A host of institutes sees business opportunity in giving leadership training to their faculty.
Prachi Gharpure, principal of Mumbai’s Sardar Patel Institute of Technology, is gearing up to polish her leadership skills.
Gharpure, who feels she is ill-equipped in dealing with the diverse pool of faculty at her institute, has found a mentor in the Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) and Wipro Technologies’ Mission10X.
This September, HBP, an affiliate of Harvard Business School, tied up with Wipro’s not-for-profit trust, Mission 10X, to launch advanced academic leadership workshop to train principals of engineering colleges and enhance their leadership skills.
“Considering that 47 per cent of engineering institute principals belong to rural areas, what HBP and Wipro are offering will be lapped up by many in the market,” says Gharpure.
But HBP and Mission10X are not the only ones in the industry who have felt the need to train teachers and academic leaders.
Though teacher training is not yet seen as a lucrative segment, players like Core Education and Technologies; Manipal (through its In-service Professional Development Programme for Teachers); The Teacher Training Foundation; Everonn Education, Educomp Solutions and the Indian School of Business see an opportunity in the segment.
And, why not? With the shortage of teachers at primary, secondary and higher levels now at 0.7 million and 1.2 million and 0.3 million, respectively, sector players are optimistic about this segment.
“Teacher training in India is essentially restricted to BEd (Bachelors of Education). We realised that teachers did not know what students wanted, where they came from and what their requirements were. So we put together a programme addressing issues like how teachers could be proactive, assess and then evaluate,” said Lalitha Chacko of The Teacher Foundation.
The foundation, a not-for-profit organisation, has so far trained 18,700 teachers and runs the Cambridge International Diploma for Teachers and Trainers, affiliated to the University of Cambridge International Examinations, UK. It offers the programme in collaboration with the British Council, Chennai.
Chacko says there are a lot of qualified professionals who wish to get into teaching, so the foundation offers diploma programmes to them.
The Bangalore-based foundation, among other things, trains teachers on the soft skills part of working with children.
Mission10X has trained over 18,000 faculty members so far across 1,000 engineering colleges in 25 Indian states. “Since there was no proper structured programme for academic leadership in India, we started Mission 10X to fill the gap,” says Nagarjuna Sadineni, general manger and head, Mission10X. The organisatin conducts programmes through discussions, role-play and simulations.
Sector experts believe that the existing BEd course is dated and needs a total re-look. Besides, there is no leverage of technology in teaching in the current courses. Also, teachers do not acknowledge the fact that training can happen beyond BEd too. Once employed, most of them are reluctant to go for further training to update themselves.
“I wish teacher training is looked at as a separate vertical, since there is an acute shortage of teachers. Like organisations, educational institutions should also send their employees for further education to keep pace with the change. If we don’t do this, even if we meet quantity targets, quality will suffer,” says Narayanan Ramaswamy partner & head (education sector) KPMG Advisory India.
Anshul Sonak, president, Core Education and Technologies Ltd says it is a challenge to get teachers to adapt to technology. His company tied up with the University of Oxford, UK, two years ago for capacity building among teachers. He adds: “It is the mindset of the teaching community that one needs to change. Teachers are not going out and learning from the other people. It requires a lot of hand holding and confidence building.” says Sonak.
Core has been working with JJ School of Arts for the past one-and-a-half years. Through the Ministry of Human Resource and Development, it has launched its pilot project to train teachers at 25 Kendriya Vidyalayas (Central Schools) for the past six months. The company has trained around 1,500 teachers from 100-odd schools so far.
“We are working on things like teacher competency framework so that governments build their own mapping tools. Teachers come from all sorts of background. There are many who have had a very elementary programme. We help them with our programme content. We are running not just teacher consultancy and teacher solutions but a teacher quality improvement programme also,” adds Sonak.
So, are these efforts paying off? Teachers have their own stories to tell. P Sai Vijay, assistant professor at Andhra Institute of Technology and Management at Tekkali, Andhra Pradesh, said he usually taught students through textbooks and the usual blackboard explanations. This led students to merely studying the subject and take examinations. “After getting trained from the Mission10X programme, I was able to teach in an interactive manner, using audio-visual mediums. My students started learning, rather than studying, by voluntarily staying back for two hours to discuss the subject in detail,” says Vijay.
Some other changes that teachers have reported include the ability to evaluate in a fair manner, enabling decentralisation of decision making, better role playing qualities for setting academic priorities.
“Unlike the past, when faculty meetings would end up being inconclusive, I have now been able to set agendas for meetings and ensure that they are fulfilled,” a Mission10X participant from an engineering school in Orissa says proudly. Though the concept is at a nascent stage, these programmes are equipped to make a definite change in the academic functioning and decision making abilities of the academia of Indian institutes.
At the higher education level, Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business (ISB) launched a Fellow Programme in Management (FPM), equivalent to PhD, for young researchers in September this year. The programme, with a duration of four to five years, will offer full tuition scholarships and a stipend of about Rs 6-7 lakh a year to students.
“The programme is fully funded and students stand to benefit from the research strengths of the ISB faculty. This will help students qualify for faculty positions in top business schools around the world,” Sanjay Kallapur, senior associate dean, ISB, had earlier told Business Standard. There is a shortage of 15,000 faculty members with PhD in management.
