51 Chapter 3 Transacting the Curriculum and Evaluating the Developing Teacher 3.1 Introduction The most critical aspect of the proposed teacher education curriculum is its transaction. Teaching is a profession and teacher education a process of professional preparation of teachers. A profession, as we all know, is characterized by an organized body of knowledge on which the undertaking is based (the knowledge base of teacher education), a reasonable duration of formal and rigorous professional training in tandem with practical experience in the field and a code of professional ethics that binds its members into a fraternity. Preparing one for a profession thus is an arduous task and involves action from multiple fronts and perspectives. It also calls for systematic evaluation of all facets of the professional training – knowledge and understanding of educational theory, practical field skills and competencies related to learning and teaching and professional attitudes and values. These two aspects of professional training, namely, curriculum transaction and evaluation of learning are discussed here: 3.2 Transacting the Teacher Education Curriculum Table 2 presents a set of processes that unfold in teacher education programmes firmly rooted in the perspective briefly outlined above. These have been juxtaposed against ‘activities’ that dominate most current teacher education programmes. The comparison serves to illustrate processes that are likely to empower teachers rather than create ‘implementers’ of a given curriculum. This is followed by a brief presentation of some of the key aspects of transacting a process-based curriculum to develop reflective teachers.

52 Table 2: Comparison between the Dominant Current Practice and Proposed Process-Based Teacher Education Curriculum Framework p Dominant Practice of Teacher Education Proposed Process-Based Teacher Education Focus on psychological aspects of learners without adequate engagement with contexts. Engagement with generalised theories of children and learning. Understanding the social, cultural and political contexts in which learners grow and develop. Engagement with learners in real life situations along with theoretical enquiry. Theory as a “given” to be applied in the classroom. Conceptual knowledge generated, based on experience, observations and theoretical engagement. Knowledge treated as external to the learner and something to be acquired. Knowledge generated in the shared context of teaching, learning, personal and social experiences through critical enquiry. Teacher educators instruct and give structured assignments to be submitted by individual students. Training schedule packed by teacher-directed activities. Little opportunity for reflection and self-study. Teacher educators evoke responses from students to engage them with deeper discussions and reflection. Students encouraged to identify and articulate issues for self-study and critical enquiry. Students maintain reflective journals on their observations, reflections, including conflicts. Short training schedule after general education. Sustained engagement of long duration professional education integrated with education in liberal sciences, arts and humanities. Students work individually on assignments, in-house tests, field work and practice teaching. Students encouraged to work in teams undertaking classroom and learners’ observations, interaction and projects across diverse courses. Group presentations encouraged. No “space” to address students’ assumptions about social realities, the learner and the process of learning. Learning “spaces” provided to examine students’ own position in society and their assumptions as part of classroom discourse. No “space” to examine students’ conceptions of subject-knowledge. Structured “space” provided to revisit, examine and challenge (mis)conceptions of knowledge. Practice teaching of isolated lessons, planned in standardised formats with little or no reflection on the practice of teaching. School Internship – students teach within flexible formats, larger frames of units of study, concept web-charts and maintain a reflective journal.

53 Teaching the Adult Learner Teacher education programmes are concerned with adult learners. They need to be based on an adequate understanding of how adults learn. Adult learners are autonomous and self-directed, have a vast amount of life experiences and knowledge, are pragmatic and goal-directed and respond better to problem solving and task-oriented learning. The emphasis, therefore, has to be on developing professional knowledge and capacities through a variety of self-directed tasks including case studies, projects, seminars and research activity. Bringing the Learners’ Own Experiences Center-stage An important feature distinguishing the proposed process-based teacher education from the conventional teacher education is that an engagement with theoretical concepts and frameworks takes place within the learner’s experiential and larger social realities. The structural provision for such opportunity is to be made in the design of the teacher education programme structure and within each area of study in a manner that allows an easy flow of movement from experience to theory and theory to field experiences. Engagement with Theoretical Concepts and Frameworks It is important to note that an engagement with theoretical concepts and frameworks is necessary, or else, there is the real danger of reducing all classroom discussions, including project work, to revolve merely around personal experiences. In such an event, there is little hope to lift the discourse from mere description of experiences to reflective analysis. This must be cautioned against, if we want to develop the student teachers’ capacity to think, analyse, interpret and reflect. As regards teaching of theory, we may note that the knowledge component in teacher education is derived from the broader area of the discipline of education as well as foundation disciplines of philosophy, sociology, history, political science and psychology. It needs to be represented so. It is thus multi-disciplinary in nature within the context of education. In other words, conceptual inputs in teacher education need to be articulated in such a manner that they describe and explain educational phenomena – actions, tasks, efforts, processes, concepts, events and so on. In doing so, concepts from various disciplines need to be integrated for arriving at a composite understanding of educational components and realities. The point of significance here is that while formulating knowledge components for teacher

54 education, conscious efforts need to be made to represent explanations from the perspective of education as well as other social science disciplines. Attempts must be made to shift from the usual ‘theory to practice’ model to understanding theory in order to develop tools and frameworks of thinking and to theorize about field realities. Training to be Reflective Practitioners Teacher education programmes at all stages should provide opportunities to the would-be teachers for understanding the self and others, develop sensibilities, the ability for self-analysis and the capacity to reflect. They should also provide ample opportunities to observe and engage with learners and learn to work collaboratively in groups. There needs to be adequate curricular space for critical content engagement and the development of professional capacities in pedagogy, observation, drama, craft, story-telling and reflective enquiry. Professional opportunities need to include reflection on their own experiences and assumptions as part of the course and classroom enquiry; critical observation and reflective analysis of the practice of teaching. Availability, quality, appropriateness and sufficiency of feedback are necessary for learning to be reflective practitioners. Theory-practice Dialectic Theory courses must be designed and transacted such that they provide greater space to generate a deep understanding of linkages between knowledge, learner, learning and methods of teaching. The most effective way of ensuring such learning is to include opportunities to engage with theory as well as the field. Practicum courses that enable student teachers to engage with children and their contexts; schools and their contexts and themselves as persons aspiring to be teachers need to complement theoretical study. Meaningful Internship and School Experience Pre-service teacher education programmes should provide sustained engagement with learners in school situations, experiences of teaching learners and observing them and regular teachers in classrooms. While functioning as a regular teacher, the intern would get the opportunity to learn to set realistic goals in terms of learners’ learning, curricula content and pedagogic practice. A sustained contact through internship would help teachers to choose, design, organize and conduct meaningful classroom

55 activities, critically reflect upon their own practices through observations, record keeping and analysis and develop strategies for evaluating students’ learning for feedback into curriculum and pedagogic practice. The school would benefit from such an alliance in terms of witnessing possibilities of unconventional pedagogies. In this process of internship, teacher trainees develop new materials for teaching-learning which can become valuable resource for the regular teachers of the school. Internship experiences need to be organized in a way that is useful in evaluating teacher’s ability, supports socialization within the profession, stimulates development of teaching-learning concepts, provides a protected field of experimentation, allows insight into new perspectives and enhances motivation to continue learning and reflecting. 3.3 Need for Complementary Structures and Mechanisms It must be noted that in order to translate this vision of transacting the teacher education programme, it is essential that complementary structures and mechanisms are in place to allow such a transaction. All theory courses will need to be inter-disciplinary in structure and have field-based units of study. For instance, only if a theory course on ‘Contemporary Indian Studies’ draws on a variety of critical social science disciplines such as sociology, history, political science, economics and geography, will it create a substantive understanding of the social, cultural, political and economic context of education? This will be further strengthened only if theory courses have field-based units of study. Likewise, establishing resource centres that enable hands-on engagement with concepts and ‘tools’ of education such as textbooks and other resources is critical to transacting a process-based teacher education programme. These resource centres are viewed as mechanisms for grounding the education of pre-service students as well as in-service teachers within immediate classroom contexts, the wider societal context and learner diversity. The conceptual framework within which these centres can operate is given below: Establishing Teacher Learning Centres (TLCs) TLC: A Structural Space for Hands-on Experience A TLC would be a structural space located within a teacher education institution for providing student teachers with hands-on experience with

56 learning materials, engagement with learners and opportunities for self- reflection. The perspective and design of the TLC would enable processes that engage teacher trainees with the world of the learner and his/her context; subject-content, learning materials and the process of learning; and the trainee himself/herself as an aspiring professional. TLC: A Resource for Teacher Trainees, Teacher Practitioners and Teacher Educators A TLC would house diverse sets of resources that would be required for teacher trainees to engage with a diverse set of processes during their training. These would range from learning materials developed by the trainees themselves and those collated from various organizations that specialize in creating teaching-learning materials, activity manuals, children’s literature, a variety of school textbooks and other alternative materials available. Opportunities to work with a variety of learning materials would help break the ‘habit’ of relying on the school textbook as the only source of knowledge and teaching in the classroom. TLC: A Forum for Interaction and Sharing A TLC would serve as a forum for interaction among teacher trainees and teacher practitioners on issues of developing materials and planning for teaching. Frequent interaction and sharing would help trainees to articulate concerns with clarity and learn from each other’s experiences. Interaction among trainees could be organized within yearly, monthly and weekly schedules. The nature of these meetings could range from planning the curriculum for the year to planning units and web-charts for a unit. TLC: A Platform for Classroom-Based Research A TLC would serve as a platform for undertaking short research projects that aim to broaden teachers’ understanding of learners and prompt them to enhance their knowledge of subject-content. For instance, an investigative project on numeracy of how children learn mathematics by focusing on the strategies they use to solve arithmetic tasks. By increasing teachers’ understanding of how children develop increasingly sophisticated ways of solving arithmetic tasks, the research based learning framework (used in such projects) provides direction for teaching and learning. This in turn would improve students’ learning through teacher’s professional development.

57 TLC: A Structural Space for Self-directed Activities A TLC would serve as a structural space whose resources would be available for teacher trainees to undertake self-directed activities such as analysis of school textbooks and literacy primers. Learning teachers would undertake analysis of textbooks to assess their suitability for children of different levels. Analysis of textbooks, using dimensions of subject-content, presentation style, language used, treatment of concepts and issues of gender and pedagogic approach would also facilitate trainees to think critically. The study of alternative text material would expose them to the different ways in which texts can be written. Trainee teachers could be engaged with collating learners’ questions about natural and social phenomena such as the following: Why do we speak different languages? Why does the lizard not fall from the ceiling? An analysis of these would prompt them to engage with subject-content and to appreciate the nature of learners’ reasoning at different ages. TLCs could provide opportunities for teacher trainees to understand learners’ thinking through personal interviews and probing with individual learners. Trainees could develop profiles of learners from diverse contexts to help them appreciate their unique social, cultural and political environments. TLC: A Platform for Developing a Repertoire of Skills A TLC could provide a platform for organizing workshops to develop a repertoire of professional skills such as story-telling, craft, music and drama. Trainees would learn to use stories as a medium to facilitate expression, imagination and the creative use of language in learners; create bulletin boards, story-poem folders and organize reading corners in classrooms. They would learn to use drama and art as learning tools and as strategies for classroom management. Through short research projects, teacher trainees and teacher practitioners will develop skills of observation, documentation, analysis and interpretation. TLC: A Structural Space for the Personal and Psychological Development of Teachers A TLC would focus on activities directly related to the personal and psychological development of the teacher. Trainees would be encouraged to engage with their own childhood experiences, aspirations to become a teacher and their views on issues of gender and identity, personal, familial and social

58 conflict. Through focussed workshops, they would examine adult-child gaps in communication, explore their own attitude towards competition and co- operation, analyse and observe the impact of competition in personal and social life. Dimensions of self can be explored through activities of drama, art, music and craft which often provide non-judgemental and non- threatening learning environments. Some of the self-directed learning strategies would include finding answers to deep reflective questions; reflective reading; reflection on observations in the classroom followed by group discussion; identification of issues for further self-study; keeping reflective diaries/journals. TLC: A Structural Space for Forging Links between Pre-service and In-service Teacher Education A TLC in a teacher education institution will provide the necessary space which could be commonly used both for pre-service and in-service teachers. Teacher education institutions that organize both programmes would need to co-ordinate with the aim to impact select schools in a concerted manner. For instance, regular teachers of the internship/practice teaching schools (where pre-service students are placed) could participate in the in- service programmes, re-oriented to address the immediate classroom context and learner diversity. A cluster of schools selected by DIETs/IASEs/ Departments of Education each year to place pre-service students can also be the selected schools for in-service programmes. All teachers of these schools can be involved in a concerted way through in-service programmes that are redesigned to provide individual support and mentoring. A DIET-TLC, for example, may provide the necessary structural space to: (a) design the in- service package of 20 days and provide hands-on training, which addresses classroom concerns and teachers’ needs; and (b) provide school-based resource support to individual teachers through the school-based Learning Centre established by interns. Concerted individual support to teachers on classroom- based concerns and issues for duration of about three years is likely to enable a process of change and deep impact. A formal partnership with a university department, IASE, or an NGO, where possible, can support the effort of the DIET-TLC in this direction, in particular, in the redesigning of the in-service programmes and in providing the bridge between the teacher education institution and schools.

59 3.4 Evaluating the Developing Teacher A glaring weakness of existing teacher education practices is the restricted scope of evaluation of student teachers and its excessively quantitative nature. It is confined to measurement of mainly cognitive learning through annual/terminal tests; skill measurement is limited to a specified number of lessons. The qualitative dimensions of teacher education, other professional capacities, attitudes and values remain outside the purview of evaluation. Further, evaluation is not continuous as it should be; the teacher education process is characterized by a wide range and variety of curricular inputs spread over the entire duration of training according to a thought out sequence. These need to be evaluated at appropriate stages and feedback given to the trainees. (a) The Comprehensive Nature of Evaluation Evaluation in teacher education needs to be objective while giving value to subjective understanding of the developing teacher. It also needs to be comprehensive so as to cover the entire gamut of conceptual, pedagogical dimensions as well as attitudes, dispositions, habits and capacities in a teacher incorporating both the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of growth. These include: engagement with learners in their contexts; school curriculum and textbooks; process of learning and knowledge; psychological and professional development; understanding of institutional arrangements, policy perspective, pedagogy and curriculum. Assessment should cover an understanding of the process of child and adolescent development; societal context of education; nature of children’s thinking – mathematics, language, natural and social phenomena; philosophical and sociological frameworks; the school as a system and the ways in which developing teachers demonstrate their changing dispositions, professional skills in organizing group learning and team work. (b) The Evaluation Protocol Qualitative indicators specific to each area of assessment need to be drawn up and initial allotment of marks should lead eventually to grades. The bases and criteria for evaluation may include:

60 Observing earners for a specified duration in specific situations: Number of hours of observation, method used, detailed notes, recording formats, data coding, reports, analysis and interpretation. Observational records maintained by the student teacher on a set of criteria relevant to the task and report writing: Field notes, classification schemes used to make sense of qualitative data. School contact practicum to relate and communicate with learner: Preparation, choice of activities, materials, developments that take place in the classroom, interaction with children, reflection on issues regarding students’ learning, expressions, creativity, discipline, influence of varying contexts. Planning for the school contact: Choice of theme, activities, materials, time, organization of material, communication skills, ability to engage learners, interaction, time management. Post-contact discussions, report writing and group presentations: Quality of discussions, insights, analysis, reflections. Psychological and professional development of the teacher: Courses, theory and practicum on the development of the self; personal growth can be assessed using the criteria of the capacity of participants to question and be critical of their own assumptions, thoughts, opinions and ideas, developing insight into one’s own self: articulating one’s own limitations and strengths, capacity to integrate thought and action, feeling and intellect, developing self- confidence and questioning over-confidence, open-mindedness, ability to listen with empathy and attention, social sensitivity, ability to take initiative, developing positive attitudes and reflecting on negative attitudes. Self-evaluation of students would use the same criteria of personal growth. Assessing a repertoire of skills: Regularity and nature of participation in workshops; skills of creating bulletin boards using relevant themes and stories, story-folders that make a collection of stories in terms of variety, context, social and cultural diversity and sensitivity, adequate reference to sources and acknowledgements, classification and retrieval system for the use of stories in classrooms and outside, capacity for evaluating ‘sound’ children’s literature with substantive reflection on the why of such a criteria, skills of telling stories to children. In addition, skills of handling laboratory and audio-visual equipments, designing teaching-learning materials, use of library, organizing field visits, seminars and group discussions and exhibitions. Understanding the learner, curricular and pedagogic issues: Practicum courses

61 complementing theory learning with curriculum studies: observation of classroom teaching practices; visits to centres of innovation; curricular materials, document and text analysis; observation records; individual and group reports; reflections; material development etc. Teacher as researcher: Teacher trainees are also given the opportunity to learn to keep observational records, to analyse their observations and interpret reality within varying theoretical and experiential frameworks. Such engagement through structured classroom-based research projects develops in them several skills to function as a researcher, thus equipping them to use mechanisms that enable reflective practice. Over the year, trainees undertake several such tasks, including analysis of school textbooks and alternative materials, analysis of learners’ errors and observation of their learning styles and strategies. Internship activities on which students may be assessed: Observing and reflecting on classroom practices, regular teaching, teaching-learning resources developed, records of planned units of study and regular daily diary/journal of reflections, evaluation of learners: design of assessment of learning, type of questions in domain areas, viewing assessment as an aid to learning and not merely as an indicator of learning. Reflective journal: Each intern would be expected to keep a reflective journal that would help him/her revisit his/her experiences in the classroom over the period of internship. The journal would include short descriptions of how the class was conducted, how learners responded, followed by analytical and reflective statements about his/her preparedness for the class, responses to learners’ questions, capacity to include learners’ sharing of their experiences, response towards their errors, difficulties in comprehending new ideas and concepts and issues of discipline, organization and management of the group, individual and whole class activities. Evaluation of the journal would mean looking at how the intern has been able to gradually move towards writing reflections rather than merely describing classroom events and processes. (c) Designing Instruments of Evaluation and Assessment In order to evaluate the parameters listed above, suitable instruments that address both the quantitative and qualitative nature of the learnings are to be employed. These include: observational schedules and records, checklists,

62 portfolio assessment, case study, project reports, participation in workshops, seminars, discussions, open-ended questionnaire and interviews, oral and written tests, cumulative records, profiles as well as formats for self-appraisal. (d) Preparation of a Scheme for Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation The evaluation of the student teacher should be spread over the entire duration of the teacher education programme covering all the parameters described above. Performance of students may be indicated in Grades.