Encouraging Innovations:
Individual teachers often explore new ways of transacting the curriculum in addressing the needs of students within their specific classroom context (including constraints of space, large numbers, absence of teaching aids, diversity in the student body, the compulsions of examinations, and so on). These efforts, often pragmatic but also creative and ingenious, by and large remain invisible to the school and the larger teaching community, and are usually not valued by teachers themselves. The sharing of teaching experiences and diverse classroom practices can provide opportunities for an academic discourse to develop within schools as teachers interact with and learn from each other. This will also encourage new ideas and facilitate innovation and experimentation. How can innovative and creative ways of teaching and learning be encouraged and supported by the system so that they can become a body of practice that can be brought to a stage when they can be built back into the system? For a start, there is a need to create structured spaces within schools, and at the level of the cluster and block where teachers are encouraged to share and discuss classroom practices and experiences. If seen as worthwhile, some of these ideas and practices can be systematically followed up. It is also important to bring together groups of teachers within and across schools and provide support to them in terms of resources as well as time to work together. There is also, a need for documentation and research of identified 'good practices'. At present, there are funds for this purpose both with DIETs (part of whose mandate is identification and documentation of innovative practices). SSA also has funds for school-based research. Some of this could be used to document the diverse practices that teachers use in different classroom contexts. In addition to providing the necessary funding, the creation of an enabling environment that nurtures and provides support to such initiatives is also important. As mentioned earlier, efforts to mainstream innovative processes and practices will be necessary. One of the main objectives of creating resource centres at the cluster level was to break the isolation of individual schools and bring teachers together on a regular basis for sharing their experiences and ideas with their peers. This is important if teachers are to develop their own professional identities and sense of belonging to a larger teaching community. It could also be one way of creating among them a sense of their own agency and fostering a sense of greater involvement and commitment to their work.
