Empowering India through Quality Teacher Education: Enhancing the Quality of Trainees and Teacher Educators

Education is an instrument for preparing younger generation for facing the challenges in life and teachers at any level play significant role in shaping the personality of young ones. Further, quality of teachers is dependent upon quality of a number of factors viz. their training, interest in teaching profession, adaptability, intelligence and motivation etc. Furthermore, it remains a big challenge to attract good quality students in teaching profession. After passing twelfth class, major lot (so called cream) of students enters technical/vocational education courses and leftover takes up general higher education (B.A. /B.Sc. /B.Com.). After their graduation, they take up their subject specialization (M.A. /M.Sc. /M.B.A. etc). Now, again the students who do not find admission in these courses, they plan to enter in B.Ed. /M.Ed. course, which are responsible for creating teachers and teacher educators. Starting from teacher educators to pupil teachers and then teachers, and then students at school level, quality gets deteriorated at all levels. Thus, quality of overall education system gets impacted. The policy makers, therefore, need to ponder over this matter for improving the status of teachers, vis-a-vis their salaries, working conditions upgradation in terms of qualifications and hence, getting effective teachers in this profession. Though under the direction of the Supreme Court of India, NCTE (National Council for Teacher Education) has made B.Ed. and M.Ed. courses of two-years, but increased duration for these programmes has further multiplied the problems. Teacher-educators and experts perceive these changes as insufficient to improve the quality of the system as a whole and that of the prospective teachers in particular. The need of the hour therefore, is to devise ways and means to strengthen the modified scheme of teacher education. This paper throws light on enhancing the quality of trainees and teacher-educators by looking into various factors responsible for deteriorating standards of teacher education.