Teacher Training or is it Taming?
CBSE and various other education boards in India provide a lot of teacher training programmes like workshops and webinars. They are presented as instruments of empowerment. They promise capacity building, professional growth, and pedagogical renewal. Circular speak of “upskilling,” “quality enhancement,” and “orientation.” The rhetoric is impressive. The question, however, is: do these programmes help teachers think independently or do they subtly train them to comply? Teacher training programmes should make a teacher a better teacher. From a content deliverer, a teacher should be enabled to move forward to an interpreter of knowledge, a mediator between curriculum and student, a creative thinker in the classroom. Training should strengthen the intellectual agency of the teacher. It should provoke questions, invite debate, and expose teachers to multiple pedagogical possibilities. In practice, workshops and webinars are designed as channels for transmission. Policies are ex...
