Dr. Humaira Qadri
Great teachers help create great students. There is no doubt that an inspiring and informed teacher is the most important feature affecting the student achievement, which makes it more important to pay attention to the training of new teachers and skill refinement of the experienced ones. With a number of orientation and refresher programmes in place for the teaching faculty of higher education, the irony is that these training programmes have neither been effective nor successful in bringing forth the desired results. Teachers, particularly new ones have many challenges that they face each day. Without a background to what does and does not constitute authentic student learning, new teachers sometimes create lessons that don’t lead to the results they were expecting. In the present digital era, where knowledge is just a click away, if teachers do not exhibit competence, fairness, and consistency from the beginning, they risk losing respect and interest. The ultimate cost of this failure is in what the student will not achieve in the classroom and ultimately failure of the education system. Therefore the pivotal role of effective teacher training programmes cannot be underestimated. Although, these programmes won’t completely prepare teachers for every issue they will face, it can help them feel more confident about many common problems that arise for teachers each day. Without this background, teachers might feel like failures and eventually give up the process of improving as a good teacher.
While the present lower education system is very particular about imparting training to the teachers, the higher education system is equally unconcerned about the same. With so much of funds being pumped into the training of administrative officers who have to deal with records, very little attention is being paid to the training of the higher education teachers who have to deal with fragile minds. This has always gone unnoticed that the sculpting of the personalities of the college students in a frail stage is left at the mercy of the untrained ones. The purpose of the college education is not just completion of the syllabus but much above that. Its basic objective is to style and chisel the personality of a student and develop him as a resource for himself and for the society. A student studying in a college is more like terracotta which is to be moulded into a beautiful shape depending on its mental capabilities. The challenge is that the higher education teachers are never trained to recognise these capabilities of the students. Further, if on their own they can, they are never trained to deal with the different mental capabilities of the students in the same class within a shorter span of time, that too when the semester system has come to the fore.
Not everybody is a born teacher and most of the people opt for teaching not as profession of their choice but as a chance that they can grab to get decently employed. When a teacher gets employed in higher education, their so called trainings are entrusted to the Academic Staff Colleges of different Universities where under the banner of orientation and refresher courses, they are fed with lectures on different topics. But within the confines of these so called trainings, never are they trained to deal with the students in a way which can stimulate critical thinking in them. They are neither acknowledged to the types and needs of the learners they can come across in a single classroom. The basic objective of teaching is to train the students about ‘How to Think’ rather than ‘What to Think’. But until and unless we train the teacher to understand, analyse and recognise the tools to stimulate the thinking in the students, we cannot expect the teacher to practice the same efficiently.
It is very difficult to understand that if the Government can invest time and money in the training of administrative personnel at the very beginning of their careers, what hinders the same process for the higher education teachers who serve to be the role models for their students in the class. And if the hindrance is too large to execute the process for higher education teachers, the other option could be to refresh and reframe the training programs in the Academic Staff Colleges which at present serve a formality of training the teachers in the mode of instructing in the classroom. The basic objective of such training should be to rigorously train the developed minds so that they can develop the undeveloped mind in the most suitable way. These trainings should give the teachers an exposure to the new teaching learning aids that can be used to make teaching more interesting. A teacher in the classroom is in competition with the technology outside the classroom. The best would be to train the teacher to guild in a way that technology becomes a tool for teaching instead of a replacement for the teacher.
The obsolete methods of the training the teachers have to be eliminated and replaced by effective ones that help them evolve with each lesson they deliver and with each interaction they have with the students. The teachers are to be taught to enslave the technology for updated knowledge and research so that they can uphold the respect and the interest that the teachers enjoyed in the past.
With a huge appreciation for the teachers who were never trained but with their own ways, they managed to touch the lives of the so many students, the need of the hour is to wake up to developments of the techno-era. There is an urgent need to train the teachers to be at par with the artificial intelligence of the technology which steals the beauty of classroom teaching where a single mind could sculpt so many beautiful minds.
(The author is an Assistant Professor (Environmental Science Sri Pratap College, Srinagar)
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