The Scheme of Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya National Mission on Teachers and Teaching

The Scheme of Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya National Mission on Teachers and Teaching is the culmination of the Government of India

Teachers are the backbone and the core of the education system. Hence, ensuring their availability and improving their quality as also the quality of teaching and learning have come to occupy centre stage of our policy discourse. Teacher Education should be seen in a single continuum covering schools to universities and we have to think of ways to strengthen the institutional mechanisms at all levels and sub-sectors so that there are vertical and horizontal linkages.

The high social demand for education has resulted in increased expansion of the education system in the country both in school and higher education. There has been a rapid expansion in the number of Schools, Colleges and Universities, that has resulted in a demand supply mismatch and also quality deficit in terms of professional qualifications, professional development. The deficit model of teacher provisioning is affecting the system both quantitatively and qualitatively.

The number of teachers required at both school and higher education level needs to be doubled in the coming years. For this, we need to adopt a double pronged strategy of increasing enrolments in post graduate programmes and expanding our research base. At present nearly 40 per cent of the teaching positions are vacant in the universities and colleges for which teacher recruitment to be done on a priority basis.

Considering the increasing demand for quality education for such large population as ours, it is important to develop less expensive, at the same time highly interactive pedagogical tools to communicate the fundamental principles of science. However, unlike school teachers, undergraduate teachers of science in India do not receive any formal training in teaching of science. They are experts in their own discipline, but may not be aware of the best practices in pedagogy, lesson planning and assessing learning outcomes. They evolve their own teaching methods, but at times their methods lack a formal structure. Also, in the absence of going through formal education in pedagogy, currently there is no platform to bring teachers together and help them learn from each other. A grass-root level peer-to-peer network will help in motivating teachers to identify scalable pedagogical tools that can be deployed all over the country, taking into account the syllabi, size of classrooms, availability of facilities, etc.
Source: http://nmtt.gov.in/about