Early Childhood Education

For several decades now most in-service teacher training initiatives have focused on subject- knowledge – euphemistically called hard spots. This phenomenon dates back to the DPEP days (1994 onwards) when there was a massive push through of the project to strengthen in-service teacher training. As a result, state project offices hired experts to design training modules for teachers.

Primarily a child who comes to the school must always be the prime focus in any education system. Lot has been said about ‘child centered’ education but what does it mean? In fact it has been left to the teachers’ discretion to define it in their own way. The child invariably gets mixed signals as there are pretty many teachers & their idiosyncracies to negotiate per year, each year.
 

The teacher has become crucial to strengthening of the educational process and development. There has been ample research to show that the nature, motivation and the capability of the teacher to engage and involve children is critical to learning.

When we think about the teacher, images of students, classrooms and schools spring up in the mind. We talk about the number of students the teacher teaches, the furniture and teaching aids in the classroom, the type of school, small or large, and the like. These we understand as the context in which the teacher works, and we are aware that the context influences the manner in which the teacher teaches.

All these years was a struggle to find out if there is a patttern of what goes into making a good school. I want to share here how the process unfolded itself from trying to find out elements or a pattern that make a good school, to understanding that there cannot be a single reason or element that makes a good school to slowly being able to get some, very minimal understanding I should confess, of two elements that emerge from the schools we have been engaged for more than a decade. Not a new thing for the field of education , but for us it has been a hard earned learning.