India faces a shortage of nearly 1.4 million trained teachers. There are over 6,400 schools in India that do not have a teacher at all. The prescribed teacher-student ratio is 1:35 however in certain regions the ratio is as high as 1:75.
Across India there is substantial consensus on the urgent need for a complete overhaul of pre-service teacher education—that is, the B.Ed (Bachelor of Education) and D.Ed (Diploma in Education). While some of these envisioned changes are a significant beginning, it is still inadequate as many fundamental changes are to be made, namely : institutional, curricular and regulatory. Most standard training approaches, with their centralized determination of curriculum, cascade model of training the trainers, rigid modules and modes of interaction, have been abject failures in dealing with the issue of teacher capacity building.
Teacher Training and Certification Programs at Bal Utsav
We offer teachers multiple modes of learning as options, including but not limited to workshops, in-school support, long term projects and exposure visits. We create platforms for peer learning and support with the proximate availability of experienced mentors and tie them together in a coherent curricular framework. We do this by having a small, distributed, high-capability teams across the districts. We believe that unless the average capacity of the existing teacher pool goes up, we will not see clear improvement in education for 20-25 years, and thus our approach includes working with pre-service (new) and in-service (existing) teachers.For the sake of coming generations, we must muster the grit to begin and sustain this effort.