A Professional Learning Community Approach for Teacher Development and OER creation - A toolkit/Institutionalizing the program

The practice of a teacher cannot be developed through quick-fix strategies and activities, without the development of an accompanying framework / theory on the process of learning and the aims of education.

- National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education, 2010 (NCFTE)

Integrating ICT into mainstream processes of the school

ICT program implementation in schools in India has usually through the BOOT (Build, Own, Operate and Transfer) model, where the implementation is outsourced to a business entity. In this situation the vendor provides basic ICT literacy to students, bypassing the regular teachers. Since the teachers are not a part of the ICT program, they have seldom evinced interest in learning ICTs for their professional development. This has meant that the digital capacities of teachers is usually poor. Secondly, the regular subject teaching does not require the use of digital processes at all in most states, hence teachers do not need to become digitally literate. As a consequence, access to and creation of digital resources by teachers is rare in most states. The vendor does not have any incentive to renew the ICT infrastructure and at the end of the BOOT period, the assets transferred to the school are at the end of their lives. This makes the program non-sustaining.

However,there is an increasing move from the outsourced design of ICT programs in schools,to a greater role for regular subject teachers in delivering their subjects through the use of digital technologies. In this new approach, where the program is being implemented with the help of teachers, there is a need for teachers to become digitally literate. Education departments are also looking at how to develop locally relevant content, using the internal capabilities of the system, viz. their own school teachers, as suggested by the National ICT Policy on Education.

Adopting an in-house model, in which the ICT lab is part of school assets, owned by the school (similar to a Science or a Language Lab), can be the first step to integrating ICT into the schools own processes and institutionalizing it in school education.

Resource - Outsourced v/s in-house models of ICT integration in school education 

PLC as a continuing model of TPD

The PLC-OER approach for teacher education provides a model for a sustained 'content agnostic' program, meaning the program can focus on subject matter or pedagogy or philosophy of education or ICT or a combination of these, in any year. The program content would be available on the OER portal and be the subject of on-going discussions on the virtual forums. Hence it is possible to 'continue' as well as 'cumulate' such learning. Gradually the PLC approach would not be adopted for a specific teacher education program, but its principles (forming teacher learning communities, who have been part of the specific learning program/processes) could apply to all of the in-service teacher education program of the state. By making the access to an ICT lab a necessary part of the teacher education program, it also has the incidental benefit of restricting the number of participants in any program to a reasonable number, allowing for greater participation of the teachers.

Participatory TPD FOSS Integration in the regular TE program of the department