An account of those educating the future
The Acharya Initiative Teacher Training Program (TTP) is a part of Agastya’s effort to enable teachers to conduct lessons fruitfully and with all the required resources. With India celebrating Teachers’ Day on 5th September, the TTP team at Agastya wanted to share their experience with the government school teachers they interact with. They wanted to express gratitude to the unknown heroes of the country silently building our future. Here’s what they have to say.
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Ask an ordinary everyday person in our country about the government school teachers and their teaching methods, and their first reaction will probably be ‘miserable’ or ‘unsatisfied’. But the truth is not so! Being ordinary men, we may have our dispositions on the public school system and fail to see the exemplary efforts of these extraordinary teachers.
When we started conducting Teacher Training Programs for these teachers, we saw their efforts and dedication to their job. If you saw their core beliefs and educational practices, your disposition would change too. All they needed was more resources and some guidance towards creating an active classroom.
This is where Agastya’s Acharya Initiative comes in. To provide holistic education to children, Agastya started training teachers using the ‘constructivist approach’ in a 4-days workshop. We also equipped teachers with tools by developing low-cost models in a 4-day long ‘Make Your Own Lab’ (MYOL) workshop. During these programs, we observed that many teachers performed extraordinarily to make the learning process more effective.
It is important to note that these teachers try their best to make up for any inadequacies in their subject knowledge through hard work. From painstakingly preparing lesson plans and brainstorming to engage children in their classroom to creating activities that involve every single child, facilitating through various practices, conducting experiments, and incorporating arts and role play in their pedagogy, they left no stone unturned to make learning fun. In many schools, teachers even contributed money out of their own pockets for stationery, books, setting up an activity room, etc.
Can you imagine — a Biology teacher bringing a real heart and lungs of a goat to teach biology to Grade 8 students and dissecting it?; A maths teacher teaches number systems by playing the flute and harmonium?; A science teacher teaches pollination by dressing up, mono acting as a butterfly? Each of these is happening in the public schools around us; Actually, a lot more than this! Without them, the most extensive education system in the world would not function at all. We are glad to play our part in helping these superstars create the superstars of tomorrow. Having reached lakhs of teachers, Agastya hopes to influence even more through the Acharya Initiative.
Meanwhile, on this occasion, Agastya shares its gratitude to all these unknown extraordinary teachers. We wish them a very HAPPY TEACHERS DAY!!
