On a bright October morning in Bangalore, India, nine school teachers listen intently as Rahul Sreekumar, 26, gives them tips on how to gauge if their students are following the lesson.
Seated on plastic chairs in the multipurpose hall of Excellent English School, where most of them have been teaching for years, this all-women group of teachers seems glad to be on the other side of the teaching fence for a change.
Sreekumar adjusts his glasses as he moves on to the next slide projected on the front wall. “Pilelo!” he calls out loudly. “Oho!” the teachers shout back, laughing. It’s a familiar call for attention that these teachers have often used with their students, one that transcends language and has no clear definition.
“Could you show us how you would apply the solution we just discussed, in your classroom?” Sreekumar asks Talat Fatima, a primary school teacher.
Fatima walks to the front of the hall and the rest of the teachers become her students. “Salma,” she asks one of them, “can you tell me how many ways a cellphone can be used to listen to music?”
Salma pretends to bite her fingernail as if she doesn’t know the answer. “That was a tough question,” Fatima concedes. “Can you tell me instead, how much your father’s cellphone costs?”
Sreekumar interrupts the role playing to explain what Fatima just did. Instead of telling Salma that her answer was incorrect, Fatima asked Salma a simpler question to give her an easy win to boost her confidence.
“We practice every trick here before applying it in the classroom,” says Fatima, referring to what they learn on classroom management and pedagogy. The workshop is offered by 321 Education Foundation and conducted by Sreekumar, who is the organization’s school empowerment manager. Practicing helps her think like her students and come up with effective solutions to any teaching problem she might encounter in the classroom.
321 is one of the few organizations in India that offers training to professional teachers, in order to close the gaps unfilled during their pre-service or pre-teaching training. “The quality of professional development programs is poor, and that’s probably the core problem of teacher quality in India,” says Padma Sarangapani, a professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. The problem gets compounded when teachers themselves have received low quality schooling and university education.
IIn order to meet the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal of achieving universal primary education by the year 2015, India passed the Right to Education Act (RTE) in 2009. With the passing of the act, India made primary education a fundamental right for all its citizens. RTE — which was introduced to ensure the inclusion of disadvantaged kids, improve school infrastructure, and better the quality of teaching — led to a dramatic increase in student enrollment rates, the building of new classrooms, and the recruitment of new teachers.
However, professional development courses have not kept up with the increased demand for trained teachers — which means that ultimately, the quality of learning has remained relatively low. According to India’s latest Annual Status of Education Report, which scores children’s literacy and numeracy abilities, a quarter of kids between 14 and 18 years of age cannot read basic text fluently in their own language, and over half are unable to do simple arithmetic such as division.
Excellent English School, where Fatima works, is a low-cost private K-10 institution with many students who are the first in their families to go to school. Most parents of students at this school keep long hours, often at low paying jobs, and are unable to devote time to their children’s schoolwork. As a result, the task of keeping the kids interested in learning falls completely on the teachers.
And yet, only a small number of teachers in India go to teacher training colleges before starting their teaching careers, since it is not a requirement for employment in many private schools. Last year, 1.1 million teachers out of 6.5 million teachers across India — including 700,000 in private schools — were found to be untrained.
Adding to the poor quality of teaching is the conditions in which teachers work. Overcrowded classrooms, boisterous children, and a constant race against time to complete the syllabus are a severe drain on teachers’ energy and time. To make matters worse, most teachers in low-cost private schools are poorly paid and get little respect for their hard work, says Urvashi Sahni, the CEO of Study Hall Foundation in the northern Indian city of Lucknow, which runs three subsidized private schools for poor children. “How can teachers be expected to impart quality education?” Sahni wonders, when schools principals speak rudely to them or make derogatory remarks to their face. This treatment of teachers is partly due to the general feeling that they’re easily replaceable.
A 2018 World Development Report indicates the importance of both skill and motivation for teachers. According to the report, professional development training is most effective when it has more practical content than theoretical, when it supports teachers continuously instead of in one-off workshops, and when it is specific to the teacher’s subject area.
In 2016, Gaurav Singh, a Teach For India Fellow, launched 321’s teacher development program Ignite! for mid-career educators. “I found that a lot of teachers want to do well,” says Singh. “They measure success through their students’ achievements. When they don’t see [the results], they get disillusioned.”
One of the teachers who has benefited from Ignite! is Vasiya Khatoon, a teacher at Excellent English School. She has already completed 10 out of the 12 training sessions on how to make lessons more interesting, motivate her students, and increase class participation. Constant classroom assessment and subsequent coaching by 321 coaches have also helped her apply those solutions correctly. “I now use a ‘hook’ to introduce the lesson instead of jumping into it right away,” she says.
Another trick Khatoon has learned to help shy students participate in classroom discussions is to first share their ideas with their seatmates. “This helps them gain the confidence to speak up in class,” she says. In a class of 60, where only five or six students used to speak up in class, she now finds more of her students participating regularly.
A grade 10 teacher, O.T. Ummu Salma, used to have a tough time getting the kids to just sit and pay attention. “No one listened,” says Salma. But using attention grabbers like “Pilelo” instead of banging on the desk or screaming at the kids has worked well for her. “In the past year, I have found a huge change in my students’ behavior, and their test scores are definitely better,” she says.
“My motivation to work has also improved. I love to come to school every morning,” Salma adds. She owes some of her newfound motivation to the events 321 conducts three times a year, in which trainers thank and celebrate the teachers for their good work.
321’s program doesn’t run without challenges though. Despite receiving most of its funding from individual and corporate donors, it has been difficult to convince some school leaders to pay the 3,000 to 5,000 rupees (US$40 — $70) it costs to train one teacher. And, since the attrition rate of teachers is high among private schools, some schools are reluctant to invest money in teachers who might not be with them for long.
321 gets around this challenge by sitting down with private school owners and explaining to them the long term benefits of training their teachers — for the teachers, and more importantly, for their pupils. “We show them, through research, the value of professional development for teachers,” says Aadi Rungta, who manages strategic partnerships.
Maintaining enthusiasm and motivation among teachers is not just an issue in private schools. The problem also exists in India’s government-run schools, which Sahni, the CEO of Study Hall Foundation, attributes to a lack of accountability and supervision. “There is complete apathy from top to bottom in some government-run schools, so the teachers don’t care either,” she says.
To improve teacher motivation, Agastya International Foundation started a teacher training program in 2013 for government school teachers in nine Indian states. It runs a four-day workshop for teachers to practice “constructivism as pedagogy,” a theory based on the idea that learning occurs when students are actively involved in a process of meaning and knowledge construction as opposed to passively receiving information. In five years, almost 10,000 teachers have attended their workshops and many, they claim, have adopted the technique in their classrooms.
Bangalore is also home to Dream a Dream, which is borne out of the realization that “true transformation happens with the presence of a caring and compassionate adult in a young person’s life,” says Suchetha Bhat, the organization’s CEO. Since 2012, the program has conducted life skills workshops with nearly 6,000 teachers. It works on breaking unconscious biases that affect educators’ attitudes in the classroom. “Many teachers discriminate on the basis of gender and favor better-performing students,” says Bhat.
Sahni applauds the good intentions behind training India’s teachers to achieve better education for the nation’s children. But she believes that the many programs currently running across India will only be effective if there is a mind shift. Affordable private schools in particular need to become “educators” rather than “money-makers,” says Sahni. She also believes that all of the attention should not be localized on teachers. Instead, she calls for a holistic approach to education that involves school management, parents and communities equally.
