Portal:Teacher Education/Intro

Children are self-directed learners and their learning extends beyond schools. If the teacher is not able to continuously develop her own capabilities, she will become a limiting rather than facilitating factor in the child's learning. Further, teachers must be able to access resources for their own learning as well as create resource rich environments for learning for their classrooms. This paradigm applies both in schools and teacher training institutions. In fact, availability of good quality curricular resources and lack of adequate professional development of the teachers and teacher educators have been identified as major determinants of the quality of education in India.

If teacher education has to be re-imagined, it follows that the teacher educators must be better prepared to impart professional teacher training to teachers and to articulate the vision of the school and teacher as proposed in the NCF. If the teacher is trained in a lecture-based, teacher-trainee model, it is not possible for the teacher to create a constructive, collaborative learning experience in the classroom. For the teacher trainee to be trained differently, it follows that the teacher educator must be capable of providing learning experiences different from those of a lecture-based didactic model.

An effective TE model must bring together teachers so that they can make meaning from their experience and this knowledge informs their practice. The teachers would gain greatly if they are able to regularly network to share and exchange ideas, news and issues regarding their work. For teachers, discipline and subject enrichment are at two levels. Besides content knowledge,what is also essential is Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) which goes beyond the subject content to content required to teach a subject. An extension of this approach is the Technological Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge1 (TPACK) attempts to identify the nature of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge. A teacher should have an idea of the various educational technologies available, the multiple representations, ideas and approaches possible for teaching, besides possessing content knowledge. Use of ICTs makes available a wide variety of tools that for multiple methods of representation, communication and learning.

To realize the vision of the NCF TE and to move towards the objectives articulated in the TE restructuring plan, there is a need to re-imagine professional development spaces for teacher educators. Teacher education must develop as a reflective undertaking that needs more skills than only those of classroom teaching.