British Council to train 4 lakh teachers in state

NAGPUR: The British Council (BC) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Maharashtra government to train four lakh teachers in English. Officials in the education department confirmed the development and said the training program should start taking shape from October.
Independently, BC has also tied up with English Language Teachers Association of India (ELTAI) and launched its first ever English Road Show for tier-II cities at Nagpur. Under the programme, the two organizations will conduct one-day workshops for English teachers to help them improve teaching skills.
Daphane Pawelec, senior training consultant at BC, said, "Usually we have these workshops at metro cities only and many teachers from tier-II cities are not able to participate. Hence we decided to go to these cities instead. We are kicking off our road show from Nagpur and will cover 10 other cities over the next few months."
Eight instructors from BC and two from ELTAI are part of the entourage for the road show. In Nagpur, the inaugural session was held at Bhavans school (Wathoda) on Saturday.
Pawelec has 36 years of teaching experience in Europe and Asia, and believes that there is always something new to learn. "Teaching is something that can always be done better. During this workshop, we aim to provide participating teachers enhanced classroom teaching skills and confidence. For example, we have a session on improving pronunciation, but here we do not ask them to follow British accent or US accent. All teachers have to do is space their words, or give appropriate gaps between words. By doing this you become clear to everyone, regardless of your accent," she said.
One of the participants, Shekhar Uke, a teacher from Gondia, said he found the training on phonetics helpful. "It was interesting to learn from the trainers how we can help kids get their pronunciation right at an early stage. The trainers were experienced people from both abroad as well as India, and I am now looking forward to implementing the techniques back home to teach my students," said Uke.
Pawelec added that the road shows will now be an annual affair. "We are looking to reach out to almost 4,000 teachers this time round, and hopefully the numbers will keep increasing each year. We charge a very nominal fee of Rs 100 per teacher, so that majority of them can benefit. We are thankful to city schools for letting us use their infrastructure for free," she said.
Next year, the cities for the road show will remain the same so that more teachers can join in for the seminar.
Amol Padwad, national president of ELTAI, said, "The sessions were extremely classroom oriented, so that teachers can implement them right away. We hope, later on, to reach out to tier-III cities and change the session designs a bit to suit all environments."