Building teacher capacity is a must to transform learning
As we celebrate one year of National Education Policy 2020 which is futuristic and progressive in its approach and caters to the aspirations of all stakeholders, expectations from the school system have reached astronomical proportions. Any solution to fulfil this burden of increasing expectations revolves around school teachers. Teachers play a pivotal role in shaping the future generations of the country. The expectations from teachers have increased manifold; not only they are expected to have extensive subject knowledge, expertise in innovative pedagogies, formative assessment tools and use of technology, but they should also be empowered to act as first level counsellors to cater to the socio-emotional needs of the students and ensure their mental health and well-being. Therefore, an effective professional capacity building strategy is required, which is designed comprehensively to address above expectations and provide continuous support and mentorship to teachers. NEP 2020 also emphasises on annual 50 hours of continuous professional development of teachers.
National Initiative for School Heads and Teachers for Holistic Advancement (NISHTHA) launched by the Department of School Education and Literacy to improve learning outcomes of the students through an Integrated Teacher training programme is one such holistic training programme. Although, teacher training has always been an integral part of Centrally Sponsored schemes, but the cascading model of training often results in communication loss thereby affecting the efficacy of the training. Further, the teacher trainings were also driven by subject specific knowledge whereas the need of
the hour is a multidimensional teacher training programme. Under NISHTHA, these limitations were taken into consideration and a new model was introduced to minimise the cascading effect and reach out to teachers directly. 8 National Resource Groups (NRGS) comprising of 15 experts from various fields were formulated at national level, who have trained identified Key Resource Persons (KRPS) at states and UTS. Thereafter, 5 KRPS at state level formed a group called State resource Group (SRG) and they trained elementary teachers directly at block level, thus, eliminating multiple layers. The modules were developed under NISHTHA through intensive consultations with States and UTS, Civil Society organisations and autonomous bodies. The NISHTHA modules are activity based and include innovative pedagogies, educational games and quizzes, Social-emotional learning, motivational interactions, team building, schoolbased assessment, in-built continuous
feedback mechanism, online monitoring and support system, training gap and impact analysis.
NISHTHA is a unique effort led by the NCERT under the aegis of Samagra Shiksha where an all-inclusive approach to augment the capacities of teachers to bring in positive change in the education system has been adopted. The feature which makes NISHTHA unique is that it is an evolving and dynamic programme and provides abundant flexibility to the states and UTS to incorporate and contextualise local flavour and content, in their language.
The first phase of NISHTHA was launched to build the capacities of around 40 lakh elementary teachers and School Heads, faculty members of SCERTS and DIETS and Block Resource Coordinators and Cluster Resource Coordinators, making it the largest teacher training programme in the world. Initially, NISHTHA training was conducted in a face-toface mode and 23,137 KRPS and
SRPS and 16,99,931 School Heads and Teachers of elementary schools were trained in 2019-20 in the pre-lockdown period.
The Covid pandemic posed serious challenge to face-to-face mode of training. Also, teachers were required to adapt to online teaching, therefore, all NISHTHA modules were made online and a specific module on Covid related challenges was added. The modules were also translated in 10 regional languages (Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Odia, Telugu and Urdu) and around 24 lakh elementary school had completed online training by June 2021. The live interactive sessions by the experts from NCERT and a group of key resource persons providing mentoring to teachers have been able to minimise the limitations of online training and kept the element of vibrancy and synergies alive.
Now, the scale and scope of NISHTHA has been expanded and NISHTHA 2.0 has been launched to amplify the competence of Secondary teachers. It has 66 modules, including 12 generic and 56 subject specific modules. Since its launch on 29th July 2021, it has received phenomenal response as around 18 lakh teachers from 29 states and UTS, various autonomous bodies have already onboarded the course.
Further, a specialised NISHTHA 3.0 training to train teachers from ECCE to Grade V under NIPUN Bharat mission with emphasis on foundational literacy and Numeracy has been launched during the Shikshak Parv on 7 September by Prime Minister. NISHTHA 3.0 aims to cover 25 lakh teachers and has 12 modules including Usage of Mother tongue/home language in teaching, usage of ICT in teaching learning process among others.
Teachers are the core of education system and the responsibility of delivering quality education and instilling values and ethics among learners, rests on their shoulders. In future, specialised and theme-based trainings on various pertinent subjects such as new age assessment tools, educational technology, usage of Artificial intelligence etc. will be designed under NISHTHA in blended mode for a robust and futuristic schooling system.
As we move ahead in the direction of competency-based education, it is essential that we strengthen our training programmes and make them need based and effective. The training programme should be able to instil the need and significance of multilingual, diverse socio-economic background and distinct needs of students among the teachers and enable them to foster the unique potential of each learner.