3.7.1 Improve the quality and effectiveness of
teachers
The scope of the current problems calls for a central policy thrust focusing both on pre-service and in-service professional development. Major
investments are needed to revamp training programs so they respond to the problems that teachers face in the classroom, provide support to teachers new to the job, improve the teaching and learning resources of teacher training institutions, and support action research in teaching and learning practices. The activities of the current centrally sponsored scheme on teacher education should be reviewed and possibly incorporated within this larger effort. What is needed is a well defined package that links pre-service and in-service professional development, on- site support activities, incentives, and a built- in feedback mechanism for improvement.
Publicly-funded pre-service teacher training colleges (TTCs) should raise their standards and provide a minimum degree of quality assurance through accreditation. All colleges
receiving any kind of government support should be required conduct a thorough self-assessment using NAAC criteria (described above) and develop an institution improvement plan. Subsequent to this, teams of experts (national and international) could independently review these assessment and improvement plans. Acceptable plans could be approved for additional financing. Findings from these teams could be posted on the Internet for public information, so that prospective student teachers could make more informed decisions about the training college they choose, and colleges would face some pressure to improve.
MHRD and States should help TTCs to build their capacity for good teaching by providing
more resources and by improving their links to external sources of knowledge. In addition to allocating additional resources, efforts are needed to break the isolation of India’s teachers’ colleges, through institutional networking, establishing centers of excellence to model what good teaching could be, and institutional twinning arrangements, including with departments
(e.g. of psychology, mathematics, science, languages, or education) in other teacher training colleges and in universities, both nationally and internationally. Subscriptions to electronic versions of peer review journals would help to update trainers’ knowledge about pedagogy and education research. Procuring video cameras for micro-teaching would help improve their teaching and learning processes. As a first step, providing Internet access in these institutions and providing training in computer literacy are necessary to give faculty and students the tools they need for communicating beyond their immediate environment.
TTCs need to improve their links with government departments of education, so that
they can modify their intake of trainees and their subject-matter to respond to forecasts of the demand for teachers. It is important for states to conduct regular surveys to ascertain the needs for teachers in various subjects at different levels and encourage the accreditation of teacher training institutions that tailor their activities to these needs.
TTCs should increase the intake of trainee teachers in the reserved categories and for subjects for which candidates are not available.
This would include promotion campaigns in senior secondary schools, especially in rural areas, to encourage youth to become teachers and make them aware of the strong labor market demand for secondary teachers.
In-service Teacher Professional Development (TPD) should be centered in schools, and focused on school-specific issues, rather than based in
disconnected institutions which use a lecture- centered approach. Peer-based, mentor-led networks (pedagogical groups) of teachers should be established across schools so that they can share experiences, discuss ideas and lesson plans for specific topics and disciplines, and observe each others’ lessons and practices.
Capacity-building is needed of institutions responsible for providing technical support and monitoring of in-service training, notably the
National Council for Teacher Education, state councils/institutes of educational research and training (SCERT/SIERT), district institutes of education and training, and institutes of advanced study in education.
Assessments of teachers’ knowledge and skills should be conducted, and develop tailored
professional development programs to address weaknesses, while offering incentives (salary and non-salary) for their completion (see Text Box 3.10 for an example).
To strengthen teacher accountability, clear teacher performance standards should be defined and used for performance evaluation. Defining service
standards for teachers and linking them with academic and behavioral standards for student performance as well as with schools’ service standards, is important to set expectations for all stakeholders, guide behavior, and provide the criteria for performance appraisal. Good teaching or extra, voluntary, efforts to help students should be publicly acknowledged, and also be duly recorded in teachers’ performance appraisal reports. These could be given weight in decisions on teachers’ promotion or transfer.
Teacher performance standards should be disseminated to all secondary schools (teachers,
administrators and school management committees); train School Management Committees (SMCs) in their role to
oversee fulfillment of standards; meeting of standards as certified by SMCs would be condition for contract extensions of recently hired teachers, and/or for existing teachers to obtain promotions.
Studies of teacher attendance and time on task at the secondary level should be conducted,
in government private aided and private unaided schools.
A teacher incentive operational research program
should be carried out, similar to the program at the elementary level in Andhra Pradesh, which links payment of a bonus to teachers whose student improve on independent learning achievement tests.
Teachers’ unions need to be engaged in a consultative mode, in view of the sensitive nature
of teacher performance, to work out acceptable procedures for periodic appraisal of teachers and for designing and developing in-service programs for teacher development.
More recommendations for teacher accountability are in Section 4.7.2 regarding teacher recruitment and management.
In 2005 the Indonesian Parliament passed a law doubling salaries for “certified” teachers. The law laid out some of the standards for certification (such as a 4-year post-secondary degree or equivalent) but left the implementation details to the Ministry of Education. The components of teacher certification have been defined, and teachers are now being assessed using portfolio evaluations conducted by assessors at teacher training institutes and colleges. These assessments either confer certification or help define a teacher professional development program which, if successfully completed, will lead to teacher certification.
Components of Teacher Assessment – A Portfolio Approach
In accordance to the Ministerial Regulation of the Ministry of National Education No. 18 Year 2007 on Certification for In-service Teachers, the components of a teacher’s portfolio include:
academic qualifications
education courses and trainings teaching experience
lesson planning and presentation appraisal by superior and supervisor academic achievements
professional development activities participation in scientific forums
organizational experience in education and social sectors and relevant recognitions and awards in education.
Source: World Bank staff
Box 3.10: InDOnESIA – Improving Quality Through Teacher Assessment and Upgrading
3.7.2 Actions to Strengthen the Curriculum and
Reform Examinations
Curricula at primary, upper primary, and secondary levels need to be made more coherent, with smoother transitions between levels.
Gradual introduction of the foundation concepts at the lower levels will help build better comprehension at the upper level without diluting standards. Low student achievement in secondary education has its roots in a weak curricular foundation in primary education. This problem is accentuated by the many short cycles within India’s education structure that disrupt the curricular connections between levels. This is a particularly serious problem in states where different departments deal with different levels of education, as in Orissa, where the Board of Secondary Education is responsible for secondary education and the Council of Higher Secondary Education is responsible for senior secondary education, with little apparent connection between the two.
Examination reform needs to change the nature of the questions asked, in order to drive a change in teaching and learning, rather than
focus on improving the examination process. Students should be probed for the following: information-reasoning and problem-solving skills; ability to meaningfully apply curricular subjects to real situations; broadening and deepening of insight; incorporating personal experiences; use of contexts; and observation and reflection (Clark, and others. 2004). To test the skills mentioned above requires changing the emphasis of examination papers and improving the questions, so as to give much more weight to testing higher-order thinking. In addition, throughout the school year, more effective method of assessing and implementing continuous comprehensive evaluation of learning outcomes, supported by remedial education, needs to be introduced.
More fundamentally, center and state educational authorities should reflect on the value and purpose of the Grade 10 examination, which at present
is used to determine passage to Grade 11. If
India wants to increase secondary and higher education enrollment rates, it needs to give more opportunities for students to succeed, rather than apply high-stakes exams which eliminate 35 percent of secondary students from the system. Options could be considered, such as making it optional for purposes of sorting students into academic streams, and offering students who wish to leave school a diploma, but no longer using it as a pass/fail mechanism for entry to senior secondary.
Incentives should be provided to states to align their curricula and examinations with the NCF.
Establishment of national standards in each of the core subjects is necessary to set academic goals towards which teachers and students can strive for, and against which administrators, schools and teachers can be held accountable. This would also help various state boards to calibrate their examination standards. Moreover, national standards facilitate internal and international labor mobility because employers need objective information with which to judge the skills of job applicants. Though it is important to preserve diversity and the distinctiveness of the Boards, there is a need to establish equivalency in examination scoring procedures and in pass standards. This requires building a consensus on rating the curricular content and qualification procedures of both national and state boards. To facilitate the development of strategies to ensure quality and transferability, a comparative assessment should be done of the different curricula offered by the various state and national Boards.
Sample-based achievement testing across all states of students in Grade 10 and 12 should be undertaken in all school types (government, local body, private aided, and private unaided),
to monitor achievement levels and standards across states, and to guide interventions for improvement. Another approach is to use certain common questions/items as “anchors” in the regular certification examinations across all Board examinations in all states, while allowing other questions to vary across states, so that these common items can be extracted
through data analysis to assess whether and how far states have achieved national standards. The center can provide incentives to States to undertake these measures.
3.7.3 Strengthen Institutions and Technical
Capacity at National, State and District
Levels
Arrangements for ensuring curriculum quality and easing the transferability of students need to be strengthened. There
is no mechanism to control the quality of curricula, and no national entity systematically monitors curricula and examinations across the country over time. COBSE’s role, organization and mandate should be strengthened, to provide greater technical assistance in ensuring that states initiate and sustain curricular reform. As to the transferability of students, NIOS is the only Board which attempts to help students transition from different state Boards and CBSE into their systems.
Simultaneously, each of the state Boards needs to expand its academic wing to establish an effective curriculum development center
(CDC), part of whose task would be to review and improve curricula, syllabi, and textbook content and quality. To change the emphasis of the system from rote to more active forms of learning, the CDC would also need to ensure that schools comply with the chosen curricula, as well as monitoring the instruction that supports this new form of learning. Departments responsible for conducting examinations, by contrast, are well established with adequate staff. But their staff would require exposure and training in the new approach to knowledge that is stipulated in the NCF.
States need to allocate more staff with adequate travel budgets for school inspection/supervision;
improvements in school quality assurance do not require major structural changes but do require more resources. For accountability purposes, and to provide the basis for rewards and sanctions, sample-based surveys are not sufficient. All students and all schools need
to have their performance measured.38 And
to compare differences in school performance under the same state policy calls for a statewide accountability system. It will take a long time, perhaps a decade or so, to develop the needed capacity for quality assurance in India’s schools. It will be necessary to start with a small sample of schools and students to build the expertise and the experience from which to launch a larger-scale undertaking in the future. But without this effort, quality in terms of students’ learning outcomes is unlikely to improve.
38 Under DPEP and SSA, a number of sample-based student
assessments have been conducted, usually at the baseline, mid-term, and terminal stages. These are a series of static measurements and do not account for growth. That said, they have developed the national awareness of the importance of measuring outcomes.
The Delhi Department of Education offers an inspiring example of what can be achieved when administrators, teachers and students come together in a focused effort to raise educational achievement. A city of 14 million citizens, Delhi is growing at almost 5 percent per year, driven by immigration from all parts of India, placing huge stress on the educational system. Nevertheless, the Department of Education has introduced a comprehensive, holistic approach to improving educational outcomes which combines: improved access and GIS-driven infrastructure; capacity-building of teachers; community participation; better pedagogy and use of ICTs; improved textbooks; innovative evaluation techniques; transparent and proper utilization of budgetary allocations; and special efforts to enroll and retain children. In addition to these inputs, the Department of Education introduced a series of initiatives to improve results, including: accountability at each level, massive computerization, weekly unit testing, teacher incentives, a transparent on-line teacher transfer system, targeted efforts on weakest schools, strict action in cases of indiscipline, and merging evening and morning shift schools. The results have been dramatic, particularly over the past two years, as seen in the figure below which shows CBSE main exam results for Classes 10 and 12 between 1998– 2008. Equally impressive, the gap between government and private school exam results has come down from 55 percent in 1997–98 to 14 percent in 2006-07. Furthermore, Delhi Department of Education government schools outperformed the highly respected Kendriya Vidyalaya schools in 2006-07.