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 explained, frameworks clarified, and implementation strategies outlined. These could be done on a website as well. Even a circular can achieve all that.

Doubts are entertained. But the foundational assumptions can never be questioned. What is expected of the teacher is: understand the policy, internalise it, implement it. Amen.

The teacher training programmes produce uniform implementers of given policies. Teachers are never encouraged to critique the system; they are trained to operate it smoothly.

Standardisation is the keyword. PowerPoint slides replace philosophical engagement. Templates replace experimentation. Measurable outcomes replace educational imagination.

Can you notice the irony? Teachers are told to encourage critical thinking in students while their own professional spaces discourage critical questioning.

In the training programmes, teachers should be given opportunities to share classroom realities, question policy assumptions, analyse case studies, and reflect on failures as well as successes. If these are done, something transformative will take place in those training rooms. Teachers will stop being passive recipients and become co-creators of educational thought. And their classroom performance will change radically.

Instead of asking “How do I implement this?” a teacher should be given the freedom to ask: “Why is this necessary? For whom? Under what conditions?”

The health of an education system depends on which question teachers are allowed to ask.

Towards the end of my teaching career, we the teachers were forced to attend the Prime Minister’s Mann ki Baat and Pareeksha pe Charcha along with students!

If teacher training becomes a mechanism for intellectual domestication, education loses its moral force. On the other hand, if it becomes a space for critical engagement, teachers emerge not as functionaries of an agenda-driven system but as public intellectuals.

The question is: Are we building capacity or are we manufacturing consent?

PS. This is the 9^th post in an ongoing series. You can access the other posts below.

Relevance of Education

Education and Making the Human

Syllabus: Where More Becomes the Enemy of Learning

Exam: The God

Competencies in School

Multidisciplinary Learning

Language and Politics of Exclusion

Teacher as Intellectual