League university, Prof Gowda has had a chance to observe first-hand how centres of educational excellence are run, and taken to newer, undreamt of heights. Ms. Renu Srinivasan of MENTOR taps the eminence of this great personality who shares his views on educational excellence…
“We have a deep and abiding commitment to our dharma as teachers . Fundamentally, at the core of any centre of educational excellence, there has to be this ethos, this commitment to making our students better than us in every way.”
A deep and abiding commitment…
The first thing that one can discern at IIMB and Wharton is the professionalism of the faculty and their commitment to doing an excellent job as teachers and researchers. While Wharton professors are very well paid, IIMB professors typically earn something less than their lowest paid graduates. Yet we too have a deep and abiding commitment to our dharma as teachers. That means we are committed to imparting knowledge to the best of our ability, to exciting the imagination of students to make them truly want to learn, to communicating meaningfully the accumulated wisdom of the ages and sages. Fundamentally, at the core of any centre of educational excellence, there has to be this ethos, this commitment to making our students better than us in every way.
Teachers in India generally have this commitment. But nowadays, dedicated teachers and their service mindset are under pressure, assaulted by financial pressures, asphyxiating administrations, and students interested only in cracking exams rather than mastering knowledge. In addition, there is relentless competition between schools and colleges to demonstrate success on multiple dimensions, including financial returns. This leads to an increasing workload on teachers and squeezes the idealism out of them.
Challenges for Principals:
In this atmosphere, the challenge before principals is to inspire their colleagues, to unleash the potential of teachers, to nurture their all-round growth and to make teaching attractive as a vocation and a profession. One key focus should be on incentives—the rewards that make efforts worth their while. Do we recognize outstanding teachers or other out of the ordinary contributions? More importantly, in this age of low academic salaries, are there ways to reward outstanding teachers by taking their minds off of subsistence-related worries? Is there enough support to enable the teacher to continue to stay abreast of research and best practices, to study further, to participate in academic conferences, to access materials, methods and mentors to improve teaching?
Believe in teachers…
Part of achieving a nurturing culture is to believe in teachers and to encourage them to devise their own diverse methods of achieving excellence. Right now, down from the government’s regulation of education, to the school or college’s regulation of teachers and students, the systems in place are aimed at tightly controlling action and intellectual freedom. The assumption is that everyone will work to beat the system. Contrast this with the American approach. There a broad set of guidelines and expectations are laid out, and performance is assessed once a year on reasonably well-articulated criteria. How to achieve these goals is left to the teacher’s creativity. The system is designed to encourage rather than to police.
Supporting academic infrastructure…
So if research is respected and rewarded, teachers will internalize this goal and gradually become disciplined scholars whose shoulders no one needs to look over. And the supporting academic infrastructure plays a crucial role—the USA has competitive grants, academic conferences, time available for research, journals to publish in, and colleagues committed to peer review. Similar support exists even for improving teaching. When someone wants to improve there must be a support system that helps them to do so—these are available at Wharton and IIMB too, to some extent.
Reducing administrative burden…
One way in which teachers can be given more time to grow is to reduce their administrative burden. This can be done by adopting School Management Information Systems. This involves harnessing technology to track progress, analyse grades, automatically produce transcripts, etc. Lots of repetitive tasks can be avoided. Basically these systems enable linkages between different sets of data. They can be shared in a common format between teachers and parents. Data can be analysed and letters and emails automatically generated. But the true value is in identifying patterns and links that the teacher might have missed – things happening to the student in another class or to another member of their family and so on. These systems can never replace direct interaction between teachers, students and parents, but they facilitate better understanding and, importantly, reduce the administrative burden on teachers.
Enriching learning…
Teachers should also be encouraged to personalize the syllabus in ways that enrich learning. An innovative teacher will constantly be excited about improving the course. They will convey through their own example, the concepts of mastering knowledge, engaging with ideas, thinking critically, testing learning in practice, reflecting on relevance. All this can dramatically transform the academic atmosphere and learning culture on the campus.
Brief forays…
Teachers and students should also be encouraged to engage with the real world as a crucial part of the learning process. Brief forays into the workplace enhance and enrich classroom learning. Teachers should interact with alumni and industry mentors to craft short, interesting learning assignments that enable students to understand the world better. Students should be encouraged to be active citizens, doing projects with non-governmental organizations, volunteering with government agencies, and even taking part in political campaigns. Any such real-world engagement will have a transformative impact on students, and enabling and monitoring these activities will benefit teachers substantially too. Overall, teachers and students should be involved with various activities because through involvement comes empowerment and personality enrichment.
The Leveller…
As I reflect on all these issues the realisation dawns on me that we are indeed the lucky ones who have access to quality education. What about the millions of other young Indians—500 million and counting? Currently our nation’s educational resources are inadequate to the task of providing all of them with good quality education at whatever level. Even at the MBA level, when you see 2 lakh students taking the CAT for about a 1500 IIM seats, rather than marveling at the competition, we must see this as a huge demand-supply mismatch. We need to level the playing field somehow. We need to find ways to make the best teachers’ lectures available to all students. We need to find ways to make learning materials available across the divides that bedevil India—the divides between rich and poor, urban and rural, between the digitally-enabled and the resource-challenged, between the English-speaking and the rest. This calls for imaginative use of technology, as well as a willingness to share knowledge rather than to hoard and ration it, or auction it to the highest bidder.
Harnessing energies…
Once you start thinking about what ails Indian education, you will find that it is not the lack of physical buildings or colleges or universities. We have lots of those. It’s what happens in them, between them and beyond them that makes all the difference. We have the capacity to harness our energies, our passions, our technologies to turn this situation around and make India truly a knowledge economy powerhouse. Let’s get on with the task!
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