THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Education Department has decided to do away with the cluster training programme for teachers which has lost its steam in recent years. Instead, the department is planning a 60-day continuous and advanced training programme for the thousands of teachers in the state aiming to refresh them and equip them with modern teaching skills.The idea is to make every teacher undergo a continuous training programme in three spells in which the focus of the first ten days would be on ‘millennium teacher’ concept. This would largely aim to develop the behavioural skills required by a teacher in changing times. The next 25 days would be for a subject-wise training session and the last 25 days would concentrate on pedagogy training. Instead of resource persons or trainers who have been handling cluster training, the new programme would have only logistics support of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). The training would be handled by outside experts using advanced technologies in academic refreshment. According to sources, a initial proposal of the training concept has been prepared and handed over to teachers’ associations for discussions. Only after several rounds of talks with the teachers associations and addressing the concerns they raise, would a final draft be framed.“The state had introduced continuous and comprehensive evaluation much before any other state thought about it. We also have made changes in the curriculum accordingly. But our training of teachers also needs to come up to certain standards, which is why the new concept is being thought about,’’ said A Shajahan, DPI.According to sources, the teachers belonging to the teachers’ bank would be first given training and rotated in schools where the teachers would be on leave for the 60-day training.The state has been following the cluster training exercise since the time of DPEP (District Primary Education Programme) which had for the first time taken learning outside the classrooms. To enable the teachers imbibe the concept, cluster meetings were proposed where sharing of experiences, discussions on issues and working out solutions were done.In a panchayat, all schools came under a cluster and in municipalities and corporations, a cluster had not more than ten schools.There were cluster rooms in specific schools for the purpose and resource persons from the Teachers Resource Groups led the meetings. Gradually, it became cluster training but lack of trainers took away its sheen. After the UDF Government came to power, cluster training was revised into cluster meetings but since the mooting of the new concept, they have been stopped.
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