It has been a while since my last post. I could make any number of excuses about my silence in blogosphere, but really the cause has been a hefty reality check. When I signed up for this project I don't think I quite realized how deep we would have to dig before we could begin to make the slightest dent (to use people's favorite word to describe the impact we're making).
Over the last few months it became evident that we had no way to measure how much the teachers in our program had changed since the beginning of the project as no substantial pre-data was collected. Furthermore, what pre-data exists was collected to measure teaching-learning behaviors and not actual content knowledge. So, in an attempt to understand the type of differences our trainings make in content knowledge as well as in teacher behavior, we decided to ask teachers to take the same test we gave the children to gather base-line data.
Guess what? The teachers made the same mistakes as the children in papers geared for children in grades 3 and 5.
Word for word. Misunderstanding for misunderstanding!
They did not read the questions, nor did they pay attention to the data provided. They simply grasped one or two phrases, created their own understanding of the question and answered the questions as they chose. Notable among the disasters was a sixth grade math teacher's inability to solve a problem which involved performing two basic mathematical operations (multiplication then addition) -- not because she couldn't but because she didn't read the question.
That teachers are not subject-matter experts is perhaps forgivable, but that they cannot answer a paper set for children in the classes they teach is distressing. The problem is that assuming subject-matter expertise, most people choose to train teachers on classroom management issues. However, one might argue that until content knowledge exists, no behavioral change on the part of the teacher will make any difference in levels of student learning.
About Me
- Amrita
- Through four years at Mount Holyoke, a year at Harvard and a year at Wellesley College, I said that I wanted to come back to India to work. Having found a suitably worthy cause (read NGO, which aims to make schools more palatable for the general Indian populace by effectively empowering teachers) and having put my money (or lack thereof) where my mouth has been for the last six years, I thought it would be useful to chronicle the result. Thus far, my adventures have led me to Bangalore-bylanes I had not previously traveled, Indlish I had not previously heard and found schools (literally in my backyard) I never knew existed. I predict that this voyage of discovery will continue to many more unchartered territories and that I will witness it all in the NGO uniform of Khadhi (or the closest FabIndia equivalent) and Kohl.
