Unlike other professions, such as medicine and law, newly qualified teachers (NQTs) are required to assume full professional responsibilities from the first day they enter a classroom. A lack of support for beginning teachers has been linked with widespread attrition from the profession in the United Kingdom and the United States. (Killeavy, 2006, p.168)

In a remote district of western Rajasthan, newly appointed teachers walking out of their four-day induction shared their experiences and challenges of their initial practice in a casual conversation. During this conversation, a few of them shared that they are eager, excited, and willing to learn how they can implement what they learned from pre-service courses to improve the learning levels of students in their schools. However, when some of them tried to reach out to senior teachers at their schools with their apprehensions regarding the teaching-learning processes in their classroom, all they could elicit from them were responses to the effect of ​‘ye sab aise hi chalta hai!’ (this is how it works). This situation demotivates young teachers from building their capacity and putting sincere, continuous efforts into their practice. This feeling was also shared by their predecessors, who are now senior teachers. 

A recurring lament of teachers with some years of experience is that they were highly motivated when they joined as teachers; however, with time, that zeal faded, and now they have settled into their jobs with the same apathy towards student learning that is generally pervasive and which they thought they would not fall prey to. This article delves into some of the key systemic issues behind this phenomenon. In the process, it details the efforts towards teacher education in India, the lack of a thoroughly planned induction and how it can help address some of the critical issues of our classrooms. 

Teacher professional development in India

Conversations and efforts regarding constantly developing and upskilling teachers as professionals are only as old as four decades in India. The Education Policy of 1968 emphasised that three to four months of in-service teachers’ training every five years is important for every teacher (NPE 1968, p.84 – 85). The Kothari Commission Report of 1964, which also formed the bedrock for the NPE of 1986, laid out the intricacies of and reforms in the pre-service teachers’ training conducted by the institutions, referred to as ​‘training institutions’ in the report (p. 67 – 88). 

The report also recommended that these training institutions contribute systematically and significantly towards ensuring qualitative in-service training programmes (p.85). Stemming from this report and the consequent policy, the establishment of the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) and District Institute of Education and Training (DIET) was a milestone in initiating the efforts towards the capacity building of in-service teachers. In the wake of these institutions, the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) launched in 1994 and the establishment of Block Resource Centers(BRCs) under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in 2001 were other pivotal moments in the history of Teacher Professional Development (TPD)in India. The National Curriculum Framework of 2005 also laid down broader roles and responsibilities (especially with its emphasis on monitoring) for these institutions with regard to ensuring need-based, experiential, self-reflective and qualitative professional development of in-service teachers (pp.112 – 113). 

In 2010, the government also released a dedicated framework for Teacher Education in the country, namely, the National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education 2010. The framework suggested a well-thought-out model for providing continuous professional development opportunities to teachers in service. While most of this document laid out specific strategies to improve the quality of pre-service programmes that are being run in the country, Chapter 4 of the document, Continuing Professional Development and Support for In-Service Teachers (p. 63 – 73), details the strategies for improving in-service teachers’ training as well. In this direction, the document emphasises that the availability of need-based support and sharing platforms should be ensured for all the teachers. Continuous engagements on academic concerns through BRCs and DIETs are also recommended. BRC-led yearly in-service trainings, intermittent training programmes organised by DIETs, and modules available at platforms like NISHTHA are the results of this framework.

In the same direction, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 suggests at least 50 hours of capacity-building time in a year for each teacher to ensure Continuous Professional Development (CPD, p. 22). The engagement in these platforms will be need- and interest-based as per the vision of NEP.

While these efforts were important in establishing a foundational structure for supporting the teachers who are in the service, nevertheless, a sincere effort from these institutions still needs to be planned to ensure qualitative and consistent support, not inspection and formality. Training programmes under various heads which have been established are conducted every year to date, but the concerned institutions struggle in ensuring the quality and relevance of these engagements to the large community of teachers and their day-to-day task of teaching. This, in turn, results in diminishing the motivation and skillset amongst teachers with each year in their service.

Stages of teacher education

In 2024, the European Commission published a document entitled ​‘Developing coherent and system-wide induction programmes for beginning teachers — a handbook for policymakers’. Nominated teacher education experts from Austria, Cyprus, Germany, Estonia, Spain, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and the UK (Scotland), and ETUCE (European Trade Union Committee for Education) participated in the process of developing this handbook. In this handbook, the committee states: ‘…professional development of teachers is a lifelong process that starts at initial teacher education and ends at retirement. Generally, this lifelong process is divided into specific stages. The first stage concerns the preparation of teachers during initial teacher education, where those who want to become a teachers master the basic knowledge and skills. The second stage is the first independent steps as teachers, the first years of confrontation with the reality to be a teacher in school. This phase is generally called the induction phase. The third phase is the phase of the continuing professional development of those teachers that have overcome the initial challenges of becoming a teacher…’ (p. 3 – 4)

In the context of India, however, teachers have been recognised as professionals only in the last few decades. The state introduced and necessitated an eligibility test for teachers, the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET), as recently as 2011. Serious efforts towards the professional development of teachers are even newer in India. And this task of professional development still functions in two different compartments: pre-service teacher education and in-service teacher education. While policy recommendations, beginning from the Kothari Commission to the Justice Verma Commission Report, have emphasised the importance of linking these two compartments, the practical implications of these recommendations are yet to be seen. The National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education (NCFTE) 2010 also reiterates, quoting NPE 1986 that, ​‘pre-service and in-service teacher training are inseparable for the development of teachers’ (p.63).

Pre-service and In-service teacher education in India

A variety of pre-service courses are offered across states; BSTC, BEd, D El Ed, and B T C are a few examples. The quality of these pre-service programmes also remains questionable.¹ As far as in-service teacher education is concerned, each year, teachers are engaged in 6 – 10 days of capacity building at their block through their BRC. These workshops do not follow any preplanned curriculum. These training/​workshops also struggle to maintain the required quality and rigor. The organisation and content of these workshops also depend upon the availability of funding. The quality of both pre-service and in-service teacher education in India is a serious concern.²

Inadequate integration of pre-service and in-service education

The DIETs were established to realise the vision of integrating pre-service and in-service. At present, DIETs conduct in-service workshops and pre-service courses for teachers. They also provide teachers with an opportunity to conduct action research and share their findings in the magazines that are published by DIETs (at district level) as well as SCERTs (at state levels). However, any apparent linkage between these two functions of DIETs is hard to find except for the fact that the same faculty is engaged for both the tasks. The presence of DIET faculty in the field (in schools) for observation or practice is negligible. Apart from separating pre-service and in-service education, such situations also cut off the workshops and research articles published by the DIETs from the actual challenges of teachers in the field and the involvement of teachers in actual knowledge creation.

The missing link: An induction programme

Teacher induction programmes are carefully planned frameworks for the professional development of newly appointed teachers to support them in their initial year(s) of teaching. Tuğba Baran Kaya and Adnan Baki, in their article titled ​‘A comparison of teacher induction systems in Türkiye, China, New Zealand, and Germany’, outline the content areas covered by teacher induction programmes, quoting Wong et al. (2005):

Induction programmes serve as a form of staff development, lasting 2 to 5 years for many teachers, encompassing many people and components, and are well-organized and comprehensive. In these programmes, novice teachers learn how to evaluate students’ learning, deliver courses proficiently, develop a repertoire of instructional practices, gain more in-depth knowledge and a broader awareness of subject fields, and work with parents. (2023, pp.43 – 44)

Sharon Feimen-Nemser highlights the criticality of the Induction Phase of new teachers, stating, ​‘Teacher induction is often framed as a transition from preservice preparation to practice, from student of teaching to teacher of students.’ (p. 1027). Elaborating further upon this phase of transition, she writes: The situation in which new teachers find themselves is inherently paradoxical. Like all beginning professionals, they must demonstrate skills and abilities that they do not yet have and can only gain by beginning to do what they do not yet understand (Schon, 1987). This places beginning teachers in a vulnerable position. Moreover, the work of teaching, itself complex, uncertain, and full of dilemmas, sharpens the paradox by reminding beginning teachers at every turn of what they cannot yet do. (pp. 1026 – 27)

In the Indian context, an induction programme to support the newly appointed teachers in this ​‘vulnerable’ phase is close to negligible. Newly appointed teachers, at most, are inducted through a short-term workshop which incorporates all the aspects related to their new job: documentation, policies, technologies to be used etc. Capacity building around how to teach specific subjects is pushed to the edge in this amalgamation of things. For instance, in Rajasthan, a four-day induction programme was organised for the new teachers. In this training, a total of 22 capacity-building hours were assigned for the new teachers in 2024, and of these 22 hours, only 3.5 hours were spent in understanding the pedagogy of English, Hindi and Mathematics, subjects that the new teachers would be teaching. Some other sessions were dedicated to understanding topics like: How Children Learn, My Role as a Teacher, Competencies and Learning Outcomes, etc. Additionally, like every other teacher training, the quality of this engagement was also a matter of concern. More importantly, the state lacks a long-term vision for teacher induction.

Most countries that have taken the endeavour of education, and consequently teacher education, with some seriousness have incorporated one to two years of teaching induction programmes that focus on providing the new teachers with an avenue where they can share their challenges from practice and seek some guidance through mentor teachers. Some countries, such as England, Germany and Norway (Zuljan and Požarnik, 2014, 194 – 199) (Pleșoianu, 2019, 1261) have a centralised induction which helps the retention of new teachers, while some other countries, such as Finland (Neimi H., 2015), Japan and China organise localized induction programmes. Countries such as Japan and China have taken a more collective approach to teacher induction programmes. In China, ​‘all novice teachers are required to continue their professional learning with general apprenticeship mentoring, teaching research groups, and other activities organised by the course preparation groups in each school.’ (Tuğba Baran Kaya and Adnan Baki, 2023, p.45). Similarly, in Japan, first-year teachers are expected to regularly take part in professional development, such as completing 10 hours per week onsite training or about 300 hours a year, facilitated by assigned mentor teachers, and offsite training for 25 days in their first year (Ozaki & Nunomura, 2013). In addition to formal training, these novice teachers continue with their learning in shokuin shitsu. at each school site. (Ruth Ahn, 2016)

Highlighting the criticality of teacher induction programmes, R N Bush, in his work, The beginning years of teaching: A focus for collaboration in teacher education (1984), elaborates: The conditions under which a person carries out the first years of teaching have a strong influence on the level of effectiveness which that teacher is able to achieve and sustain over the years; on the attitudes which govern teachers’ behavior over even a forty-year career; and, indeed, on the decision whether or not to continue in the teaching profession. (p. 3)

Given the criticality of induction programmes in the continuum of teacher professional development and its absence in the Indian context, here are some general principles of teacher induction programmes that can be pivotal in supporting the initial year(s) of practice of new teachers:

1. Duration of teacher induction programmes

Teacher induction programmes should serve the purpose of supporting the teachers in their initial years of the complex task of teaching. For this purpose, induction programmes need to be visualised in a manner that can provide the newly appointed teachers with recurrent platforms for sharing their challenges and learnings, along with a systematic framework for their growth as practitioners. Instead of an induction that lasts only for a short term (4−10 days’ workshop), the programme should be visualised as a yearlong process (at least). During this process, newly appointed teachers of a block/​cluster (depending upon the number of teachers appointed) could meet regularly for workshops that provide them avenues for sharing as well as for providing newer pedagogical insights for their growth.

2. Access to competent and experienced mentor teachers

Detailing the induction programmes of various European countries, Ana-Maria Pleșoianu (2018) in her paper titled ​‘Comparative Perspectives on the Induction of Teachers in the European States Systems’ highlights the importance of a competent mentor teacher for the success of induction programmes: The qualities of a mentor need special attention. Mentors must be selected according to rigorous criteria, such as intrinsic qualities (interpersonal skills, communication, and adult learning knowledge). Otherwise, there is a risk that mentors may have little influence on the debutants by limiting their exposure to an innovative or effective teaching style in experimenting with different approaches and teaching strategies. (p.1263)

In the Indian context, the selection of mentor teachers does not follow any consistent criteria. In many cases, mentor teachers that conduct the induction workshops have nothing to do with the actual task of teaching at the level of the mentees.

For improving the quality of the induction programmes (or of any capacity building forum), the process of selecting mentor teachers needs to be made more rigorous. A standard criterion for the selection of mentors should be that they have considerable and effective experience of teaching at the level at which the trainees are supposed to teach. Qualitative experiences will not only help in enhancing the quality of content that is to be delivered, but they will also help in tackling the challenges that come when a teacher starts practicing in a school situated in a community.

3. Field-based pedagogical support

Induction programmes should not only be limited to the engagements that are done during the workshops. Teachers are inducted to the process of teaching when they face a classroom in a school that has its own culture, which in turn, is situated within the larger society that has its implications for children’s lives and, consequently, learning. Mechanisms of individual observations and inputs for the classes of these teachers should be ensured in the initial years. The specificity of the challenges that teachers face and the contexts that they work in can only be addressed when teachers get inputs from a competent mentor teacher on their practice. Additionally, such observations and inputs will also guide the new practitioners in reflecting upon their own practices, helping them become reflective practitioners in the long run. 

4. Supporting professional and personal growth

Citing the existing research on the relevance of induction programmes for teachers, the European Commission handbook on teacher education states: Hobson and colleagues (2009) analysed international research literature on mentoring beginning teachers and described the potential benefits of mentoring support. Effective support of professional development, reduced feelings of isolation, increased confidence and self-esteem, and improved self-reflection and problem-solving capacities have been described as the main benefits for mentees. The most common feature amongst research findings relates to the provision of emotional and psychological support, increasing novice teachers’ morale and job satisfaction. Mentors help novice teachers to adapt to the norms, standards and expectations associated with teaching in general and with specific schools (Hobson et al. 2009: 200 – 201). (p.39)

Added to what Killeavy has said about teachers being required to assume ​‘full professional responsibilities from the first day’ is the fact that for many teachers, this also involves migrating to their place of work. From living in a new community and facing the plethora of socio-economic and systemic challenges that impact the functioning of our schools to delivering the expectations from their new role, a lot of things can cause demotivation, emotionally and professionally, during the initial phase of practice for a teacher. In such a scenario, induction programmes can help with sustaining their motivation and support the professional and personal growth of newly appointed teachers in new social settings. This growth is not only desirable but essential for the teachers, given the dynamic nature of their role.

Conclusion

In the Indian context, an induction programme incorporating the above-mentioned aspects seems unattainable if not complemented by the necessary amendments required at policy and implementation level with pre-service and in-service education – beginning from the quality of pre-service programmes to strengthening of institutions like SCERTs, DIETs and BRCs. The NEP (2020) envisions a lot of these changes, including Continuous Professional Development (CPD) for teachers. An induction programme spanning at least the initial one year of the service of new teachers should be an integral part of such a continuum, a principle that has been advocated since the Kothari Commission Report of 1966 but only in policies. Along with other systemic changes (such as unburdening the teachers from non-academic duties), the induction programme can play a pivotal role in bridging pre-service and in-service education, sustaining the zeal and motivation of new teachers through the initial years of their service.

A thoroughly planned induction programme, when complemented by other necessary reforms in teacher education, can make a significant impact in sustaining the zeal of the new teachers in their initial turbulent years of practice through carefully curated modes of sustained and necessary motivation and guidance. In the words of Feimen-Nemsar (2001), who analyzes multiple schools of thoughts on teacher education in her work, From Preparation to Practice: Designing a Continuum to Strengthen and Sustain Teaching: The first years of teaching are an intense and formative time in learning to teach, influencing not only whether people remain in teaching but what kind of teacher they become. (p.1026)

Given the massive landscape of the Indian Education system – 9 million teachers working in around 1.5 million schools (Issues in Education, p. 5) – and its innumerable teaching/​learning contexts, a policy can only outline the key principles that should be kept in mind while designing localised modes of teacher induction. Even after designing such policies and models, their success will depend on the rigor and quality with which they are executed. In the end, any policy recommendations will only be as good as their execution.

Author

Akash Shandilya is a Resource Person with Azim Premji Foundation, Rajasthan. He has completed his master’s in English from English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. In his current role, he works in Teachers’ Professional Development and Content Creation, primarily in the domain of English Language Teaching.

Featured photo credit: Purusottam Singh Thakur, Azim Premji Foundation

References

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