AT the launching ceremony of the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) project to be implemented in Sindh a couple of years ago, I asked the then leader of the initiative whether they had conducted any assessment of teachers’ needs. His response was typical: “We know their needs.” This has been a major issue with the reform initiatives in education in Pakistan. The interventions usually disregard contextual realities and the needs of teachers, and thus fail to bring any significant change to classroom practices, despite spending huge resources.
Imagine a multi-grade setting where one or two teachers are expected to engage four to six grades in a school. Ironically, these teachers have been trained for mono-grade teaching. Accommodating children usually from disadvantaged backgrounds, these schools make up the large majority of schools in Sindh.
Unfortunately, these schools, the teachers and, ultimately, the students barely receive any attention from the ‘reformers’. Social justice proponents argue that resources should be channelled to the neediest. Using Rawlsian logic, when water is directed to the neediest dwelling at the end, the leakages will be enough to fulfil the needs of those surrounding the channel.
The majority of CPD projects not only disregard the real needs and realities of teachers but also neglect the principles of change. Scholars believe that change initiatives should be as simple as possible. When teachers are expected to work on too many fronts such as both content and pedagogy, failure is very predictable. The focus of reform initiatives is usually on the technicality of change rather than the practices and beliefs of people who will be affected by the change. When the deep-rooted beliefs and practices of teachers are neglected, it is unlikely that the ‘visible changes’ will reach the stage of becoming an accepted norm of the classroom. Even if there are some innovations, like ‘bubbles on the water surface’ they will disappear as soon as the project concludes. Imagine a setting where one or two teachers have to teach four to six grades.
Most importantly, CPD interventions in Pakistan are less informed by the latest trends in the professional development of teachers. The traditional CPD models, where teachers are sent out of school to attend programmes have been found to be less impactful mainly because of their sporadic nature, being accessible to only a limited number of teachers, the lack of relevance to teachers’ real issues and the mode of delivery where teachers are treated as passive receivers of knowledge transmitted through ‘experts’.
The shift is now from professional development to professional learning with the assumption that teachers’ work necessitates ongoing learning, rather than one-time ‘development’. Job-embedded learning, workplace learning, collaborative learning, communities of practice, mentoring, peer coaching, lesson study and many other school-based professional learning approaches have, therefore, replaced the traditional approaches to professional development.
Teachers are expected to engage in collaborative inquiry in their workplace where they collectively identify their context-specific issues and find contextual solutions for those issues building on their own capacity — something like a magpie that builds its nest out of the materials in the locality.
Change agents, however, still intervene with the traditional cascading model where the actual lesson alters as it reaches the classroom passing through so many channels and sources. Consequently, when some impartial observers evaluate the intervention, they will come to the conclusion that nothing has changed radically at the classroom level for students — the ultimate beneficiaries of these interventions. Ir-
onically, without such evaluation of what worked and what didn’t, change agents approach other agencies who intervene with their own models, assumptions and agendas, and the process continues.
The need of CPD for teachers in Pakistan especially in Sindh is intense given that the pre-service teacher education programmes that the majority of teachers attend are considered to be outdated and theoretical, barely preparing them for effective teaching.
However, to make the CPD interventions impactful for teachers and ultimately for our students, we should revisit our approaches by considering the real needs of teachers, principles of change, and latest trends in the professional development of teachers. Continuing with the common hegemonic process of universalising practices of economically powerful nations without considering our contextual realities may have serious long term implications for education.
(Opinion) Published in Dawn, October 26th, 2024
