Starting with their global teachers’ training programme, the Delhi government has selected 30 principals from the 54 model schools in the Capital who will be sent to Cambridge University in the next few months.
The Delhi government had in its Budget, released on Monday, announced that it will send its teachers to universities like Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge to train them in best education practices. The government has also earmarked Rs.102 crore for this purpose.
Training teachers at regular intervals is one of the best education practices adopted by many countries across the world. Finland and South Korea, which claim to have adopted the best education practices, send their teachers for trainings to help improve their skills and teach children in a better way.
After the first batch of principals is trained, 200 teachers will be sent to Cambridge. The next batches will be sent to Harvard and then to Singapore University. The trained teachers will then act as “mentor teachers”, who will be given the responsibility to train others.
“The mentor teachers will be responsible for capacity building across various schools in the Capital. The idea is to multiply knowledge among as many teachers as possible. These mentors will also visit schools for inspection,” Education Advisor to the government Atishi Marlena said.
According to sources, the Delhi government is highly interested in the Finland model of education and wants its teachers to be trained in the country’s best education practices.
“What the government is interested in is skill development and activity-based learning for students. Though there are many limitations for teachers in the Indian scenario — our population is much more than theirs, there are logistic issues, besides the challenge of changing the mindset of parents — we will try to inculcate the best possible practices in a manner that go well with the students and parents here,” said the principal of a Delhi government school.
In an attempt to change the conventional way of learning, the Delhi government is trying to reduce syllabus and include more of skill-based courses. According to sources, they also plan to hire resource persons for the purpose.
Government schools currently have two heads under which they evaluate students — scholastic and non-scholastic. Under the scholastic head, a student is awarded marks for academic subjects like mathematics, science, literature and history, while under the non-scholastic head, skills like arts/crafts, music and sports are evaluated.
“In order to encourage students to engage in arts/non-scholastic subjects, we balance their marks with scholastic subjects. Suppose a student has score less in scholastic subjects and has got a B+ grade, we adjust marks from non-scholastic to improve their grade to A,” a government school teacher said.
