National Level Panel Discussion on
“Next Generation Teacher and Teacher Educator Competency”
18th August 2017

School of Education (SoE), CHRIST (Deemed to be University), organized the National Level Panel Discussion on ‘Next Generation Teacher and Teacher Educator – Competence and Competency’ was held on Friday, 18th August 2017. The panelists were academic stalwarts from various renowned varsities across the country. They were Prof  R C Patel from Centre of Advanced Studies in Education (CASE), The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat, Prof Nagendra from Banaras Hindu University, Uttar Pradesh, Prof Vijay Kumar from Pondicherry University, Prof Emeritus Sridhar from Mysore University, Mr Francis, Best Teacher Awardee from Navodaya Vidyalaya, Goa, Mr R S Patil – Indian President’s National Teacher Award winner from Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishat, Mr Vikram Bhat, Alumnus and Director of Dream a Dream (NGO) and Mr David Wohlever Sanchez, Duke University, UK.

 

The keynote address was given by Dr Prakasha G S, SoE, who spoke about the Major Research Project (MRP) on Next generation teacher Competency (NGTC). He listed out the various competencies that the 21ST century teacher must be equipped with by citing articles from Harvard Graduate School of Education, Butler University, UNESCO, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the likes of other international universities. It was very clear from the research the way MRP has progressed and the unique output it produced; it has come up with competency balance score card, which can diagnose a teacher’s relative performance of each listed competency with absolute performance scores. This was followed by the panel discussion where each of the panelists presented what they thought the teacher competencies are that could be added to the list mentioned by Dr Prakasha.

Prof R C Patel brought out the statistics of enrollment ratios across different classes of children and said that an integral teacher competency is to get children to continue their education. He also stressed on the importance of socio-emotional learning through the concept of Johari window. The Best Teacher awarded panelist Mr Francis highlighted the role of today’s teacher as a facilitator which is all the more challenging compared to a conventional teacher role. He also said that the traditional lecture method of teaching is now considered Arcadian and has no scope in next generation teaching. Drawing from personal experiences of influential teachers, Mr David spoke about the teacher-student relationship at a micro level, stressing the importance of mentorship. Prof Emeritus Sridhar spoke about how it is essential to initially understand the traits of the next generation in order to be able to equip oneself with teaching competencies. Alumnus, Mr Vikram also drew from personal experiences to say that it is a challenging task to chart out the competencies of a next generation teacher because we are unsure as to how the next generation learner would be considering the rapid pace of changes children are going through. The panel discussion ended with the post-lunch brain storming session with the expert panelists voicing out their ideas on NGTC. The discussion was very insightful for the student-teacher audience as they are pursuing to be effective and influential next generation teachers.

Dr. Prakasha G S
Convener
Panel Discussion