The states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh presented their best practices and achievements so far in teachers training and Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FNL) programme, under the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN) Bharat Mission on the sidelines of the fourth G20 Education Working Group meeting (EDWG) being held in Pune, Maharashtra from June 17 to 22, 2023.
The State of Uttar Pradesh claims to have trained six lakh teachers at block, district and state level so far in a run to achieve the ‘NIPUN Lakshya’ by 2025-26. This is part of its efforts to transform the state into ‘NIPUN Pradesh’, officials from Uttar Pradesh, said. The state government claims to run a four day weekly teachers training programme and an idea exchange exercise where knowledge is shared among academicians to learn best practices. The state further claims to provide lesson plans and teaching tool kits in collaboration with the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to educators to guide their teaching activity. Furthermore, the state claims to have upgraded its District Institute of Education and Training (DIET) to provide best training to its educators.
The representatives of the states and experts in different fields presented these insights as progress made under the NIPUN Bharat mission till date on the day-two of National Conference on FLN held on June 18 on the topic ‘Capacity building and training of teachers in blended mode’.
The state of Chhattisgarh claims to have rolled out policy reforms keeping in mind its multilingual tribal population and training its teachers to meet the FNL targets. The state claims to have in place an Interactive Radio Programme based on a United States (US) initiative which allows teachers to explain the content in the mother tongue as and when required. “We also release a monthly ‘Charcha Patra’ to brainstorm best teaching and learning ideas and conduct exposure visits for teachers to build capacity,” Sudhish M, assistant director, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, said.
Meanwhile, Madhya Pradesh government runs Mission Ankur to achieve the NIPUN goals by 2027, officials said. The CM Rise Teacher Professional Development (TPD) programme is another of its initiatives towards achieving the goals. “We have built dashboards softwares for teachers to map their performance on state and district levels and recognise their active participation,” Dhanaraju S, state project director, said.
Besides, Andhra Pradesh has undertaken structural reforms in its school education system breaking it down into foundational and high schools to introduce age appropriate interventions. As per S Suresh Kumar, commissioner, School Education, the state’s five year school education system transformation programme is supported by the World Bank. Andhra Pradesh also tracks the implementation of FNL and teachers training through a management information software.