FICCI School Conference – Teacher Education Session

FICCI held its first school conference at New Delhi on March 10. I was helping facilitate a session on Teacher Education, which has perhaps become one of the really important challenges of our education system. The NCF 2005, NCFTE 2009, the Justice Verma Committee, the Centrally Sponsored Scheme, the new Teacher Mission and the RTE Act provide the backdrop against which the discussions are happening.

As per Dr. Amarjit Singh, AS, MHRD, lots of great things are happening:

• Focus has been on quality of teacher education, program and curricular revisions. a new model curriculum and various short and long program formats have been designed
• The CBSE has set up a Centre for Assessments, Evaluations and Research
• The NCERT is building learning indicators – a set of “common core” learning outcomes
• NUEPA is building school standards
• The Open University, UK partnership is underway with 3000 teachers being trained across 150 teacher development units
• North east state open universities are starting MOOCs
• The CIET has built a semantic content store called the NROER
• The Delhi SCERT has actively introduced the flipped classroom and shared curriculum practices
• Various examples of digital content and community based programs across K12 and Teacher Ed

Prof. MM Pant gripped the crowd’s attention by invoking John Daniels’ solution of training 10 million teachers by flipping pre- and in-service education. Dr. Anjlee  Prakash talked about the role of the teacher and her professional development in the context of a connected, networked and technologically advanced world (FICCI School Conference_LLF_2014 for FICCI), and the role of MOOCs & blends thereof in Teacher PD.

A few other takeaways from me:

• We need better technology to aggregate, remix, repurpose and feed forward content and conversation to ever-growing networks
• We need design and development of systems that engender network formation and scale
• We need interoperability with the myriad tools and systems being developed
• We need better technology and processes to capture and analyze interactions of teachers and students with the OER created by different initiatives; need learning analytics systems in place quickly
• We also need to raise heutagogical capabilities in a concerted manner, perhaps with a set of coaches or mentors that we actively support

It was a packed conference session with many other speakers including Prabhaav, TESS India and Microsoft. And we obviously ran short of time (my apologies to the speakers, especially Anjlee and Lokesh!).

And yes, I am building up a repository on teacher education. Please do send me your links!