The Role of Pedagogy in Developing Life Skills

Abstract

In response to recent concerns expressed by Indian industry about the ‘employability’ of school and university graduates, this article examines the role of pedagogy in developing life skills (or twenty-first-century skills) and how these can be incorporated in the school/university curriculum. Recent curricular frameworks have incorporated life skills within the school curriculum by stressing the importance of inquiry and collaborative work through all subjects taught in school. The article finds a similar emphasis in the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) in India, but classroom observations and textbook analyses show that learning objectives in schools are frequently incorrect or misaligned with the NCF vision. The article briefly touches on how the beliefs of teachers affect their classroom practices and recommends that attention should be paid to the professionalisation of teachers, as only then can students acquire skills that are relevant for the twenty-first century, which is what employers want.

JEL Classification: O15, J24, I21

Keywords

Education non-cognitive skills employability skill pedagogy India

1. Introduction

Recently, employers have raised concerns about the ‘employability’ of school and university graduates, pointing to their lack of skills in numerous areas. As an example, Blom and Saeki (2011) list the following skill gaps that employers identified in new engineering graduates: reliability, self-motivation and willingness to learn (under core employability) and problem solving, creativity and the use of modern tools (under professional skills). These skills go beyond merely knowing content and possessing technical skills; instead, they refer to ‘life skills’, which are needed to manage a job and a career with some degree of independence and without constant supervision. Organisations handle this problem by identifying the skills that new hires lack and organising workshops and courses to fill the gap. These could range from short workshops on values, motivation and creativity to re-teaching skills and content that were poorly taught/learnt in school and college.

The lack of ‘life skills’ is puzzling to educationists, because the formal education system was set up to prepare children to handle their economic and social lives when they become adults. Graduates arrive at the workplace after at least 12 years, if not more, in the formal education system. However, companies (and now the government) are taking on the enormous task that formal education is supposed to handle over a period of more than 12 years. It raises the question of what is being taught in the formal education system.

The picture we get from studies on student achievement is not encouraging. Many school students fail to acquire even the basic skills that employers need. The data on rural India show abysmally low skills in basic literacy and numeracy (ASER, 2005–2011), whereby a high percentage of children in class 5 are unable to manage tasks designed for students of class 2; without these foundation skills, learners are unable to understand complex texts and advanced mathematical concepts in the higher grades (Pritchett, 2013). Even in urban schools, students lag behind their international counterparts in middle school in literacy, mathematics and science (Educational Initiatives & Wipro, n.d.) and in secondary school in science and mathematics (World Bank, 2009).

Teachers are usually blamed for the low achievement levels in schools, but teachers operate within a larger ecosystem that influences their practices. For instance, it could be argued that the factors such as adequate school infrastructure and lack of resources affect teaching practices. However, Muralidharan (2013) found little or no impact of the inputs such as school infrastructure, teacher pay and teacher–pupil ratios. Another example is that teachers may be following a curriculum that is too advanced for the students’ level; in their analysis of student achievement in primary grades in developing countries, Pritchett and Beatty (2012) found that learning levels became flat after a point, which they attribute to an overambitious curriculum. Hence, any discussion of education has to consider the numerous influences on classroom practice—why instruction is framed in particular ways, the role of the curriculum and assessments, the expectations of society, etc. (Alexander, 2001). This examination and discussion surrounding education is termed ‘pedagogy’, which goes beyond teaching practices.

Within a wider framework, the question is whether or not the current curriculum is relevant. On this, the concerns expressed by employers have served a crucial function—they have highlighted the need to re-examine and reform the school/university curriculum so that students learn the relevant skills. This does not imply that the sole purpose of education is to supply workers for the job market, but it does suggest that the curriculum (and instruction) may need to be aligned with what is required for living and working in the twenty-first century.

This article is divided into two major sections. The first section, ‘Life Skills at Work and in Education’, defines life skills, which are the skills that employers desire, along with the responses of educators in terms of suggestions for new curriculum frameworks and how to incorporate life skills in the curriculum and instruction. The second section, ‘Pedagogy in India’, examines some components that impact school instruction; it finds that the curriculum framework and even the school examination system advocate instruction that incorporates inquiry skills and collaboration, but data from classroom observations and textbook analyses show that these are either misunderstood or bypassed. Following these, the article touches on teacher education and gives three suggestions for improving the quality of education.

2. Life Skills at Work and in Education

2.1 Defining Life Skills

There have been attempts to list life skills, which appear to constitute an endless, and often overlapping, list. One list is given in Scott (2015), who summarises the suggestions from research under four heads: (a) learning to know; (b) learning to do (critical thinking, problem solving, communication and collaboration, creativity and innovation, information, media and technology literacy and information and communications technology [ICT] literacy); (c) learning to be (social and cross-cultural skills, personal responsibility, self-regulation and initiative, sense-making skills, metacognitive skills, entrepreneurial thinking skills and learning to learn and habits of lifelong learning); and (d) learning to live together (seeking and valuing diversity, teamwork and interconnectedness, civic and digital citizenship, global competence and intercultural competence). A list of the skills by organisation can be found in the Central Square Foundation report by Singh and Menon (2016).

One parsimonious and useful distinction can be found in the World Bank’s STEP (Skills Towards Employability and Productivity) programme (2014, pp. 7–8), which lays out three types of skills: (a) cognitive skills, which include literacy, numeracy and the ability to solve abstract problems; (b) socio-emotional skills (non-cognitive skills or soft skills), which relate to social, emotional, personality, behavioural and attitudinal domains; and (c) job-relevant skills, which are task-related (such as computer use). Of these skills, cognitive and socio-emotional skills fall (or should fall) under the purview of school education.

Life skills have always been part of education, but they have acquired significance in the twenty-first century. One reason is that the advent of digital technologies has led to fundamental changes in how people interact and work. Dede (2010) points to three fundamental changes: a shift to a knowledge-based economy, because computers can perform routine tasks, the increased role and importance of collaborative work in the workplace and the need to handle vast amounts of information in order to separate signal from noise. Employers do not need to hire people who can perform calculations by hand or people who can spell obscure words, because computers can do this faster and more accurately; instead, the workplace is looking for people who can select appropriate procedures and interpret the results that the computer provides, as well as people who can sift through volumes of contradictory and often inaccurate information in order to write a coherent report or paper.

This shift involves a cluster of skills termed ‘twenty-first-century skills’ that are intended to replace the twentieth-century curriculum that Dede (2010) terms the ‘legacy curriculum’. One example of a twenty-first-century curriculum framework is the P21 framework for twenty-first-century learning (2011), which has at its core the 3Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic) and twenty-first-century themes (or subjects). These core skills are driven by life and career skills, learning and innovation skills and information, media and technology skills; the whole is supported by standards and assessment, curriculum and instruction, professional development (of teachers and educators) and learning environments.

India is not alone in finding that graduates lack essential job skills; employers in other countries have expressed the same concerns about low employability, but some countries have responded by revamping their education systems. As early as the 1980s, the USA began examining the skills required for a new knowledge economy and envisaged a fundamental shift from memorisation of facts to the development of inquiry skills. In Asia, both Singapore and China have modernised their education systems through planning at the central level. Singapore, like India, inherited an education system from the British, and China followed a competitive examination system for centuries; both countries have, however, moved beyond these ‘legacy systems’, whereas India still needs to address this issue.

2.2 Life Skills Within the Formal Education System

There seem to be three ways to teach life skills in school (UNESCO, 2016, p. 3):

As a specific subject. For example, Behrani (2016) describes a module on the life skills education programme in Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) schools;

As part of extra-curricular activities in school; and

Cross subjects, so that they underpin the traditional school subjects.

Educationists have focused their efforts on the third option, in which life skills are imparted through all the subjects taught in school. The problem is how to translate and integrate such skills into the curriculum. Scott (2015) reviews different research-based curriculum models, such as Sternberg and Subotnik (2006), who suggest fostering learners’ capabilities in three areas: reasoning (analytical and critical thinking and problem-solving skills), resilience (life skills, such as flexibility, adaptability and self-reliance) and responsibility (wisdom or the application of intelligence, creativity and knowledge for a common good). Scott’s review concludes that the following three components are common to these curriculum models: inquiry, design¹ and collaborative learning for effective instruction. The focus of education thus turns away from teaching a body of content to making students work in groups to explore and understand concepts.

In short, research shows that the life skills that employers want can be taught within the school curriculum by incorporating and emphasising inquiry skills and student collaboration (see Chu et al., 2017, for how this is done in Hong Kong).

In the past few decades, the dominant curricular model has shifted away from teaching inquiry skills and collaborative work in school towards achieving measurable outcomes. The dominant model from Tyler (1949) lays out four steps: set objectives, select learning experiences, organise instruction, and evaluate progress. This model remains enormously influential, because it focuses on measurable teaching outcomes and provides an efficient path to deliver these outcomes. The focus on ensuring that learning outcomes are met is echoed in Muralidharan (2013) and the National Education Policy (2016), but they do not touch on what these learning outcomes are, who specifies them, whether they are appropriate or how they are interpreted by teachers and students.

In contrast to the narrow focus on learning outcomes, the educationists such as Bruner, Vygotsky and Slavin address the general purpose of education. Bruner (1963) places learners at the centre of the curriculum, with inquiry being central to learning and instruction. He lays out four elements of a theory of instruction that is based on the following proposition: ‘[I]n order to learn or to solve problems, it is necessary that alternatives be explored and that you cannot have effective learning or problem solving without the learner’s having the courage and the skill to explore alternative ways of dealing with a problem’ (Bruner, 1963. p. 526). He envisages learning as exploration in a safe environment that is guided and supported by the teacher. Inquiry skills are most clearly articulated in the teaching of science based on Schwab (1962). They can range from mere confirmation of facts, through structured and guided inquiry, to open inquiry, where students formulate their own research questions (Rezba et al., 1999, cited in Bell et al., 2005). Banchi and Bell (2008) provide examples of how this translates into classroom activities for science, and Appendix 1 provides an example from the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT).

Inquiry skills are also being emphasised in other disciplines, as seen in the Common Core Standards (CCS) in the USA. For English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects,² students are expected to ‘engage in the skills of research and inquiry, with a focus on gathering evidence from multiple information sources, evaluating the credibility of those sources, and writing an integrated synthesis that appropriately cites evidence from those sources’ (Sparks & Deane, 2015). This begins in grade 1, where the standards specify that students should learn to:

Explain major differences between books that tell stories and books that give information, drawing on a wide reading of a range of text types. (Common Core Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects³: p. 11, emphasis added)

This focus would move students away from studying and learning from a single source of information (the textbook) to using and evaluating multiple documents.

The teacher plays an important role in developing inquiry skills. As a knowledgeable adult, the teacher guides the learning by providing a structure and input that is appropriate for the learner’s level, which is termed ‘scaffolding’ (Vygotsky, 1930–1934/1978).

The emphasis on collaborative work comes from the theory that learning is a social, rather than an individual, activity (Vygotsky, 1930–1934/1978). When students work together to accomplish a task, they pool their resources and student achievement is higher (Slavin, 1980). Collaborative work has been found to improve cognitive skills, such as critical thinking and metacognition, as well as social skills, because students need to negotiate with members of the group. Collaborative learning has assumed greater importance now for two reasons. First, digital environments offer and require collaboration, which can be seen in the use of chats and discussion forums. Second, collaborative work within teams has become the norm in work environments, and employers have identified the ability to collaborate as one of their desired skills.

In short, curriculum design envisages a shift from memorisation to fostering inquiry skills and collaborative work. These have always been central to education but have assumed new importance in the twenty-first century if students are to manage their careers in a changing world.

3. Pedagogy in the Formal Indian Education System

The Indian education system has been criticised for emphasising rote learning rather than developing the skills that lead to independent, lifelong learning. Much of the blame has been placed on the examination system that supposedly encourages memorisation rather than conceptual understanding and application. However, the system is not monolithic; some components encourage inquiry skills and collaboration, but other components undercut these efforts.

This section looks at some components of pedagogy in the formal Indian education system. The description cannot even begin to capture the enormous variation in syllabi, textbooks and schools across the country; it is limited to extracting a few broad features of curriculum and instruction even in ‘elite’ urban schools, without the ‘noise’ of poor implementation.

Figure 1 is a stripped-down version of how these components could influence teaching practices in the classroom. At the highest level, the curriculum framework lays out what should be taught, and the examination system tests whether students have learnt it. Between these high-level specifications and classroom teaching, there are two major influences: (a) how the high-level goals are translated into syllabi and textbooks and (b) how adults perceive pedagogy, that is, what society, parents, teachers and teacher educators consider important in curriculum and instruction.⁴ The gap between the curriculum framework and teachers’ beliefs about teaching (among government school teachers) has been noted by Brinkmann (2020).

Figure 1

Source: The author.

3.1 The Curriculum and the Examination System

In India, the national curriculum is designed by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), and the major end-school examination is conducted by the CBSE. Both organisations have been criticised as encouraging rote memorisation and the poor quality of education, but a closer examination shows that many of their visions are similar to other curricular frameworks, such as P21. The National Curriculum Framework (NCF; 2005) developed by the NCERT lays out a vision of education that prepares students for ‘meaningful and productive lives’. The document consistently places emphasis on the learner and learner engagement/activity as the basis of learning. Chapter 3 on Curricular Areas, School Stages and Assessment lays out the goals of the core subjects at different levels, moving from using learner experience at the primary-school level to an engagement with disciplinary concepts at the secondary level. In terms of inquiry skills and collaborative work, the NCF stresses the importance of inquiry skills in science and notes that interactions are important in learning (Chapter 2, Learning and Knowledge). The NCF is a high-level vision document, and it is left to the NCERT and the education bodies of the respective states to specify how this vision can be translated into instruction through the syllabus and textbooks.

CBSE question papers are broadly in line with NCERT formulations. For instance, in history at the class 12 level, the NCERT emphasises historiography—the process by which historians arrive at their conclusions; the CBSE question paper for history has a section that requires students to perform the task of a historian, namely, to interpret a document. In such questions, students cannot rely on memorised answers but have to read and interpret an unfamiliar text (see Appendix 2 for an example). In English, the NCERT emphasises language use and downplays grammar; the CBSE question paper for class 10 tests language use (whether students can spot language errors) rather than language usage (knowledge of grammatical terms).

Both the NCERT and the CBSE have attempted to translate the NCF goals into practical forms that teachers can use. Two examples are the introduction of project work and Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE), which is intended to provide feedback to the teacher on the effectiveness of instruction. The NCERT has prepared a few manuals that show teachers how to assess student learning of concepts that have been introduced in the NCERT textbooks (see Appendix 1). In 2013, the CBSE introduced a test called Problem Solving Assessment (PSA) for classes 9 and 11 that tested application of knowledge rather than knowledge of facts in three domains—language, qualitative reasoning and quantitative reasoning—but the test was abruptly withdrawn in 2015.

These efforts by the NCERT and the CBSE show attempts to move instruction away from memorisation of facts to development and application of skills in real situations. However, the stage-wise specifications are left to the syllabus and textbooks. The translation from the vision through the syllabus to the textbook gets diluted and sometimes does not match the high-level goals; this can be seen in how teachers interpret CCE as a test for students rather than as a diagnostic tool for teachers (Srinivasan, 2015).

3.2 The Syllabus and Teaching/Learning Material

During the 12 years of schooling, instruction occurs in stages that are appropriate for the learners’ age and ability levels. These stages are specified in a syllabus as learning objectives (with sub-objectives) and then broken down into lesson plans that the teacher transacts in the classroom. The NCERT syllabus lays out three broad stages—primary, secondary and higher secondary. This gives schools and teachers the time and freedom to achieve the learning objectives, but such a minimal syllabus offers teachers little guidance on the steps (sub-objectives), their sequence and how to assess learning. This is left to textbooks and their interpretation of the NCF vision.

There is sometimes a mismatch between the curricular framework laid out in the NCF, the syllabus that follows and the textbooks prepared for the classroom, even those produced by the NCERT. For example, as mentioned earlier, the NCF downplays grammar, but the NCERT syllabus includes grammar items (nouns, pronouns, tenses, empty subjects, etc.). Again, the NCERT syllabus states that the learner should be able to read and write simple words, phrases and short sentences, but the NCERT textbook for class 1 (Marigold) provides fragmented, incomplete and sometimes inaccurate techniques for teaching children how to read. A more successful attempt is seen in Kerala, where the state education body, the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) Kerala, has developed detailed syllabi and the textbooks incorporate inquiry skills even in the primary grades. For instance, critical reading is a learning objective in primary school. In each chapter, students read authentic texts, such as newspaper reports on an incident, which they subsequently discuss. There are intensive, ongoing teacher education programmes that enable teachers to understand and follow these objectives in their classroom instruction.

However, for most teachers, the curriculum comes down in the form of a textbook that lays out both the content and the sequence, along with questions on each lesson. As a result, the teacher’s lesson plan is often merely ‘Cover pages x to y in the textbook’, with little understanding of why and how to teach the material. At the same time, teachers have the option of going beyond the textbook by using additional resources to teach the content and devising their own tests to assess student learning.

3.3 Teaching Literacy and Mathematics

The NCF lays out a vision of teaching–learning that emphasises inquiry and collaboration, which would foster twenty-first-century skills, but in classrooms, it is the teacher who has to implement these visions. Studies on classroom practices are remarkably consistent in their findings that: (a) teacher talk dominates and (b) teachers rely on the textbook. For instance, Jhingran (2012) found that in grades 1 and 2 (in government schools in Rajasthan and Assam) children spent 90% of their time listening to, watching and repeating after the teacher or another student and copying. The findings are similar for private schools; Smith et al. (2005) found that in grades 1–10 students spent 62.9% of the time listening. The type of teacher talk was explanation (54%) and giving directions (10%); pupil answers to questions made up only 7% of the time and were responses to closed questions, often requiring a single-word response.

There is also a heavy reliance on textbooks, which Kumar (1988) has termed ‘the textbook culture’. While the textbook had a place in times when materials were scarce, they cannot be the sole source of teaching–learning material today when material is easily available on the Internet and employees are expected to handle multiple documents. Yet, teachers depend on textbooks, both for what should be taught and for the sequence of content. For instance, Sinha et al. (2016, p. 34) found that in rural schools in Bihar, most of the teachers were reading from the textbook (89%), asking questions from the textbook (67%) or asking students to recite (49%).

It is not clear why teachers resort to so much teacher talk or rely so heavily on the textbook. Explanations range from teacher’s lack of subject matter knowledge to the ‘apprenticeship of observation’ (Lortie, 1975), where teachers teach as they have been taught. There is a third explanation: in an outcomes-driven model of instruction, the teacher has to demonstrate to all stakeholders that teaching has taken place. This can be seen below in the description of instruction in reading and mathematics. The description of reading instruction is based on classroom observations in urban private schools for children from middle-class backgrounds, while for mathematics, I have analysed a chapter in the NCERT textbook, which is intended for all populations.

3.3.1 Teaching Literacy

Literacy encompasses both reading and writing. The acquisition of reading skills is a long and invisible process; writing, on the other hand, results in an immediately visible product that satisfies all the concerned adults—teachers, parents and school inspectors. As a result, writing is frequently emphasised at the expense of reading.

Initial Literacy

The data come from a school for children from a middle-class background whose parents are literate (for details, see Gupta, 2013a, b). The teachers’ objective was to teach English to the predominantly Kannada-speaking children and to make them form the letters of the English alphabet in upper case and lower case. The teachers gave instructions (‘Go to Page X in the copybook and finish writing’) but offered no explanations; they then corrected the students’ completed work.

What did students understand of this activity? I distributed sheets of paper to the students and then collected their ‘artefacts’. From these, students’ evolving understanding of print emerged, which are called concepts of print (Clay, 1985; Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982). One student mimicked the pose of an adult writing and produced a page of ‘pretend writing’ that used made-up symbols. Several students experimented with the direction of writing, going from top to bottom, right to left and finally settling on left to right; however, one student tried boustrophedon writing (left to right and then right to left) before abandoning it (Gupta, 2012). One student drew pictures and labelled them with letter strings; he had figured out that written words represented objects, even though his strings did not represent sounds.

The extraordinary difficulties involved in the acquisition of literacy can be seen in the three examples below. While most children were able to separate letters from numbers within the first month, one child, after 1 year, was chanting ‘b-a-eleven ball, w-a-eleven wall’. When I pointed to the picture of an umbrella with the letter ‘U’ in a child’s copybook, he said ‘U for chhatri’; after 1 year of copying the letters, the child still did not understand that the letters were meant to represent sounds.⁵ And after 2 years of instruction, one child could spell out the letters ‘w-a-l-l’ (which had been taught at the beginning of the year), but she could neither pronounce it nor point to the correct picture or object.

As a second intervention, I distributed a few simple storybooks to the students. One student, who had learnt to read from her mother, taught her friends to read and they came to show me their skill. Together, they recited the text to me—with the book closed. They had memorised the text in the belief that this was what adults wanted.

For the teacher, the copybooks provided evidence for parents and administrators that the teaching activity had taken place. However, it must be said that some parents realised that this was insufficient and taught the children at home; this is evident in the case of the boy who produced letter strings and the girl whose mother had taught her to read.

Not all schools follow this approach, but it remains the dominant approach. Alternatives to this approach are often used in schools for first-generation learners where the gaps in learning cannot be filled by parents or tuition. They use the NCF suggestions to begin instruction in the mother tongue and build literacy on the spoken language. They do not rely on commercial textbooks but devise their own instructional materials. For instance, to teach an Indian script, such as Devanagari, children are not taught the standard sequence of letters; instead, they are introduced to small sets of letters that they can instantly combine to form meaningful words (Eklavya, 2003; Jayaram, 2008).

The learning outcomes at these two types of schools are very different. Through the standard approach, children are able to write and spell isolated words but cannot understand what they read. In contrast, the alternative approach produces students who can comprehend texts above their grade level, but their handwriting skills may not be as good.

Reading in the Higher Grades

The reading instruction in class 4 of an English-medium school in Karnataka that caters to first-generation learners displays two features of a reading class—teacher explanation of the text and students’ attempts to memorise the text.

In the two classes the author observed, both teachers spent the first half of the class explaining the text to the students. Student engagement with the text consisted of round-robin reading, where students took turns to read the text out loud to the class. In one class, the teacher asked one student to explain the text to her classmates. The student began her explanation with a sentence she had managed to memorise from the text. This links back to the practices seen in the earliest grades (see the section above), where children seem to think that reading means memorising and reciting the text.

Teacher explanation is not confined to rural or government schools but seems to be a common practice even in ‘elite’ schools. Teachers at an urban, ‘elite’ school told me that sometimes they begin the class by asking students to discuss a topic and make predictions about the text. However, this takes up time and then they have to justify to administrators (and parents) why they have not ‘covered the textbook’.

In effect, students bypass the text, depending instead on the teacher for an explanation. They are able to answer questions on the text, which is taken as evidence of learning, without having read the text.

3.3.2 Teaching Mathematics

The NCF (NCERT, 2005, p. 42) states that ‘developing students’ abilities for mathematisation is the main goal of mathematics education. Maths should help develop the child’s resources to think and reason mathematically, to pursue assumptions to their logical conclusion and to handle abstraction’. At the same time, it acknowledges that school mathematics ‘[p]roblems, exercises and methods of evaluation are mechanical and repetitive, with too much emphasis on computation’.

The example used here is the relationship between perimeter and area, which is taught in middle school but is conceptually difficult. A study found that only 23% of the students in class 8 could correctly answer a question that tested whether the perimeter of a rectangle would increase if the area decreased (Educational Initiatives & Wipro, 2006). This is not surprising, because it eludes teachers too. Ma (1999) found that middle-school teachers in the USA were unable to explain that an increase in the perimeter did not necessarily lead to an increase in area, whereas teachers in China explored the problem mathematically.

The focus on calculation rather than explanation or experimentation can be seen in the NCERT textbook (class 7, Chapter 11). Instead of asking students to explore the relationship by drawing different rectangles on squared paper, the textbook provides the following explanation:

From a sheet of paper, Tanya cuts out a square. Do the area and perimeter increase or decrease?

[Several irrelevant tables and figures follow.]

A bald statement follows: ‘It is clear that the increase of perimeter need not lead to increase in area’.

The rest of the 76-page chapter is devoted to calculating area and perimeter for different types of figures.

As a result, students learn to perform calculations for complex figures, but both students and teachers would be unable to answer a simple question: can the area change while the perimeter stays the same? Note that examinations are designed to test calculations, whereas an interviewer is more likely to test understanding of a fundamental concept.

This focus on mechanical procedures in mathematics has been noted in other studies. In the study by Arvind (2008), the transcript from mathematics highlights the emphasis on learning a mechanical procedure. The teacher explains the method to be used (divide and then multiply), solves a sample problem on the blackboard and then assigns four problems for the students to work on individually. Since students have merely learnt a procedure without understanding the concept, they apply it mechanically to a different mathematical problem and get the wrong answer.

In mathematics, students could be asked to experiment and understand the concept, but this takes up valuable time that could be spent on filling up a copybook with sums to demonstrate that activity has taken place. It can be seen that learning objectives have been translated into visible outcomes that can be measured.

Such an approach to instruction does not help to build the life skills that students need, irrespective of whether they are cognitive or non-cognitive. Skills such as self-motivation, problem solving, creativity, reasoning, leadership and collaboration then have to be relegated to a separate course or module instead of being incorporated into the formal education system.

4. Teacher Knowledge and Beliefs

Although school teachers are required to obtain a teaching certificate or a BEd degree in order to teach, studies find that pre-service or novice teachers hold strong beliefs about effective teaching that are difficult to change (see Borko & Putnam, 1996, for a review of studies). Many of these beliefs come from the ‘apprenticeship of observation’ (Lortie, 1975); as schoolchildren, teachers have spent thousands of hours watching their teachers at work, and so they continue to teach as they were taught. Teacher education programmes that attempt to change the beliefs of novice teachers are only partially successful. In India, Clarke (2003), reporting on District Institute of Education and Training (DIET) programmes in Karnataka, found that schoolteachers were ready to incorporate learner-centred techniques that encourage ‘activity and joyful learning’, but they believed that the teacher is more knowledgeable than the student and has a duty to transmit knowledge. This perception of the teacher’s role leads to lecturing and providing answers, which makes it difficult to implement inquiry-based instruction in the classroom. In contrast, teachers in the USA and Singapore are trained to acknowledge that they do not know the answer but will find it for the student.

The NCERT and state education bodies, such as the DIETs, conduct workshops and training programmes to show in-service teachers how to incorporate learner-centred teaching, project work, CCE, etc. However, these programmes are usually very short, lasting a few days or even one day. If teachers are to change their beliefs about teaching and learn how to implement new instructional methods in their classrooms, it has to be done through longer programmes that allow time for reflection and practice. This falls within the domain of teacher education programmes.

Current teacher education programmes in India focus on theory drawn from the philosophy, sociology and psychology of education, which is backed up with practice teaching. They seem to assume that teachers have the required subject matter knowledge, which may not be the case. A series of studies tapped teachers’ understanding of what they taught in their classes (Bhattacharjea et al., 2011, Chapter 5; Kingdon & Banerji, 2009; Sinha et al., 2016, Chapter 3). Teachers in Bihar were asked to answer typical questions that they gave their students; they were then asked to provide the steps to arrive at the answers. Many mathematics teachers were unable to give the correct answer, but even those who gave the correct answer could not list all the steps in the calculation, which indicates that teacher explanations are often inadequate. Among language teachers, most of them knew that to teach vocabulary they should use a simpler word to explain a difficult word. However, most of them were unable to write a summary—a skill that they teach their students.⁶

The second assumption is that teachers are able to transform their subject matter knowledge into pedagogical content knowledge that suits the age and ability level of learners (Shulman, 1986). The difference between them is what separates the biologist from the biology teacher. The teacher cannot go into a classroom and merely transmit information; the content has to be transformed so that it is understood by learners.

These missing components can be seen in the Central Teacher Eligibility Test (CTET) for the post of teachers in central government schools. In the section on English, half the questions test language proficiency, a few questions test knowledge of grammar and grammatical terms, and a few questions test knowledge of terminology. Missing from this is knowledge about the structure of the language, which is central to language teaching (see Andrews, 2003, from Hong Kong). Without this background, teachers make assumptions about learning which are incorrect. For instance, teachers in the early grades assume that learning to read in English is easier than learning an Indian script, because ‘English has only 26 letters’. This view ignores the complexity of the English script, where the link between sounds and letters is not consistent or obvious, whereas in Indian scripts such as Devanagari there is a close correspondence between sounds and letters. As one international organisation noted, ‘All else equal, children learning to read in English required two to three times the amount of instruction as children learning to read in languages that are more regular in their construction’ (Early Grade Reading Assessment [EGRA], 2009, p. 10).

In addition, teachers need to become familiar with twenty-first-century skills and technology; even at the university level, teachers resist the idea of allowing students to compose their work on the computer because ‘We give marks for neat handwriting’. This does not prepare students for twenty-first-century jobs.

At the same time, it must be said that many teachers are aware of better teaching methods but are constrained by what administrators or parents want. As pointed out in the section on teaching literacy, teachers know that students should interact with the text, but then they have to explain to the principal why they did not finish teaching the entire textbook. Parental pressure too can impact instruction. One semi-rural school replaced the standard copybook with instruction in phonics. Parents objected until one parent told the principal, ‘My son in Upper KG [who learnt phonics] can read shop signs but my son in Class 4 cannot’ (Gupta, 2014).

In a comparison of the school education systems in China and India, Goldman et al. (2008) highlight a critical difference between the two countries. Due to political turmoil in the twentieth century, China frequently had to reform its school education system; since its most recent iteration was in 1996, China was able to formulate a curriculum that emphasised twenty-first-century skills. In India, on the other hand, the focus was always on higher education, and basic education was neglected until 1986. As a result, India was a late entrant into the sphere of basic education, and perhaps we are still trying to understand how to deliver quality instruction at the school level.

5. What Should Be Done

How does one teach students the skills that they need for the twenty-first century and for employability? There appear to be three solutions to the problem.

The first solution is to use volunteer teachers and remedial teaching to fix problems in the system. Muralidharan (2013) reports on studies that have found improved learning outcomes through such interventions. However, remedial teaching does what should happen in the formal school system—individual attention and instructional material that is suited to the ability level of the learner. There is also a potential problem with remedial teaching—volunteers may teach as they were taught. For instance, remedial courses in English at the university still teach grammar in the belief that this will improve students’ language proficiency. Children from middle-class backgrounds have an advantage here—their parents can support their learning by encouraging them to read storybooks (Heath, 1983; Purcell-Gates, 2004). They can also afford extra coaching or the cost of coaching centres that fill the learning gaps.

The second option is to use technology. Currently, schools and teachers seem to have a limited view of what technology offers, using it to display supplementary lessons or PowerPoint presentations, and universities prepare videos of professors lecturing. However, there is a wide range of options in the use of technology for education. At one end of the spectrum, there are learning objects and simulations; for instance, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) creates simulations for science and mathematics that allow students to manipulate variables in order to understand the underlying concepts and relationships. At the other end of the spectrum, there is learner-driven education through technology that is proposed in minimally invasive education (Mitra, 2003) and self-organised learning environments (SOLEs)⁷; however, these still need to be driven by a curriculum. Between the two extremes, simple technology using smartphones offers access to multiple sources of information on the Internet, so that teachers and students are not dependent on the textbook. Students can also use technology to create documents that combine text, graphics and video, and they can analyse data. However, it is the students who have to use technology, and it cannot be used merely as a tool for the teacher to display information.

The third option is to address the professionalisation of teachers, which is a long-term option. McKinsey (2007) examined the education systems of the top-performing countries in OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and found that these countries get the right people to become teachers and develop them into effective instructors through teacher education programmes that provide support for effective teaching. High-performing school systems, such as in Singapore and Japan, use four broad approaches that provide ongoing support to trainee teachers: (a) they build practical skills during initial training by moving the lecture into the teacher’s classroom; (b) they place coaches in schools to help the novice teacher; (c) they get the right teachers to become principals and provide instructional leadership; and (d) they enable teachers to learn from each other.

6. Conclusion

This article examined the role of pedagogy in developing life skills or twenty-first-century skills. Recent curricular frameworks incorporate life skills within the school curriculum by stressing the importance of inquiry and collaborative work in all school subjects. There is a similar emphasis in the NCF in India; however, their translation into the syllabus and textbooks remains weak, with learning objectives that are misaligned with the NCF.

Since it is the teacher who handles classroom instruction, adequate teacher preparation is critical, because, as the McKinsey report (2007) points out, ‘the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers’. This preparation cannot be handled through short training sessions for in-service teachers that do not allow time for reflection, mentoring and practice.

There is a clear need to reform both the formal education system and teacher preparation if we want to equip students with the skills that employers desire, as well as the skills they need to manage life and work in the twenty-first century.

Footnotes

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Appendix

Appendix 2

Source-based Questions in the CBSE History Examination

Read the following extract carefully and answer the questions that follow:

A rural city?

Read this excerpt on Madras from the Imperial Gazetteer, 1908:

…the better European residences are built in the midst of compounds which almost attain the dignity of parks; and rice-fields frequently wind in and out between these in almost rural fashion. Even in the most thickly peopled native quarters such as Black Town and Triplicane, there is little of the crowding found in many other towns…

1. Where and why were better European residences built?

2. Explain the condition of black towns.

3. State the meaning of gradual urbanisation of Madras.

Source: CBSE class 12 history question paper 2016 (Part D: Source-based questions).

Notes

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