By: Rayees Masroor
Training programs in an organization are a process by which people are taught the skills and given the necessary knowledge or attitude to enable them to carry out their responsibilities to the required standard and to undertake greater and more demanding roles for effective job performance.
Training program is also important in the education sector same as the other sectors or organisations. The need for training in education particularly for teachers is important to improve the quality of education.
Teachers are crucial in implementing educational reforms in accordance with the aspiration of the true Philosophy of Education. The success of a school curriculum is closely related to its effective implementation. Teachers have to be personally aware of the school curriculum, improve and enhance the necessary skills to interpret the concept changes accurately and to implement the modified curriculum according to its requirements, aims and objectives.
As such, the need for in-service training or staff development and skill enhancement programme for teachers plays an essential role in successful education reform. It also serves as a bridge between prospective and experienced educators to meet the new challenges of guiding students towards higher standards of learning and self development. In developing the professionalism, status of teachers, the training programs should not be run away from the reformation that occurs. In-service training offers one of the most promising roads to the improvement of instruction. It includes goal and content, the training process and the context. The need for in-service training in schools for teachers is to equip them with new knowledge and skills to face new challenges and introduce reformation in education. In-service training can enhance the competence and effectiveness of teachers to enable them to impart much needed quality education to the students.
The knowledge, idea, skills and attitude of the educators must be developed through integrated and systematic manners and as such it’s now an established fact that one of the important component to improve the quality of education is through in-service training for teachers. With respect to this, even though there are many in-service training programmes being organised by the school Education Department through State institute of education (SIE Kashmir) and the DIETs (District institute of education and training) the effectiveness of in-service training in schools is not up to the satisfactory levels as is felt by various educationists and experts in the field. It would be sheer injustice to assess the quality of education in terms of the annual results only because the whole purpose of teaching-learning process is to produce efficient and competent global citizens.
One of the most important indicators to suggest the lesser quality of education in schools and colleges is the rising unemployment as the learners do not possess enough skills to strive for self sufficiency and to compete as global Citizens. In such a system the pass out students from schools and colleges would wait for years together for a government job rather than to make themselves more capable, skillful and competitive in a world where there is no dearth of opportunities. To keep the process of teaching and learning updated and dynamic, the institutions of training and learning like SIE Kashmir and the DIETS at the district level have an important role to play but its widely believed that these institutions have not done enough which would have ultimately benefitted the students and teachers as well.
Education sector, like others fields of life, has been facing new challenges and issues in a fast changing world and it would be suicidal to ignore the new roads to the improvement of instruction. In our state, the teacher training hasn’t got the attention it deserves. One of the basic reasons behind the lack of activity and ineffectiveness of DIETS in the state has been attributed to the fact that most of the people serving in these institutions have been there for so many years and in some case decades together despite the fact that the school education department has few times issued orders and instructions with regards to the transfers of these officials.
If the state government is spending huge sums of money for the teachers training and for the advancement of the professional competence of teachers, there is a need to use the institutions that are concerned with such functioning’s. There is a growing perception that the department should either frame a fool-proof transfer policy with regard to the postings and transfer to these institutions or the full time staff should be recruited for these institutions so that the fundamental goal of skill enhancement of teachers and professionalism related to the quality of their work is achieved.
The writer is a counselor at IGNOU and can be reached at rayeesmasroor111@gmail.com
