Faculty is central to an Institution. The performance of an Institution, be it in terms of world rankings or its ability to shape the future of its wards, or excel in teaching learning processes and instil an ability of problem solving, both technical as well as worldly in its subjects, its ability to contribute to the research quotient of the available pool of research knowledge base, all would depend on the teachers that it employs and attracts on to its portals.
This brings us to the question of defining a good teacher. He is one who has a great domain expertise, excellent professional skills, and exemplary personal qualities. If he can also show leadership acumen with an innovative spirit, probably we have a winning combination yet not sufficient to deliver, for it is now necessary to present the subject expertise to an audience in a way that they would be sufficiently inquisitive to pursue further. It is a fact that many bright students are put off of a certain topic or area for ever, only because their passions were never aroused or their latent talents never explored, by the teacher who himself was found wanting in abilities.
Each stakeholder perceives a certain value chain as attributable to a teacher. The society would probably seek a teacher who is patient, kind, flexible, resourceful, tolerant, open minded with a good sense of humour, enthusiastic, one who enjoys his teaching, is honest, imaginative, creative, efficient, self-disciplined, helpful, humble and modest. The Institutional requirements will expect him to be technically sound in his discipline and a good researcher besides being a great presenter. With so many attributes that are expected of a teacher, the art of teaching itself becomes central and can be thought of as a performing art. Live performance before an audience are termed entertainment. However, a live performance such as teaching, when accepted as one that profoundly affects the psyche of a child and hence must be accorded the highest of the statures among performing arts, will it be pursued in the spirit in which it eventually manifests.
The late Richard Feynman, long time professor of physics at Caltech and Nobel Laureate, left behind an enduring legacy as both a brilliant physicist and a masterful storyteller and a teacher. Even at the height of his professional career, he used to practice teaching a certain concept, a few hours before, to an empty audience, in a closed room in his institute, before actually delivering the same in the class room. Teachers today can certainly take a leaf out of such passion.
It goes without saying that such performances also have to be rewarded sufficiently amply. If it is treated as a skilled job, it must, at least be treated at par with skilled jobs that need higher order skills such as those defined by the industry. Needless to say, then, that the pay packets must also be commensurate.
In a system that is short on quality, it is imperative that the best are identified and nurtured. Those with potential are trained to excel and those who are pretenders weeded out. However, our systems are built to encourage mediocrity. Cadres are defined and pay scales are fixed. A certain minimum set of eligibility criteria, would be sufficient for an aspiring teacher to become a part of the system. He then keeps at it doggedly sometimes, lackadaisical most of the times, his entire professional life traded, without bothering to know if such effort actually makes a difference to the people around him and not concerned if the entropy of the system rises or falls. He would continue to draw a salary that is cadre defined. Performance is conveniently given a goby. Admittedly, there are peer reviews and such other methods. But then they do not separate the weed from chaff.
The whole model needs to be disrupted if quality has to thrive. Can a teacher be accredited for the skills that he has? Can the financial benefits be a function of such accreditation? Certainly, food for thought. Assuming an objective function can be defined for a teacher, with the desirable attributes as variables and weightages apportioned to each such attribute, depending on their importance in a value proposition to the institute that he serves, we would have a perfect equation to solve for a number that may vary on a scale of 1 to 10. Of course, such equations would tend to be nonlinear, but then quality and performance were never linear. Such scores are then linked to the salaries that one would draw. One could easily have slabs within a cadre, based on range of scores and teachers classified against them. An accreditation score would then define the excellence that we would like to see in a teacher apart from helping the system to weed out the non-performers. Such teachers, paid in proportion to their counterparts in the industry or other professions would now have something to look forward to, besides constantly challenging themselves to perform better. In a massive system such as ours, any good option could easily be rendered redundant because of numbers. What then can be done? Can such qualities be instilled by training? There are a few so called teacher training institutes that are growing by the day. Many of them are also in the government sector. A fair amount of teacher professional development, also known variously as teacher training, or professional learning is really bad. I don’t just mean that it’s poor value for money or insufficiently effective. It’s much worse than that. A large swathe of training has no effect whatsoever on pupil outcomes. In fact, teachers come away from irrelevant and poorly-understood and superficial changes to their teaching that not only make the lessons worse, but also leaving them with the impression that they are now better teachers who require less training in future. However, it is not as if no skills can be taught. Teaching in a technical institution can be challenging if the teacher is not clear on his concepts. Still there are some key principles to follow in teacher training. Firstly, the process must start with a clear identification of need. Identifying the cohorts that are under-performing, which topics are being taught less effectively, and which skills their students are acquiring less fluently is of utmost importance.
A professional judgement using suitable assessments and other data, an investigative process that begins with aspirations for students and teacher engagement must then follow. Secondly, since the need is identified, teachers need to access expertise both within the institution and from outside. External expertise matters to avoid group think and to make sure, precious development time is focused on genuinely effective approaches. This expertise needs to be quality-assured and peer-reviewed. There is no point paying good money for training that others have already found lacking, or which fails to live up to its promises. Thirdly, training has to be sustained and effective. For far too long, we have seen folders full of notes from such training that we’ve never looked at again. Experiential learning must be made a way of learning in training schools. Only then a teacher would go back to his student with a narrative that would also improve his own performance. In such a scenario, a reduction in Teacher student ratios, be it by the accreditation agencies or the regulators in uncalled for and can be counterproductive.
We then have two propositions to ponder on. Identify teachers who would perform based on their intrinsic skills and nurture them with incentives to do better and setup such training schools that would identify a latent talent and train them to excel. The clock is ticking. We need to act before the children are forced to look at other avenues to succeed or make a mark.