Know Why Effective Teacher Training Is Important

I have been honoured to communicate with many parents, teachers, students, principals and education management professionals across the nation and nearly all of them have commonly expressed dissatisfaction regarding the following facts:

• The one-time irregular teacher training programs produce no good result.
• There is urgent requirement of teacher training in schools.
• The teachers’ quality hasn’t improved over time.

I am not going to spend much time here in explaining a teacher’s role in schools as we already know that they are the most important people in influencing both the students’ learning and development. A great teacher always decides the students’ growth through the teaching-learning procedure in schools.

Here my concern is the lack of due importance provided to the teacher development programs and the missing importance of developing teachers as a part of the teaching-learning process. Personally, I believe that our mindset that has placed teachers always in a divine light has impacted the way teachers must been trained and supported justifiably with support vis-à-vis any other expert. Albeit I regard teaching as a noble profession indeed; however, the holy metaphor has somehow made this profession too divine to be provided with a fair chance to blossom. Making a bureaucrat, a scientist, an engineer, a doctor etc. is all well-planned actually and the result is always well-structured but we always expect teachers to be born with incredible excellence and passion. Believe me! Teaching a 5-year-old student to learn efficiently is not less difficult than performing a bypass surgery. It is completely the matter of saving life in both professions.

Unfortunately, I have observed that teacher training in many situations worked under the following premises:

1. Although a teacher is a static professional who come to school with all require skills for teaching efficiently, a good teacher should be a good student first to keep learning and gathering information in order to meet students’ every requirement.
2. Teacher training is required in the teaching-learning procedure and generally a secondary requirement for the entire system to run efficiently. Both teaching and learning goes simultaneously for which the schools should have necessary teacher training modules. The best teacher training program must be like the support for all teachers to help them sharpen their skills while needed.
3. Teachers are always not enough motivated which results to inefficient teaching. Thereby, the schools need to arrange teacher training programs to know the teachers’ requirements. It actually opens lots of scopes of learning and improving their skills.
4. You can easily measure a student’s accomplishments but it’s quite tricky to measure a teacher’s efficiency. But we need to measure it to get a good teacher and good results. This actually opens the path of the teacher’s development.

Final verdict:

Schools should understand the essentiality of well-structured teacher training programs that are necessary for the teaching-learning process of the schools. As the teachers play the key role in the performance and development of the students, these programs must be provided their due importance in the curriculum. Understanding and researching different models for the same is similarly required to allow better teaching-learning practices. Just keep in mind that every teacher should learn and grow in order to help students learn and grow to a great extent.