Phase 2 of British Council’s teacher training initiative takes off

In all, 600 Block Resource Teacher Educators (BRTEs) will receive training from British Council representatives in two centres in Tamil Nadu. These BRTE educators will pass on the knowledge of what they have learnt to 3,700 teacher educators in their respective districts, who will later go on to train primary school teachers. The project continues to focus on enhancing the teaching capabilities of English teachers and will also support primary level teaching and learning in the state’s Simplified Activity Based Learning classrooms, by training teacher educators of other subjects.

The partnership commenced in 2014, when 300 Block Resource Teacher Educators (BRTEs) from the state participated in training on how to more effectively train and support English teachers. 

“We were trained in new teaching techniques. We followed the ‘day release model’, where we got an opportunity to apply what we learnt at the end of each day with students and provide feedback on the experiences and challenges we faced. It is now our task to take what we have learnt and pass it on to the other BRTEs teachers in our respective districts,” said K Narayan, a BRTEs teacher from Erode. The BRTE’s have trained 40,000 primary teachers till date, aimed at improving their English fluency in the classroom, enhancing the quality of teaching and learning and developing early literacy in English. 

According to Andrew Foster, Senior Academic Manager - South India, English Partnerships, British Council, “We use micro-teaching techniques to train the BRETs trainers. As part of each session, the trainers will practice the skills that they learn on each other to receive constructive feedback from their peers. The goal of the programme is to boost the confidence of teachers.” The British Council has also carried out extensive monitoring and evaluation of the teacher training at the block level.

According to Pooja Kulkarni, State Project Director, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, “The data collected from the State Level Achievement Survey (STAS) shows an improvement in primary school students after the implementation of this programme. STAS is a sample survey that is conducted for primary school students studying in Classes 3, 5, and 8.” 

Last week, the 300 BRTEs who were part of the first batch in 2014 received further inputs from the British Council on how to train teachers in the effective use of activity-based learning. The three-day training programme was organised in Chennai and Madurai. “We have found that many teachers were unable to read and comprehend English. We started this programme, with the help of the British Council and Unicef, to help boost the confidence of teachers in a bid to improve their overall teaching capabilities,” said R Malathy, Senior Consultant, SSA Tamil Nadu. 

Later this year, a new batch of 300 BRTEs will join the programme for the first time and attend a six-day training programme, while those who participated previously will attend for four days. These 600 BRTEs trainers will then go on to train 3,700 Tamil Nadu BRTEs trainers of all subjects from January 2017. This training will assist the state’s teacher educators . They will also train nearly 48,000 primary teachers across the state. Speaking on the occasion, Alan Gemmell, Director, British Council India said, “We are delighted to strengthen our partnership with the Tamil Nadu government. The British Council is committed to supporting teachers improve the learning outcomes for young people in India. We hope that the training has helped teacher educators and teachers enhance their language skills, improve their leadership qualities and create a great learning experiences in their respective schools.”