So if teacher training is a waste of time, what’s the alternative?

Something like this. (password: janauddhar)

Here’s a video of three science lessons developed with our science teacher, Namrata and Laxmi, Asha and Sunita, our class 1 – 3 teachers.

These lessons are drawn directly from the government textbook, but we’ve brought them to life with student activities, differentiation (teaching students of different abilities in the same class) and some hands-on science.

The key here is that we’re not teaching the class 1 – 3 teachers how to devise student activities or how to do differentiation in a vacuum, we showing them how to do it in a very specific context – a chapter from their textbook.

This is what we mean by improving teacher quality by starting from specific lessons, not general principles.