December 23, 2020.
TED NewsDesk, Madhya Pradesh: The government of Madhya Pradesh has taken part in a brand new initiative in collaboration with IIM Indore. They plan to form a series of training modules for helping almost 3.07 lakh school teachers between classes 1 to 12 across the state. It will help them learn to organise their time and mental health, along with developing their teaching skills.
Each training module consists of two videos of seven minutes each that focus on developing the competence of the teachers in three areas, namely, time management, stress management and self-management. The teachers will receive these videos on Whatsapp, these videos will also be available on the school education department’s CM Rise digital training programme portal.
According to the state’s principal secretary (school education), Rashmi Arun Shami, “While the existing CM Rise digital teacher training programme of our department was aimed at providing video classes for teachers to digitalize their training concepts and enhance their teaching skills before the school reopens, the innovative training modules developed in partnership with IIM-I aims at helping teachers manage their time, stress and self. These modules developed in cooperation with IIM-I will be shortly launched by the school education minister.”
Apart from the seven minutes videos on self-improvement for the teachers, also available in the module are a pre-read material and post-read material along with an exam based on multiple-choice questions. A school teacher will have to clear all these steps to become IIM Indore certified school teachers.
Professor Himanshu Rai, the Director of IIM Indore commented on the project, “This is the first of its kind initiative in the country by the MP government in partnership with our institute. It’s the culmination of six months of exhaustive work by our team here, which began with the detailed survey of 39,000 teachers to ascertain the multiple problems being faced by them. We hope that this exercise ultimately brings a positive change in the behaviour and efficiency of government school teachers in MP and ultimately has a cascading effect on the overall quality of school education in the state.”
The team of researchers who are working on creating the modules consists of professors Prashant Salwan, Shruti Tiwari, Raina Chhajer, Vaijayanthee Anand, and Ajith Phadnis apart from the head of the team, the Director of IIM Indore, Professor Rai. The team held surveys of 39,000 school teachers all over Madhya Pradesh to focus on many areas of interest such as their behaviour, including the overall state of their physical as well as mental health, fulfilling working environment, time and stress management etc.
The results of the survey conducted proved to be very important as they told the research team about the working conditions and competence of the teachers. According to the results, only about 12% of the male and 8% of the female teachers were content with their overall health. Additionally, 32% of the male teachers and 305 of the female teachers had good mental health. More than 35% of the male and 30% of the female teachers were really happy with their working environment. Almost 51% of the male and 56% of the female teachers had average time management skills.
These results have shed very useful and important light on the condition of the school teachers in Madhya Pradesh. To overcome these issues, the modules will be developed and hopefully, will help the school teachers with their issues and help them come out better, more competent teachers.
Source: The New Indian Express
