Edu-leaders

There are disputes over the DNA of a “good teacher”. If an ordinary human being has 46 chromosomes in her body, it’s argued that a teacher has two extra. Which is why, it is said, they can sense a chewing gum. Or, they know instinctively when the boy in the second-last row starts texting his friend in the front bench. It is also estimated that a good teacher can eat his lunch in two-minutes flat without even looking at it. (A great one, it is said, does not require nourishment.) Jokes apart, teachers are a worthy lot. Never quite the hero when things go right and always the first to be blamed when things don’t, most of them carry on in a stressful and demanding profession because they are passionate about their calling.

However, is it enough to be just passionate? Particularly a novice professor, entering a classroom filled with students not much younger than her? Perhaps for her, a little training goes a long way. If not training, then words of advice from a senior. With more institutions of higher learning being established in India, the country’s scarce pool of professors is getting even smaller. How does the higher education sector hope to sustain itself and carry on teaching an increasing number of Indian students in such a scenario? Who trains its newest batch of novice professors, especially in the “Gen-Y classrooms” that depend more on the net and web than pedagogical best practices that focus on rote learning?

The answer may very well lie in teaching and learning centres. Not institutes, but platforms where dedicated professors can discuss, analyse, mull and learn from their peers, seniors and experts. There are examples of such centres in the west. However, is Indian higher education sector ready to invest time, interest and a bit of resource in the concept?

There is little reason to believe that because students understand or remember information long enough to sit for a test, they necessarily remember that information when they need it the most. A growing body of evidence suggests that in traditional educational environments, students don't always change the way they think. Thus, they don't change the way they act. Though it is difficult to judge what entails good teaching, the more fortunate among us may have experienced it. A good teacher is usually an effective one, who leaves a sustained, substantial and positive influence on the way students think and act. He or she is both knowledgeable and passionate. In India, good teachers are hard to come by.

Reality Check
By 2020, the Centre plans to boost India's gross enrolment ratio (GER) to 30% from the present 13.5%. Speaking at a three-day higher education conference in New Delhi, Kapil Sibal, the Minister for Human Resource Development, said, “Even if we achieve the target ratio, India will still lag behind developed countries like the US where the current gross enrolment ratio is 70%.” In a bid to raise the GER, “model degree colleges” will be set up under centrally-sponsored schemes in several states. The first in line is Karnataka, where 20 such colleges will be established. The state government will provide land for free and colleges will be established at a cost of Rs8 crore each. In all, 374 such colleges will be set up across India, especially in regions where the GER is below the national average. This will only compound the problem confronting the Indian higher education sector – more institutions being added to existing ones, with commensurate addition of faculty.

If Indian higher education is to be at par with the West, it will need a much bigger pool of teachers. In 2010, the Union health ministry decided to amend the postgraduate medical education regulations and revise the student-teacher ratio in medical colleges from 1:1 to 2:1 to enable colleges increase seats in PG courses. That created a furore. Experts opined that the increased ratio could corrode the quality of medical education.

This brings us to the second problem – improving quality of existing Indian institutions will require specialised teachers, an entire batch of them.

Compounding the problem is the growing list of mandates from the Centre and UGC. In 2010, UGC regulations for PG programmes made it mandatory for universities to have at least one teacher for every 10 students for science and media and mass communication studies, one teacher for every 15 pupils for humanities, social sciences and commerce and management. Undergraduate programmes needed to have at least one teacher for every 15 students in the media and mass communication departments, while the teacher-student ratio needed to be 1:30 for social sciences and 1:25 for the science stream.

Again, another UGC rule: “Regulations on minimum qualifications for appointment of teachers and other academic staff in universities and colleges and measures for maintenance of standards in higher education”, declared that colleges would have professors – posts which were reserved for university departments. (Before this, a teacher could move up to the rank of an associate professor in a college.) Also, it mandated that 10% of the posts for professors in a university will consist of “senior” professors, with over 10 years of experience. New provisions also stated that undergraduate colleges (without postgraduate departments) will have professors, 10% of the number of associate professors. It was mandated that the college professors will be selected according to the same criterion as university professors. There was to be a professor in each department in a postgraduate college.

New Ball Game
Our country may have a host of teachers’ training colleges, specialising in training students to be better teachers for schools and colleges. But, professors don’t usually queue up to attend them. College and university professors are either PhDs or are required to pass the National Entrance Test (NET) to qualify as an assistant or associate professor. Once they pass the test, it’s straight off to class. Many among these fresh batch of professors join new institutions, where they don’t even have (older) peers to consult. As Pankaj Jalote, Director of Indraprast-ha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi, explains: “IIIT is a fairly new institute. Therefore, it has a very young faculty. Our teachers never had any role models or seniors to look up to. It was this reality that made us realise that IIIT needed to start something to help our teachers.”

Feeling this need for training for his new batch of teachers, professor Jalote contacted his friend, Satish Tripathy, Provost, University of Buffalo. Tripathy led him to Jason Adsit, director of the teaching and learning centre at University of Buffalo, one of the several universities to have a teaching and learning centre. “Through my discussions with Adsit and later with my colleagues, I realised that lack of mentorship was a problem in every new institute coming up across the country,” says Jalote.

The result of this discussion was a Indo-US workshop on pedagogical practices that was attended by directors of IITs and IIITs, and trainers from University of Buffalo and Texas A&M University. The aim of the workshop was three-fold: to mull the need to have dedicated centres where teachers could congregate and discuss better pedagogical practices, to create such a centre in India, and formulate a “best practices handbook” on classroom pedagogy.

Teaching and Learning Centres
Universities in the USA, the UK and Australia recognised the need for teachers’ training a while ago. Today, several of them have dedicated teaching and learning centres (TLCs). These are not to be mistaken for departments of education or teachers’ training centres. TLCs dedicate themselves not so much to “training” professors, but serve as a platform for experts, in-house or from outside, to congregate and discuss pedagogy and its systems. And they serve as repository where pedagogical research is contained for future reference.

According to the University of Buffalo’s website, a TLC “provides opportunities for faculty to enhance excellence as teachers by disseminating knowledge through workshops, speakers, programmes, discussion groups and consultations, about the teaching and learning process, about skills and methods to enhance teaching and learning, and about how to utilise effectively and innovatively the latest developments in information technology and media to enrich course content and presentation and enhance student’s educational experience”.

The TLCs also provide, “small, group-based or one-on-one instructions on technology-enhanced teaching methods and specific software applications. Individualised assistance with technology skills, as well as customised group instruction sessions are also provided”. So, whether one is a full-time or part-time faculty, adjunct, lecturer, teaching or research assistant, librarian, or the campus-wide IT staff – TLCs are help centres for all.

Adsit sums up, “It’s a platform really, which allows the renewal of passion in teaching. It ensures that a teacher’s enthusiasm stays intact. It prevents bureaucracy from seeping into the system by allowing teachers to take control of the classroom and related decisions. It allows reflection on the purpose of teaching. For India, the concept should be easy to adopt. There is so much content out there that it can resort to.”

Too Few Examples
Taking a leaf out of the US example, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore maintains its own teaching and learning centre for excellence, which supports faculty in promoting teaching excellence and develop existing teaching skills, and helps develop innovative teaching and learning in management education based on research methods. The centre is run by specially appointed committee made up of faculty members.

Getting it Right
“When we began to teach, most of us didn’t know how to go about it. We were thrown into classrooms. We were expected to figure it all out by ourselves. Some of us did so quickly. Several never quite did it. Effective teaching is absolutely the core mission of all universities, either research or non-research based. If any university wishes to do justice to this mission, it has to help its faculty become both excellent teachers and scholars. Teaching and learning centres perform this double duty – they help us become not only excellent teachers, but scholars, too. And that is why they are so needed. Whether in India or elsewhere,” believes Lucinda M. Finley, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, State University of New York at Buffalo School of Law.

“Sometimes, students learn because of the teacher. Sometimes, they learn despite the teachers. For me the same argument stands in favour or against teaching and learning centres. There are teachers who walked in and taught successfully, despite never having stepped into such a centre. That is because there is no dearth of intrinsic talent, i.e. talented teachers. Several of them teach without training. They enter a class for the first time, and by their third they have a clear notion of what is the ‘right’ way.

“If one refers to the book Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me, teachers tend to generate workable options for themselves – and according to their rationale, believe them to be ‘right’. What TLCs do, is that they help a teacher generate options through discussions, peer dialogues and workshops. And, provide content, literature and research which the centres are supposed to generate on the profession, developed by experts,” asserts Jeff Froyd, director, division of academic development at the Texas A&M University.

A teacher’s professional life comprises some key decisions: how am I going to set the syllabus? How am I going to assess my students? How much time should I devote to a topic? All these decisions are taken by faculty across the world based on their own, limited experience. What a TLC does is offer more options in such a scenario, along with evidences based on accumulated research helping academics make more informed choices.

Another reason for establishing a TLC could be that experts don’t necessarily make great teachers. Take the IITs, for instance, which regularly bring in “subject experts” to conduct special classes. The idea is that because an expert knows a topic well, he automatically does a “great” job teaching it. But, teaching is often an acquired skill. It requires training, practice and a different kind of expertise altogether. This gap between being just an expert and being an expert in teaching, an on-campus TLC can fill.

When a university conducts a training session, it usually is not questioning a teacher’s sincerity. If a philosophy teacher goes to a hospital and says that he’s not a trained doctor, but he sincerely wishes to cure a patient, he will not be entertained. By asking teachers to receive training, a university is not questioning a teacher’s dedication towards his profession, but asking him to improve and grow even further. And it is true that most people believe that teaching is “easy”. “A teacher won’t be allowed to build a bridge. But, an engineer is allowed to teach. It is because, every one automatically assumes that anyone can teach. I hope for the sake of students that the assumption is true,” jokes Froyd.

His comment, however, uncovers a deeper truth – that the academic world requires a “dual specialised person”. Not just an expert teacher, but a specialist who’s an expert teacher. And if we believe the experts, teaching and learning centres are a step in that direction.

The Feasibility Factor
In trying to establish a TLC, the first step, according to Surendra Prasad, Director, IIT Delhi, is the awareness that TLCs are needed. “Teaching and learning centres have to treat teachers as they are. Understanding the context is cardinal. Whatever experiments that we have to do has to be within an institutional framework. One cannot just take any model and impose it on the Indian reality,” adds Sanjay Dhande, Director, IIT Kanpur.

Points that need to be examined before setting up a TLC include:
- What is its bigger goal, agenda or purpose?
- Should it be geographically specific, or be a virtual centre extending beyond regional specificities?
- Should it be a separate, stand-alone centre, or an on-campus entity?
- Should it have a separate, full-time director running programmes, or could an institute director serve the purpose?
- Should it promote mandatory or voluntary attendance?

These questions may lead to several answers and an equally large number of models that a TLC may be based upon. This means that there is not a singular model. As Pankaj Jalote suggests, “What we need to do is to start small pilot projects across geographies. Starting large-scale will be a mistake. If we start small, there is a greater chance of experimentation. And each area, which could mean an institute, or a geography, can perfect their own model based on their needs.”

However, the consensus is clear. Setting up a TLC requires four basic components:

• Willing participants: Teachers should be willing to take part in the process. Most professors believe that making TLCs mandatory will create a certain level of miscommunication. Teachers should be willing to improve themselves.

• Time: Between deciding a content, teaching, assessment and research, professors have little time to pursue anything else. Thus, should there be a special time for TLCs?

• Resources: Materials such as black or whiteboards, technology enabling powerpoint presentations and experts to teach the participants.

• Space

Linda B. Nilson, Director, Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation at the Clemson University, South Carolina, points out: “An important distinction is often made while starting a TLC. Should it be a centre dedicated purely to the craft of teaching? Or should it move beyond mere teachers’ training to the more overarching concern which is ‘faculty development’. The latter is more preferable and you see the more successful TLCs in the US adopting it. It allows faculty a space of their own, where they feel safe. It lets them know that the management and the administration value teachers and their expertise. Just as institutions invest in their students, they must invest in their faculty.”

Qualitative Assessment
Trying to assess if teacher training is actually working is tricky. However, in the US, the UK and in Australia, where on campus TLCs are more common, qualitative data is collected after each session. These may be written or oral assessment of the workshop, follow-up interviews, students’ evaluation of the professor before and after attending a session, and a professor’s assessment.

“I do get to see the strongest reaction among the professors who attend. In the way a faculty member perceives himself after a session. There is a level of satisfaction. Most of them rely on self-assessment reports, which they obtain through students’ reaction in class vis-a-vis attendance, civil behaviour and response during exams. Most of the teachers in my schools report a marked improvement,” says Finley.

Quantitative data is hard to come by, as there are no “perfectly controlled experiments” that have been conducted in each field.

Defending TLCs, Rajeev Sangal, Director of IIIT Hyderabad, says: “More training is always a great idea. Some people have raised the question whether such a centre would work in a research-based institute. I believe teaching and research universities are not in contention. They should help each other. Such a centre, on any Indian campus, could be accessed by all professors for discussion and training.”

Conclusion
At the IIIT Delhi seminar professors compared teaching to a stage performance. Because there is a definite audience. Because professors need to catch that audience’s attention. For that reason alone, one can call teaching a “craft” – a skill. If it is indeed a skill, then it may be learnt.

TLCs are training grounds and platforms where young professors can seek mentorship from their seniors. Seniors can discuss specific problems. Peers can consult each other, or experts to solve specific problems. Professors can receive training in technology-based education. They can discuss problems, get inputs from peers, and then arrive at a conclusion on how to tackle that problem. It’s a discussion board. Ideas can be bounced off. There could be one-on-one consultations, workshops, seminars and presentations.

Each TLC may be custom made according to the requirements of an institute or a university.

India has a scarce resource pool of professors. And a smaller pool of “good” professors. If foreign universities start poaching from this pool, then India will have a serious “professor problem”. With the Centre expected to work towards a robust GER and with new institutions being formed every day, the answer to bridging the student-professor ratio gap may lie in TLCs.