Access to quality education remains a problem across the globe. Through our past programs we have identified three major limitations within the public education system including: 1) lack of foundational literacy and numeracy; 2) limited psychosocial support and socioemotional wellbeing support for students; and 3) low teacher support and poor classroom pedagogy (teaching practices- typically reliant on rote memorization).
The Indian National Educational Policy (2020) calls for reforms in classroom practices; with an emphasis on understanding-based, application-based, and child-centric education for all emphasizes the need for equity and inclusion. Similarly, the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, calls for equitable and inclusive access to quality education for all irrespective of sociocultural divides. Furthermore, SDG 4 emphasizes the importance of teacher professional development, teacher empowerment, and teacher motivation to bring about quality education for all. Despite large investments in resources and infrastructure, quality learning remains low, especially within communities experiencing sociocultural and economic divides including additional marginalization like race, gender, disability, rural/urban, economic, class, caste, and religion. With large class sizes and increasing student diversity, overwhelming requirements of curricula and examinations, and various accountability measures, teachers have limited opportunities to understand, contextualize, and personalize their teaching to individual students’ needs. In order to truly bring about equity in education (i.e., education for all), we must ensure quality education for every child (and their individual needs).
Research suggests that teachers are foundational to learning processes but unfortunately, they are some of the least supported individuals within educational systems. India has nearly 95,00,000 teachers with roughly 3,80,000 teachers in Gujarat. There is an increasing recognition of the importance of ongoing and continuous teacher professional development. A large part of national budgets is spent on teacher training and enrichment with mixed results. The current training programs are fundamentally based on external experts conducting one off teacher training, while the larger underlying systemic issues related to teacher disempowerment, demotivation, de-professionalization and lack of contextualization of the practices are overlooked. Commonly, teacher professional development is conducted through one-off, top-down, ‘expert’-centric workshops, which have consistently been shown to be ineffective (Haßler, D’Angelo, Walker, Marsden, 2019). Instead, effective teacher development must be rooted in classroom practices and provide opportunities for reflection and professional collaboration amongst groups of teachers. A systematic review of 238 impact evaluations of educational intervention programs in low- and middle-income countries found that continuous TPD programs focusing on pedagogy had the largest and most consistent positive effects on student achievement (Snilstveit et al. 2016).