Principles-based Adaptive Teaching

The last ten years have seen developments of national importance in school education in India. With the Right to Education (RtE) and the National Curriculum Framework (NCERT, 2005), changes have been afoot to enable access to quality education for children at scale. Responding to the concurrent need for teacher education to support the vision of a robust education system, the National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education (NCFTE, 2009) recommended substantive changes in curriculum and practice of teacher education in the country. Subsequently, the Justice Verma Committee Report (MHRD 2012) endorsed these curricular reforms and called for an overhaul of the sector. Notably, similar shifts have been observed across the world, as teacher education programmes discuss pathways for the professional development of teachers to enable them to work as transformative professionals in the 21st century. UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goals call for transformative pedagogies, with a shift towards active, self-directed participatory and collaborative learning, problem orientation, inter- and trans-disciplinarity and linking formal and informal learning (UNESCO 2017, 7).

With rapid advancements in science and technology, and the pervasiveness of ICT and media in our lives, the education sector stands witness to radical changes that are affecting teaching-learning practices in schools. It also alerts us to the range of knowledge development required of educators to meet the challenges of a changing sector adeptly. Further, the aptitudes and skills anticipated from students to contribute meaningfully to a knowledge economy include effective communication, intercultural sensitization, analytical and critical thinking, problem-solving skills and creativity, among others, which extend beyond mastery of pre-given content. In this framework, educators are required to constantly update, deepen and innovate on domain knowledge and pedagogical practices to prepare their students for uncertain futures.

Research indicates that faculties of education need support to implement the ambitious curricular reforms but are unable to do so due to, among other factors, academic isolation and a dearth of good curricular resources. There is an urgent need for quality teaching-learning materials that can trigger critical inquiry, invoke a sense of adventure and provoke the curiosity of both student-teachers and teacher-educators to embark on the complex task of learning to teach.

The themes for these books have been identified based on a consideration of B.Ed. curricular documents and demands for capacity building from the field and address the needs of preparing teachers for the 21st century.