CHENNAI: The State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) is providing residential training for postgraduate teachers for the first time at Perasiriyar Anbazhagan campus this academic year. The move is aimed at helping teachers to be up-to-date in their subjects and make classrooms in government schools more activity-oriented.
While 450 teachers taking nine subjects are being trained on a pilot basis now, the initiative will be expanded based on response, officials said. The department chose 50 teachers each of whom teache Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Botany, Zoology, Accountancy, Commerce, Economics and History. The training programme has been designed for six sessions and each session is for five days.
“This is a voluntary training programme. PG teachers are generally reluctant to attend such programmes as they fear they would not be able to complete the portions for classes 11 and 12,” an official said. “The programme is unique as we have roped in reputable, retired and serving professors to teach various concepts in the textbooks. Teachers are involved in various activities like performing experiments and problem-solving to implement what they have learned.
They are also encouraged to read reference books during the programme. After five days of training, PG teachers go to their respective schools and implement the activities and teaching methodologies they have learnt. When they come back for the next session, they can discuss the problems in implementing the pedagogy in classrooms,” officials said.
Teachers who are participating in the programme have said that their teaching has become more effective now, though there are challenges in implementing their learning fully. “There are not enough resources in the school to implement all the activities. However, we were able to implement more than 50% of it and observed that this way of teaching increases the attention of the students. The students also told us that they are able to remember the concepts better and reproduce them during examinations,” said a teacher from Tiruvarur.