Pupils at an Indian state school wander around their school grounds measuring angles of garden tiles. In another playground, students line up together to form a human rectangle. These schoolchildren are enjoying their trigonometry lesson, and their maths teachers are relishing a job which has become more dynamic with training. Teachers in these schools have been educated through The Open University's (OU) project, Tess-India (teacher education through school-based support).
India needs a million qualified teachers, and training them is a logistical challenge. Together the Indian government and OU are working with NGOs and educational institutes to deliver up-to-date teacher training at scale.
While still in the developmental phase, the OU is noticing successes. "When we first visited a particular school, we saw a teacher in front of a class lecturing to about 60 children," says Tim Seal, OU technical director of Tess-India. When teachers were given access to resources – which are available online, in a printed version and even in a format for mobile phones – the class was transformed. "This teacher had got together with a colleague to run a shared lesson and students worked in groups. We are seeing real changes in practice."
This initiative draws on the OU's expertise – 45 years of delivering flexible distance learning – and experience from other established projects, such as the award-winning Tessa (teacher education in Sub-Saharan Africa) which has been running since 2005, and another award-winning project in Bangladesh (English in Action). All these projects aim to deliver strategies for teachers to draw upon and encourage professional collaboration.
"I wasn't confident before but I am now," says Laboni Nusrat, an English in Action facilitator in Bangladesh. "Students are now more active in the classroom and love the audio materials." And where projects in Africa have been running for longer, teachers have begun meeting online and even in person to boost their expertise. "Teachers have started to share together," says one teacher who's taken advantage of Tessa materials.
While Tess-India, which began in November 2012, has UK funding until May 2015, the OU hopes the project will continue to help the Indian government reach its target of free, compulsory and quality education for all children by 2017.
Educational consultants from the UK and India are visiting local schools to make the teachers' professional development materials as relevant as possible to individual areas. "Teachers need appropriate examples," says Seal.
To accompany the teacher training materials, Tess-India also offers leadership and management training for schools. "Heads in schools need to understand the improvements so they can support changes in teaching," says Seal.
While Tess-India currently provides materials to help the teaching of maths, English and science, it's an encouraging sign that teachers are asking for resources in other subjects, says Seal.
Key to the OU's successful involvement in educational projects has been the innovative way training has been delivered. English in Action in Bangladesh, for example, gave teachers cheap mobile phones which were pre-loaded with video demonstrations of lessons.
Now, says Seal, with the ubiquity of mobiles across areas targeted by the OU, resources might be delivered via SD cards suitable for smart phones.
