Context

• Success of new education policy depends on how we recruit and assesss teachers.

What is the issue?

• Recruitment of well-qualified teachers into the schooling system is the first prerequisite to ensure that students receive quality education.
• However, teacher recruitment processes in the country are not adequately streamlined. There are diverse recruitment processes across regions, school stages, and school types central, state, and private schools.
• This, in turn, leads to multiple criteria and processes for hiring teachers, thereby bringing a wide disparity in teacher quality across institutions and regions.
• Many of the processes are also sub-optimal in measuring the competency of a candidate.

Teacher hiring mechanism in place

• One of the most common and widely-taken tests to ensure eligibility for recruitment is the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET), conducted at both the state (STET) and central levels (CTET).
• TET is the equivalent of the licensure tests that are undertaken by teacher candidates in various countries.
• However, in India, the test is required only for government school teacher recruitment at the elementary stage (Class 1-8).

Issues in hiring mechanism

• TET has been critiqued time and again for various reasons. These include low pass percentages, poor test quality, lengthy test papers and a serious lack of alignment with teacher preparation programmes.
• The test was in the news recently because of the teachers’ recruitment scam in West Bengal.

What we need?

• A coherent strategy: to tie together the various tests and processes such as TET, teacher recruitment tests, classroom demonstrations and teacher interviews. This will enable a holistic assessment of teacher competence.
• Understanding what is competence: Framing a common understanding of what qualifies as teacher competence. Simply speaking, teacher competence can be understood as the core knowledge, skills, and dispositions expected of a teacher to effectively contribute to the teaching-learning process.
• Multiple methods of assessment: To evaluate several other skills and dispositions, one requires multiple methods of assessment including classroom demonstrations and teacher interviews. These assessments could help gauge skills like effective dissemination of a concept and selection of appropriate resources and learning materials.
• Teacher’s aptitude: Most importantly, such processes should help evaluate a teacher’s empathy towards students. Respecting learner diversity and skills in building a participative/democratic classroom culture are crucial requisites of a teacher. The recruitment process should assess the teacher’s aptitude in this respect.
• A comprehensive competency framework: That details the skills a teacher should have. This could be derived from a teacher education curriculum rooted in policy perspectives of the day. For instance, in the case of the NEP, the curriculum could be geared towards imparting training in classroom practices that make learning joyful.

Long-term benefits to adopting such a holistic model of teacher recruitment

• Better parity: It will ensure better parity in the quality of teachers recruited across the country.
• Equitable education: Will contribute to equitable education for students from diverse sections of society.
• Credibility is ensured: The recruitment process will also become credible if it is rooted in a framework that outlines the core competencies of becoming a teacher.
• Reduction in coaching centres: At the systemic level, this may also lead to a reduction in coaching centres as the assessment processes will be non-standardised and cannot be easily gleaned from coaching materials and guidebooks.

Conclusion

• Teachers with a passion for the profession are foundational to the positive educational change envisaged by the NEP. Setting up clear benchmarks of quality and well-designed recruitment processes hold the key to ensuring better teaching-learning outcomes.

Mains question

Q. What do you think on teacher’s quality today? Explain how dynamic teacher recruitment process will enhance teacher’s quality.

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