VSAT-enabled training for primary teachers launched

NEW DELHI - A VSAT-enabled teachers’ training programme was launched in nine cities across the country Friday to impart conceptual clarity in key areas of primary school teaching.

The cities are Noida, Delhi, Patna, Guwahati, Bhubaneswar, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bhopal and Jaipur.

The five-day module, Transformational Teacher Training Programme, has experts sitting in studios in Chennai training teachers across the country through an interactive two-way VSAT technology that makes the programme participatory.

Teachers can conduct verbal exchange with their long-distance trainers in their satellite classrooms.

The module has been conceived by Macmillan Publishers in partnership with Vidya Bhavan Society and the Delhi-based Everonn Education Limited.

The programme compels the participants to question established facts in the light of new evidences and thus opens the mind to myriad ideas of making the classroom engaging and lively, a statement released by Macmillan, one of the biggest publishers of academic texts in the country, said Friday.

The key feature of the programme is its child-centric approach wherein the innate potential of the child is recognised and a methodology evolved to strengthen and build on it so that knowledge is constructed through a process of questioning, reasoning and making informed inferences - and not just by accepting textual information as sacrosanct facts.

The programme is being delivered by a team of experienced teachers and trainers, who through their interaction with teachers over several years have designed a very effective and transformational teachers’ training programme.

The panel includes Rama Kant Agnihotri, professor of linguistics at the University of Delhi, H.K. Dewan, a particle physics scientist, Kamal Mahendroo, a member of the People’s Science Movement, A.L. Khanna, a former reader in English, and Rajni Dwivedi, a textbook developer for various state boards.