Making the Curriculum Come Alive: From Teacher Education to Classroom Practice

From teacher education to classroom practice

As the needs of education continue to evolve, teacher education must evolve with them to prepare teachers for the realities of today’s classrooms.

The Integrated Teacher Education Programme (ITEP) represents an important step in this direction. By bringing professional preparation in education together with specialised disciplinary study, it recognises that subject expertise and the ability to teach that subject effectively need to develop together.

Yet, there is an important difference between learning about pedagogy and applying it.

A future teacher may learn about experiential learning, assessment or learner-centred classrooms. Developing professional capability, however, also requires them to design learning experiences, create assessments that reveal understanding and develop resources that respond to specific learning challenges.

This is where teacher preparation has to move from understanding pedagogy to applying it.

Teaching is not a capability that develops only by reading about it. It develops through designing, experimenting, demonstrating, receiving feedback and reflecting on practice.

Teacher education has traditionally relied on coursework, assignments, examinations and internships to develop professional capability. These remain important. But future teachers also benefit from additional opportunities to apply what they are learning in active and collaborative ways.

University Departments and Colleges of Education, District Institutes of Education and Training

(DIETs), State Councils of Educational Research and Training (SCERTs) and Regional Institutes of Education (RIEs) can create such spaces through demonstrations, workshops, exhibitions, peer learning and other platforms that encourage future teachers to actively engage with pedagogical ideas.

Competitions can be one such opportunity. When designed around meaningful teaching challenges, they can encourage participants to apply their knowledge, develop ideas, learn from peers and reflect on different approaches to teaching.

Three competitions. One shared purpose.

At Sterlite EdIndia Foundation, this idea takes shape through three initiatives that focus on different but interconnected aspects of classroom practice.

Together, these competitions reflect a simple but important reality of teaching.

Teachers plan learning experiences. They use resources to support understanding. They ask questions to understand how students are thinking. And they adapt their teaching accordingly.

The three competitions, therefore, are not isolated activities. They create opportunities for preservice teachers to work through some of the decisions that shape everyday classroom practice.

Turning curriculum into a learning experience

One of the most fundamental tasks of teaching is deciding how learning will happen.

A curriculum can define what students are expected to learn. A teacher, however, has to determine how that learning will take place. This requires much more than organising a sequence of activities.

A thoughtful teaching plan requires teachers to consider the learner, the concept, the intended learning outcome, the learning experience and the evidence that will show whether learning has taken place.

They need to anticipate what students already know, where they might struggle, how they can engage with a concept and what activities and questions can encourage deeper participation and understanding.

These are the decisions at the heart of Sterlite EdIndia Foundation’s Teaching Plan Competition.

Rather than simply discussing learner-centred or competency-based teaching, the competition requires participants to think through what these approaches could look like in a classroom. They make decisions about the learning experience, activities and ways of engaging and assessing learners.

The value, therefore, goes beyond the teaching plan itself. A teaching plan is where the curriculum first begins to take the shape of classroom practice.

Making learning tangible

Planning a learning experience is only one part of teaching. Teachers also need to think about how concepts can become clearer, more accessible and more meaningful for learners.

Many concepts that students encounter in classrooms are abstract. Some are difficult to visualise. Others can feel disconnected from everyday life. A teacher’s challenge is to create bridges between the concept and the learner. This is where teaching-learning materials can play an important role.

But creating a TLM is not simply a creative activity. It begins with a pedagogical understanding of what students are finding difficult and what might help them understand it better. The answer could be a model, an activity, a visual aid, an interactive resource or even an object created from materials that might otherwise have been discarded.

This is reflected in EdIndia’s work around creating TLMs from scrap, where the emphasis is not simply on making something innovative, but on looking at available resources differently and using them to support learning.

The process of designing a TLM encourages future teachers to think from the learner’s perspective. It requires creativity, but creativity with purpose. The objective is not to create something impressive. It is to make learning more meaningful.

The questions that shape learning

Designing a learning experience and creating resources to support it are important parts of teaching. Equally important is a teacher’s ability to understand how students are thinking and learning.

Of the many skills teachers use every day, questioning is perhaps one of the most powerful. Questions can test recall, or they can reveal understanding. They can show whether a student remembers something or help a teacher understand how the student is thinking.  

This is particularly relevant as education moves towards competency-based learning and assessments that focus more on conceptual understanding and higher-order skills.

Sterlite EdIndia Foundation’s Question–Making Competition provides pre-service teachers with an opportunity to practise this skill by designing competency-based questions using frameworks such as Bloom’s Taxonomy. Its purpose is to encourage future teachers to think carefully about what a question requires a learner to do, whether it asks them to remember, explain, apply, analyse or create.

The questions teachers ask shape the kind of thinking students practise. And if classrooms are expected to nurture critical thinking, problem-solving and creativity, teachers need to learn how to ask questions that invite those capabilities.

Together, these three aspects of teaching: planning learning, making it accessible and understanding how learners think show that effective teaching is not a single capability. It is a series of purposeful decisions that ultimately shape a child’s experience of learning.

And it is through such decisions, made every day in classrooms, that the larger ambitions of education policy can be ultimately realised.