this picture which looks almost the same as 10 years ago when we had
PTC, CT, B.Ed and M.Ed. The only huge difference we made during these 10 years
is that we closed down the Teacher Education Colleges which were affiliated to
the universities and worked closely with local schools. Today I see a huge gap
created between the schools and universities that are offering the aforesaid
programs.
Another amazing intervention was made couple of years ago in
some parts of country where they inducted teachers with none of teacher
education degree or certificates, and implemented an induction training
program. No evidence so far came to my notice how these teachers are performing
in comparison to the teachers with B.E, M.Ed or any other degree. Initially
when I conducted an interpretive analysis of this reform during 2011-2013, I
felt very hopeful because the training provided to teacher educators at
colleges of education emphasized some crucial aspects such as – avoiding the
use of textbooks and collecting new materials and research articles to share
with prospective teachers, enabling prospective teachers to become reflective
practitioners, developing their IT
skills, communication skills and introducing new assessment techniques,
etc. Then we closed all those teacher education colleges and sent those teacher
educators back to district school systems to teach their relevant subjects at
schools or colleges of general education.
Now we come to in service teachers’ professional development.
During past 20 years I have seen multiple interventions one after another
coming in and phasing out. The provincial and federal departments of education
tried out various models of teachers professional development but end of the
story is that none of them has been sustainable, reason being project oriented
approach, based on foreign or local NGO funds. None of these professional
development plans rooted from grounded data of teachers needs assessment.
Research institutes in Pakistan where M.Phil and PhD students graduate every
year and present their research work at National and International conferences;
majority of them at the end of their research reports give a list
recommendations and I have seen one of these recommendations is always for
professional development of teachers and head-teachers. We do not use any
research data until it comes from a study of UNESCO, USAID, World Bank, British
Council, etc. We belittle our university students and faculty members at every
forum when we belittle the research work they conduct and present but we
highlight even small scale but hugely funded research from INGOs. I have been
attending almost every other conference in Islamabad may it be in a university
or in a grand hotel organized by one of the funding agencies. I am not sure
when we will be able to realize the worth of qualitative grounded research to
have localized curriculum, instruction and teacher education instead of merely
experimenting with one after another borrowed models.
The challenges today are huge. The teachers in public as
well as mainstream private schools know nothing about 21st century
teaching and learning. Philosophy of education being adopted at teacher
preparation and by the teachers in practical teaching is still mostly based on
behaviorism and cognitivism. Very few classrooms are witnessed to be based on
constructivist approach but the teachers do not really know how to handle it.
In the beginning of 21st century the philosophy of education
unfolded itself around the world with the emergence of collaborative and
cooperative learning supported by the postulation of connectivism. People in
this time and space were learning more through online resources than text books
during past two decades. But we in Pakistan remained as resistant to this
change as we always are. Teachers themselves lacking IT skills and public as
well as private schools least bothered to invest in provision of IT resources
found it easier to retain the culture of one book one teacher and a brick wall
classroom that remains no-go area for any outsider. We keep preparing our
children at school to read from a book, copy it in the notebook, add some more
to it if the teacher tells to and then memorize this as much as possible to
reproduce in class tests and final exams. We build other activities in
classrooms as co-curricular activities but we never came out of this rigid
model in which phenomenon of learning is
minimized and reduced only to reading, writing, memorizing and re-writing or
orally narrating what we have memorized. This model definitely cannot and does
not prepare any student after 10 or 12 years of schooling for any creative,
productive or responsible activity in society.
It is claimed by every other government that curriculum is
revised and that new text books are being provided to the students; but in my
opinion only changing text in books after every few years cannot bring the real
curricular reform. We need an overhauling of the whole structure and function
of teachers preparation and professional development with the curricular change
if we really wish to bring a reform in the coming years. Teachers today need to
have stronger content knowledge beyond text books, pedagogy beyond classrooms,
curriculum planning beyond lesson plans, and multiple media content development
to enrich the teaching learning processes. They need to come out of teacher
centered and content centered paradigms. For developing independent and
critical thinking among next generations, first the teachers need to liberate
their own minds from rigid mindset. They need to completely flip the order of
teaching and learning. They need to put the learning at top priority and build
strategies using online, offline, indoors, outdoors and textual as well as
non-textual learning experiences. Until and unless we do not redesign our
assessment processes we cannot assume that all these practices and culture will
change. Now when the schools are closed for COVID-19 management, almost every
school claims to provide online learning. Here again the phenomenon of distance
learning is reduced to onscreen reading, lecturing and testing. Online or
blended distance learning does not mean that a learner may only be sitting down
in front of computers and doing everything on screen. It makes use of real life
situations which could never be used in a classroom. It broadens the horizons
but only if the teachers and material developers know how to use multiple forms
of instructional technology effectively.
I see this scenario as an opportunity where we can stop for
a while, rethink, readjust, reset and renew all old systems. Let us make an
effective use of this time and enable the system to adapt the updates required
for the years ahead. Help teachers, head-teachers and teacher educators realize
what they don’t know and what they don’t do. Stop assuming that we are doing
fine. Let us tell ourselves and our teachers to press the button of restart
with all updates allowed to install.