British Council trains 1200 teachers and head teachers in Telangana Government schools

British Council on Friday concluded the three week training programme on ‘Core Skills and School Leadership Development’ for teachers and head teachers of Government of Telangana Education department. The training was held from 23 May to 10 June 2016 with the main focus of improvement of teacher development systems and supporting English teachers specifically in their professional development.

200 State Government Schools under control of the Director School Education were chosen for the pilot programme during this 3 week training period. The training programme will be scaled to other schools across the state only after the successful conclusion of this pilot.

• 1000 teachers underwent the Core Skills training in Critical Thinking and Problem Solving including a one-day Introduction to Core Skills for teachers.
• 200 head teachers underwent the School Leadership Development Programme in these 4 modules – building leadership capacity, creating and communicating a vision, leading and managing change, building and sustaining effective teams) over 5 days training including, a one-day introduction to Core Skills for leaders.

Deputy Chief Minister, Kadiyam Srihari inaugurated the training at Social Welfare Gurukul School in Serilingampally and spoke about the need for quality education and removing misconceptions that government schools cannot offer the same.

Mei-kwei Barker, Director, British Council South India said, “We are delighted to collaborate with the Government of Telangana Education department to train 1000 teachers and 200 head teachers. The British Council is committed to supporting teachers improve learning outcomes for young people in India and UK and across the world. We hope that the training has helped them enhance critical thinking and problem solving skills, improve their leadership qualities and create great learning experiences in their schools.”.

Mr. Jetty Prasad, Teacher from Telangana Model School & Junior College Mehaboob Nagar, Dhanwada said,‘We are thankful to Telangana govt for offering such wonderful training session by the British council. Through various activities and group discussions, ideas and best practices of other teachers were shared. The trainers helped us to incorporate the CTPS activities in our curriculum. Integration of other subjects was also explained well, this will help students for overall development. Introduction to the Core skills helps us to look into our future lesson planning.”

Speaking at the valedictory ceremony, Sri G.Kishan, Director of School Education, Telangana said, “Our approach to universalize education by community-ownership of the school system is a response to the demand for quality education. This can be accomplished by embedding core skills in the curriculum. I am confident that this will be achieved through British Council capacity building workshop for teachers and leaders.”

The key objectives of the Core Skills project were:

• To provide training on Core Skills pedagogy to teachers from 200 model schools in Telangana state
• To enable these teachers to use student-centred approaches in their lessons in line with the recommendations of the NCF (2005) and to inculcate Core Skills thinking in students.
• Establish a framework for Continuing Professional Development for school teachers including Core Skills pedagogy and learning.

The key objectives of the School Leadership Development were:

• To equip school head-teachers and school officials in leadership roles with core leadership skills for positive transformation and quality improvement of the schools and the teams they lead
• To provide an enabling stimulus for the school leaders to plan and implement a leadership change project that helps in addressing their specific need for quality improvement in the school.
• To develop leadership capacity of Head Teachers for shared responsibility and collective action for quality improvement

At the end of the training, all participants were given a reflection journal to note down the change projects they will be carrying out in their classrooms and develop classroom delivery techniques and skills so that they can effectively embed Core Skills in their curriculum. The participants will once again come together in October to share their experiences of implementing the learning in their own classrooms, thus engaging in peer learning and reflection.

Through social media active engagement by various stakeholders the training programme has garnered around 1.3 million impressions.