KARACHI: “The first thing which I did after returning to school with my new training on critical thinking classrooms was changing the class set-up. I moved all the students’ benches aside and we spread a mat on the floor in the middle of the room on which I sat down with the children, who were thrilled to find their teacher at the same level as they,” said Sajida Parveen, who at the time was a young teacher at a school in Lyari.

“My headmistress and other seniors were aghast but only until they saw a change in my students’ learning attitude. The children were suddenly more lively, more alert and didn’t hold back from asking questions while also sharing with me what they thought,” said Sajida, who is now the headmistress in the same school.

The teacher was one of the participants in a policy dialogue on ‘Improving quality of learning through quality of teaching’, organised by the Teachers’ Resource Centre (TRC) at the T2F on Thursday. The dialogue was part of the yearlong programme, supported by the Open Society Foundations (OSF), that the TRC embarked on in January with a goal to develop a rich repository of teaching and learning material that infuses critical thinking skills in classrooms around the country.

TRC’s former director Seema Malik spoke a bit about how the project was initiated. TRC formed a working group of material developers from teacher education agencies and schools from the public and private sectors and its own resource persons. Resource material that has been developed by this working group is at the moment being pre-tested in school to gauge its effectiveness. A national review committee which has representation from the government’s curriculum and teacher education machinery and NGOs working in education, has been set up to support and endorse the project. An action research has also been undertaken to pave the way for advocacy and project improvement.

“Unfortunately, we here have a culture to not question. This needs to change. It doesn’t mean that we should disrespect out teachers. We are not making the children rebels. They can ask questions with respect. Critical thinking is not destructive, it is constructive,” said Mahnaz Mahmud, TRC’s academic programmes adviser who also read out Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Tota Kahani’ as TRC’s multimedia showcase presentation to point out how just pushing to learn with not paying attention to the learner’s needs would only do harm.

During the national review committee members’ panel discussion, Qamar Shahid, an education expert from Nawabshah, emphasised the importance of not just training the teachers but also their heads and bosses. “In order to achieve results you need a proper framework. Train both teachers and teacher heads to get them on the same wavelength,” he said.

Agreeing with him, Ms Malik said: “In an ideal world, the teachers would be well-read and do their job well. However, we do not live in an ideal world. The teachers, if well-read, feel alone if their headmasters or headmistress are not with them and the heads feel they are alone if their teachers do not share their ideas. But the thing is that we have to help each other as no one from outside will come to do your work for you. So we have to get all the educationists here on the same level, too. Like when I learnt computers, I could spend the entire day playing games on it and my boss would think I was working. The change only came when my boss learned computers, too, and knew what I was up to.”

Shahid Saleem, deputy director, planning and coordination, Punjab, said none of the teachers could escape without training. “For teachers to get their cases considered for promotion in grades in Punjab, they first have to prove that they have at least undergone four to six weeks’ training. Every new teacher is also bound to be trained before getting a post in Punjab and for this we have developed hundreds of study materials. It would be good to connect this critical thinking programme to our system,” he said.

Syeda Basarat Kazim of the Alif Laila Book Bus Society said that for getting results one had to turn things upside-down and not just think out of the box but to break boxes. “We have to think differently and once we give the children an opportunity to express themselves there is no stopping their potential. They need roots, but they also need wings to fly,” she said.

“Change will come from where we start playing our role,” said Idrees Jatoi from the Bureau of Curriculum.

Finally, quoting the ASER report, Nargis Sultana of the OSF said that even class two students here didn’t have the competence for that level. “Critical thinking needs to be taken to all public and private schools here but in order for that to happen we needed neutral partners who can take it to all schools in all the provinces. That’s how we partnered with the TRC. The idea is to make it part of the system by linking all the education components such as teachers, schools, textbook boards, etc, and generalise this method of teaching,” she said.

Published in Dawn, August 29th, 2014