Delivering a Jolt to India's Teacher Training

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/world/asia/delivering-a-jolt-to-indias-teacher-training.html

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MUMBAI — Samidha Shetya, a mill worker’s daughter with a 10th-grade education, was among the first group of women to start working as teachers for a private group called Muktangan in 2003.

She is now among hundreds of teachers who initially had no formal training, much less university degrees in education, working with children from low-income homes.

When Mrs. Shetya began at Muktangan, she was given three months of training and told to find children she could enroll in kindergarten; she began with two classes of 30 students each. Having studied only in the Marathi language, she had to use a translator to get through Muktangan’s English-language curriculum.

She also had her own battle at home. “In my in-laws’ home, no woman worked,” she said. “I had to really convince them. Now they see what a difference it has made on all of us.”

Now 30, she is training to take on a managerial role at N.M. Joshi Preschool, which has 90 students.

Muktangan, which works with seven Mumbai public schools, may be a relatively small player in the education system, but it is contributing to a larger debate over how India’s teachers should be recruited, trained and developed.

Across Mumbai, there is a shortage of both public school spaces and qualified educators. About 30 percent of English-language teaching jobs remain unfilled, according to the city’s Education Department.

And the quality of teaching in the 1,600 elementary schools and 49 secondary schools financed by the government is often poor. According to Dasra, a foundation, about half of 8-year-olds in Mumbai public schools cannot write and a third cannot understand numbers. Increasingly, even working-class families are looking to send their children to private institutions.

Muktangan has tried to address the problem in an unconventional way: In the last decade, it has trained almost 500 teachers, who start out with a 12th-grade education in any local language and at least 3rd-grade-level English.

A decade ago, when Mrs. Shetya started, she received only three months of preparation. Now, applicants go through a year of training before they are placed in classrooms to observe and learn; their own education continues through their careers.

Only about 10 percent of Muktangan’s recruits start off with a college education. However, about 90 percent of its teachers are working toward upgrading their qualifications. As of last year, about half had obtained college degrees, and some went on to acquire master’s degrees.

“Muktangan’s criteria for bringing in unqualified people may need to change,” Nalini Juneja of the National University of Education Planning and Administration said by telephone from New Delhi. However, she added that some of Muktangan’s strengths — like engaging with children — were lacking in India’s formal teacher training.

Teachers at government schools must have bachelor’s degrees in education from government-accredited colleges; but formal qualifications have been no guarantee of quality.

In 2011, when a new national teacher eligibility test was required, the results were abysmal. Data presented to Parliament showed that fewer than 10 percent passed.

Muktangan was founded a decade ago by Sunil and Elizabeth Mehta, a husband and wife team. Mrs. Mehta, a vibrant Englishwoman with a crop of white hair who came to India in 1968, is credited with developing Muktangan’s curriculum for teaching teachers. A former vice principal of the elite Bombay International School, she also spent 11 years at Aga Khan Education Services, where she researched classroom practices and created training modules that would work in underprivileged communities.

Her idea was to break teacher training into levels for primary, middle and high school, and to let the educators basically move up the grades along with their students.

“Our trainers are women from the community, all folks outside of the higher education realm,” Mrs. Mehta said of the staff members who train the teachers.

Regarding the Indian system in general, she said that “there’s a disconnect between teacher education and schools, because there’s no connection between theory and practice.”

Muktangan’s biggest obstacle has been its inability to get government accreditation for its teacher education program, a requirement under India’s Right to Education Act. Failure to comply can result in withdrawal of government financing and of official recognition. But to qualify, Muktangan needs, for example, a separate physical building for teacher training.

“Everyone in Delhi has shown us that they believe in the quality of our education for teacher training, but we can’t check any of the boxes on the forms,” Mrs. Mehta said.

Shantaram Shinde, a commissioner of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, said: “Muktangan teachers may not be qualified in traditional methods of teacher education, but they have more efficient output. Our municipal schools tend to only focus on formal education, so Muktangan has helped by introducing new, more stimulating activities within the classroom.”

At the Globe Mill Passage Municipal School and the Sayani Road Municipal School, classrooms were decorated with student art, and seventh-grade students sat at computer terminals, researching projects on African wildlife.

Despite their teachers’ lack of formal training, Muktangan’s pupils seem to hold their own. The public schools affiliated with the organization had a dropout rate of 4 percent, compared with 7 percent in Mumbai in general. Their student attendance rate of 90 percent is also better than the general average. Muktangan students generally do well in state scholarship exams, with passing rates of more than 90 percent.

Muktangan may be working with only seven schools, but its unique take on teacher training is beginning to have a broader influence.

Last autumn, it worked with Unicef and the Maharashtra State Council of Education, Research and Training to assist teacher trainers in the state. The 60 workshop participants went on to reach an additional 10,000 teachers.

“Unicef knew Muktangan had a strong understanding of teacher training,” said Reshma Agarwal, an education specialist at Unicef. She said that Muktangan’s modules — which included classroom evaluations and activity-based learning — were “very good.”

“In terms of the content and materials, Muktangan was very technically sound,” she said. “And if the state takes up something like this it will benefit.”

Muktangan is now in talks with the nonprofit affiliates of large corporations, like the Icici Foundation and Tech Mahindra, to bring its training to public schools in other parts of the state.

“They’ve designed a phenomenal teacher education curriculum,” said Deval Sanghavi, co-founder of Dasra, the foundation. “Muktangan cares about the quality of education, and they’ve enabled women in the community to assume leadership positions where previously they had none.”

A study by the Tata Institute of Social Services said that Muktangan’s “teachers see themselves as change agents in the community, especially in relation to changing attitudes about girls’ education.”

The teachers, most of them women who tend to come from poor backgrounds, said they were initially hampered by everything from poor English to family pressure to stay out of the workplace. Madhuri Prabhukar Tiwari, 42, who was a Muktangan teacher for six years, said, “They are not just changing our children, they are changing our families.”