Quality Enhancement of Schools Through Teacher Empowerment
Schools can enhance the quality of their educational processes through carefully planned teacher empowerment programmes. These programmes include creating a supportive school environment, integrating values into all the processes, and practising equity, inclusion, and personalised instruction. This will enable an active learning pedagogy that espouses the belief that everyone can learn and achieve high performance.
Supportive School Environment
Schools need to create a highly supportive environment for children and teachers, as they are the primary stakeholders. The school management must initiate efforts to improve upon the available basic facilities to further enhance the teaching-learning process.
Providing multimedia facilities in all the classrooms that deal with digital content is one such basic requirement. The school web portal should be dynamic, and if possible, should be created by the school’s own ICT team so that if any problem were to arise, it can be fixed internally. Schools can initiate an ICT drive using an open-source platform like ‘Moodle’ and develop an e-learning and e-training portal for the greater convenience of teachers. An e-magazine for students to express themselves creatively can be introduced using WordPress or any other open-source template. It is also essential for any school to have an Information Management System for hassle-free documentation of data and error-free analytics.
Quality Enhancement through Value Integration
The focus of any school at all times should be on improving the quality of classroom teaching. Quality enhancement processes include annual curriculum planning and teacher training sessions. Schools need to introduce different methods of teaching and innovative strategies for their teachers to make the classes more interesting for their students. The right way to influence children positively is to be a good role model. It is necessary to present oneself as a hardworking, intelligent adult with a strong sense of right and wrong.
Cardinal Aspects of Professional DevelopmentThe most important change the school can bring about is the way professional development programmes are organised. Equity should be given due to inclusive and personalised instruction. Schools must not be totally dependent on external resource persons for conducting training programmes, as they may not have a clear idea about the specific needs of the school and this may result in a disconnect between the training objectives and the requirements of the staff. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce in-house professional development programmes for which teachers of the school are the resource persons and the topics are selected based on the need for quality improvement, especially in pedagogy. Emphasis must also be given to communication and digital skills. Continuous efforts to achieve professional development will empower teachers to perform better and bring about constructive changes in classroom teaching methods.
The 3G Approach to Education
Another effective approach to education could be the integrated 3Gs approach: genuine self-awareness, generous hard work and generative innovation. The entire set of school processes can be fine-tuned in line with the 3Gs approach. Parents, teachers, and students can be encouraged and oriented to adopt this new approach that will improve the overall performance of students in scholastic and co-scholastic activities in a remarkable manner. This empowers teachers to be better equipped to accept changes and face greater challenges to make teaching an inspiring process. Schools can introduce a discussion forum for teachers, parents and students alike, with the intention of reinforcing and augmenting the professional development programmes. These discussions could help generate innovative and creative modules and exhibits for students and teachers.
Active Learning Pedagogy
Continuous efforts by teachers to attain professional development results in the generation of a new active learning pedagogy apt for their school. Active learning pedagogy focuses on inclusion, equity, and personalised instruction. This pedagogy can be defined as learning for everyone and achieving high performance by everyone. Schools can also consider partnering with learning platforms to help them step up the standard of their teaching. Collaborative efforts can also be pursued for improvement at every level by using specific, carefully selected tools. These tools help teachers assess whether or not the students have mastered different subjects and decide the nature of re-teaching and reassessment as required, enabling teachers to support children to improve their performance and skills. All the tools mentioned will further empower teachers to improve the quality of teaching and help children comprehend their lessons effortlessly.
