Teacher education, teaching and learning in Pakistan

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 21^st 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 21^st 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.