International Development students, Anushna Jha and Mehrin Shah, make a convincing case for introducing teaching assistants to government and low-cost private schools in South Asia.
The learning crisis in South Asia needs immediate and innovative solutions before another generation of learners go through years of schooling without having learnt much. That South Asia is undergoing a learning crisis is not a new revelation. In 2014, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), in its Education for All Global Monitoring Report, warned that schools in South Asia are failing to achieve basic learning outcomes. It reported that less than half of the children enrolled in schools in India and Pakistan were learning the basics. More recently, in May 2018, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reiterated the low levels of learning students in South Asia are achieving.
Among the range of factors flagged as contributing to this learning crisis, inadequate efforts to improve the quality of teaching may be regarded as critical. Not only because of its direct effect on the learning outcomes of students, the quality of teaching also draws its importance for it reflects the will of the larger education ecosystem to ensure quality learning. When facilitators of learning (primarily teachers) are motivated besides being competent, it reflects a resolve of the larger framework of policymakers, administrators, and other stakeholders to ensure actual learning outcomes. Teacher motivation is a critical determinant of the classroom environment and ultimately of students’ learning outcomes. In turn, it is influenced by the kind of treatment teachers receive in terms of their workload, incentives, training, and impetus for professional development. Learners too face several impediments in their learning process – a high student:teacher ratio being a major one. It inhibits the cultivation of the habit of inquiry among students as it may not be possible for the teacher to cater to the questions of each student in a large classroom.
A step towards improving both teaching and learning could be to have teaching assistants in schools. The model proposed here has been thought of keeping government schools in mind, although they may be replicated by low-cost private schools as well.
Teaching Assistants: The Existing Practice
Conventionally, the role of teaching assistants consists of assisting teachers in the classroom with the aim of academic success and better learning of the students. Teaching assistants, under the supervision of the teacher, provide instructional services to the students. By doing so, they allow more time for teachers for teaching and lesson planning.
The application of teaching assistants to aid the learning of students with disabilities in schools has amplified in various developed countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Finland, and Canada. Today, the utilization of teaching assistants to help students with learning difficulties and disabilities in schools has become a socially accepted practice in the western world. In some cases, students with severe levels of disabilities tend to receive majority of their instructions from teaching assistants rather than teachers. States in the U.S. which have the highest number of their students with learning difficulties and disabilities in schools tend to depend more on the teaching assistants than the teachers – the utilization of teaching assistants instead of being “a way” has become “the way” to help students with learning challenges.
Teaching Assistants in South Asia – A Proposed Solution
In the South Asian region, where a considerable proportion of students go to state-run schools, the practice of having teaching assistants is not common. There is a lack of individual attention given to students as a result of many factors including high student-teacher ratios, the huge amount of workload for teachers, and low levels of motivation among teachers. As a result, students may complete years of schooling without being enabled to identify their strengths, weaknesses, aptitude, interests, or aspirations. This, in a sense, defeats the fundamental purpose of education which is to hone a person’s ability to think and also to prepare her/him for the future.
Teaching assistants could play a constructive role in bridging these gaps and facilitating students fulfil the fundamental purpose of education. They could be recruited from the group of educated unemployed youth in that local area and can be offered some stipend in return for aiding the school to improve students’ learning outcomes. This would give some sort of employment to these teaching assistants, ensure that they do not lose touch with the knowledge and skills they have acquired through their education, and contribute in making education better for the next generation. It may also enhance job prospects for these teaching assistants in the future.
Teaching assistants could be inducted on a short-term basis, after a brief training on pedagogies and orientation to the curriculum. The following are the envisioned roles and responsibilities of these teaching assistants.
- Facilitate classroom interaction– The primary role of teaching assistants would be to increase the scope for students’ participation and to conduct engaging activities in order to enhance learning outcomes. Team-based learning would be beneficial for students to grasp concepts as well as to learn central tenets of teamwork.
- Give support to teachers– Teaching assistants could be present while the teacher is conducting a class and assist him/her in conducting group activities or reinforcing concepts. In cases of teacher absenteeism, these teaching assistants could also lead classes so as to ensure that students’ time is not wasted.
- Provide individual mentoring- Each teaching assistant could be given a small group of students to mentor. Mentoring would include reviewing their academic work, mapping their aptitude and interests, giving extra time to students who require further assistance with coursework.
- Conduct awareness programmes– Given that students imbibe a large part of their behavior and attitude from what they learn at school, teaching assistants could organize awareness programmes. These may include sessions on physical health, gender sensitivity among other relevant themes.
This model is expected to help tackle the problem of high student:teacher ratios that is prevalent in most South Asian schools, increase learner-facilitator interaction, allow for creative pedagogic tools to be applied by these teaching assistants, have motivated classroom facilitators in the form of teaching assistants, organise classroom teaching (since teachers would have to make lesson plans in advance and share them with teaching assistants), and thereby enhance students’ learning outcomes. Simultaneously, it could be considered as a means to provide engagement and employment to those currently unemployed.
Overcoming Potential Challenges
There may be initial apprehension that this would increase the burden on the budget allocated for schools. However, in reality, the proposed initiative would only amount to a marginal share of education budget given that these teaching assistants would only be provided with some honorarium. The cost would be much less than that incurred if trained full-time teachers were to be appointed. Moreover, it would be a rather low-cost employment generation activity on part of the government.
Another challenge that could be foreseen is that of resistance from existing teachers who may not be very amenable to sharing space with these new inducts. Huge amounts of workload and high student:teacher ratios could be used as legitimizing tools to gain the acceptance of these teachers. Moreover, it may be emphasized that teaching assistants would not be replacements of the teachers; they would rather assist in improving the teaching-learning process for students. Their interaction with teachers would be regulated so that they are not used to offload the responsibilities of teachers.
The proposed introduction of teaching assistants is by no means expected to be a magic bullet tackling the learning crisis or the problems that plague education in South Asia. It is envisioned to form part of the solution.
Anushna Jha (@anushnajha) is a Master’s student in the department of International Development at the LSE. She has previously interned with the Department of Social Welfare, Government of Bihar, India and Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, a think tank based in New Delhi, India. Her research interests include education policy, gender and education, and public private partnerships in public services.
Mehrin Shah is a Master’s student in the department of International Development at the LSE. She has previously interned at the Aga Khan Rural Support Program in Pakistan. Her primary research interest lies in public policy, specially in areas of poverty eradication, education, and gender.
The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
First of all, “teacher assistants” were already introduced. As one of the authors worked in Bihar, Shiksha Mitra should ring a bell. Other varities of locally recruited, not-well-trained teachers have been tried in various States. After some time, they adopted to their environment and became part of the low equilibrium system. This idea to have the “teacher assistants” do additional teaching is completely ignorant of the realities. They will and have simply been used as replacements. Bihar alone needs 280,000 additional teachers to comply with the PTR mandated by the RTE Act ( http://www.indiaspend.com/cover-story/bihar-short-of-280000-teachers-spends-lowest-per-elementary-school-student-76265 ) . The article is entirely ahistorical. I can provide govt. reports from the 1980s where it was pointed out that the underinvestment in teacher education will ultimately lead to the situation we have now. To undermine the profession by letting untrained people overtake the teaching activity after pointing out a low motivation among teachers is an interesting remedy (Has anyone suggested to recruit “assistant economists”? Probably not, as their field is complex and requires training. So does teaching.)
To take examples from Germany, Finland, the US, and UK shows a lack of understanding of the local context. I mean, we do not have to second-guess here. There is enough evidence on the long-term impact of the different varieties of para- and contract-teachers, as well as Shiksha Mitras. That being said, of course for the high-fee private schools of the middle and upper class, well-trained and experienced teachers are essential. But for the poor? Well, let’s try assistant teachers (again). This is yet another element of what Pasi Sahlberg calls the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM).
No. Let’s talk about a common school system instead and let’s talk about the status of teacher-training-institutions, the new MOOC scheme in India now which fails massively ( https://scroll.in/article/875601/why-a-new-policy-proposed-for-training-teachers-in-service-may-not-help-them-much ), and let’s take a systemic view. History is key to understand the status quo. I could not – with all respect – disagree more with this article.
For a more balanced view, there is an interesting PHD thesis from the LSE on Aligning opportunities and interests: the politics of educational reform in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Bihar ( http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/389/ ).
My suggestion instead (for Bihar): Free teachers of additional administrative tasks, employ at the cluster-level (consisting of around 10 schools) a clerk who will overtake the administrative tasks thus freeing teachers and HMs from it (indeed, a recent study showed that only 19% of the working time of teachers is actually spent on teaching: https://www.news18.com/news/ivideos/survey-shows-teachers-spend-only-19-of-their-time-teaching-1885259.html ), ensure compliance with the RTE infrastructure norms (less than 10% of Bihar’s schools do so), fill vacant posts in the lower bureaucracies (see an excellent article by Kiran Bhatty and Dipa Sinha here: https://thewire.in/government/public-sector-health-education-vacancies ), and strive towards desegregation by introducing a Common School System (for a full report and roadmap on this topic, see the Report on the Common School System prepared for the Govt. of Bihar: http://adriindia.org/centre/report_details/report-of-the-common-school-system-commission ).
For a real systemic reform, I would further suggest to take a look at Harvard’s Building State Capability (BSC) program and their approach of Problem-Driven Iterative Adaption ( https://bsc.cid.harvard.edu/ ) so that we get over projects and ad-hoc add-ons.
The advantage of my suggestion of employing clerks is that they have a clear non-teaching task, thus ensuring that they will not replace teachers, and that they will not undermine the profession. If the study regarding teaching time is only approximately accurate, this could potentially multiply the time of teachers actually spending their time on teaching. I am sure that this will also have the support of teacher unions.
I should declare that I am a co-initiator of the Bihar Education Policy Center of which I am also an advisory board member ( https://www.biharedpolcenter.org/ ), apart from being a MSc student in Development Studies here at the LSE.
My comment might sound harsh and I apologize for it. I feel a pointed debate is useful here to put forward contrasting views. I do however have deep respect for the work of the two authors. I look forward to your response.
Thank you for taking out time to read our piece and share your views.
A few points to consider-
1. As for Shishka Mitras, the initial enthusiasm was thwarted by attempts at regularising unqualified para-teachers. That is an eventuality we have neither suggested nor do we endorse.
2. As regards these teaching assistants not being well-trained (and thus being bound to fail), the proposed cohort would be trained in both curriculum and pedagogy.
3. That they would eventually ‘become part of the low equilibrium system’ is an assumption that in our view cannot deter innovation and solution-seeking.
4. About the point on ‘additional teaching’- awareness campaigns mentioned in the article are integral and not additional. Both of us having spent over two decades of our lives in South Asia (and one of us having spent 18 years in Bihar) and soaking some understanding of on-ground realities, we would argue that such campaigns are critical to any attempt at educating.
5. The pupil-teacher ratio issue needs both short and long-term solutions. While regular teachers are being inducted, trained, and integrated- these teaching assistants would ensure that existing students don’t face the brunt of systemic problems.
6. Underinvestment in teacher education is still a reality that needs to be dealt with. Not a historical phenomenon.
7. Inducting more people to assist learning is in no way undermining the profession. It is taking into account the realities and addressing them. Prior training in pedagogy has been reiterated. As has been emphasised in the article, teaching assistants are not envisioned to replace teachers.
8. Another read of the relevant parts will show that examples from US, UK and other Western countries were taken precisely to distinguish the role of teaching assistants in those countries from that proposed for the South Asian context. The concept of teaching assistants as it stands in other contexts has been reworked and contextualised so as to meet the needs of the region.
9. If we may reiterate, our article was about South Asia and was not centred on Bihar!
We do appreciate and agree to some of the solutions proposed by you. In any case, they are not in any contradiction with inducting short-term assistants to tackle the crisis at hand. And may we also echo the closing line of our article, we do believe that proposals like ours can be ‘part of the solution’; they are not envisioned to be the only solution.
– Anushna Jha and Mehrin Shah
Thank you very much indeed for your answer.
Let me try to go through your suggestions point by point.
1. The argument that the actual regularization caused that Shiksha Mitras performed lower over time is in my opinion flawed. I have not seen any proof of this suggested causal inference. Indeed, the PhD theses I mentioned sort of investigates such claims by the orthodox view of political economy.
2. There is a difference between getting a short-term training and an actual teacher education. If you suggest a longer training, you will come closer to an actual teacher education. If that is your suggestion, then why not training young people to become teachers? If your argument is to quickly recruit young people on large scale within short time, your training cannot be too sophisticated.
3. Indeed. But it asks for systemic change rather that ad-hoc projects that ultimately vanish and become absorbed by a low-level equilibrium. There is no lack of “innovations”, “pilots” and new things. Indeed, faddism is a regular feature of the education reform movement. It undermines truly systemic change in the long run (for an extended explanation of this argument, see (Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action by Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock, Oxford University Press, 2017).
4. I do not think that “Unlike you, we grew up in this country” is a good argument to make. Did you go to a State-run governmental school? No need to answer this question. I just want to make clear that we should not refer to individual experiences here, at least not to suggest that any of us has superior knowledge due to the place of birth.
5. They are actually not trained in a number that would be required (in Bihar). Plus, one would need the financial means to be able to employ them afterwards. This is highly unlikely unless there is a massive increase in the budget (currently, the national government in India spends less than 0.7% of its national income on education (taking the allocation for FY 2017-18): https://www.indiaspend.com/budget-2018-falling-education-spending-aggravates-indias-learning-crisis-wastes-its-demographic-dividend-96241/ ). My suggestion is not that: throwing money at it will solve the issue. Yet, financial constraints are there. And due to the exit by the middle- and upper-class from the public system, there is a low probability that this will change in the near future.
6. Yes, I did not suggest the opposite.
7. I disagree here (see also 8.)
8. The context really matters here. I have outlined what in my opinion will happen if your suggestion would be implemented. There is little correlation between official roles assigned and what is actually happening on the ground. To say: But we didn’t say that when it will actually happen is in my opinion a too simple excuse. My point is that irrespective of your de jure role description, what will happen is that the assistants will be used to take over the teaching and thus not be an add-on. Both of us make assumptions here. I think it is fine if we disagree.
9. Exactly, and that is part of the problem. Context does matter. The approach to make policy prescriptions for a whole region is part of the problem, not the solution.
I however agree with your closing line in a fundamental way: I believe that proposals like yours are ‘part of the problem’, not the solution.
Once again, I honestly appreciate that you took the time to answer in such a length. To open a debate and to answer to criticism is truly an amazing spirit. Kudos!
– Martin
Thank you very much indeed for your answer.
Let me try to go through your suggestions point by point.
1. The argument that the actual regularization caused that Shiksha Mitras performed lower over time is in my opinion flawed. I have not seen any proof of this suggested causal inference. Indeed, the PhD theses I mentioned sort of investigates such claims from the orthodox view of political economy.
2. There is a difference between getting a short-term training and an actual teacher education. If you suggest a longer training, you will come closer to an actual teacher education. If that is your suggestion, then why not training young people to become teachers? If your argument is to quickly recruit young people on large scale within short time, your training cannot be too sophisticated.
3. Indeed. But it asks for systemic change rather that ad-hoc projects that ultimately vanish and become absorbed by a low-level equilibrium. There is no lack of “innovations”, “pilots” and new things. Indeed, faddism is a regular feature of the education reform movement. It undermines truly systemic change in the long run (for an extended explanation of this argument, see (Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action by Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock, Oxford University Press, 2017).
4. I do not think that “Unlike you, we grew up in this country” is a good argument to make. Did you go to a State-run governmental school? No need to answer this question. I just want to make clear that we should not refer to individual experiences here, at least not to suggest that any of us has superior knowledge due to the place of birth.
5. They are actually not trained in a number that would be required (in Bihar). Plus, one would need the financial means to be able to employ them afterwards. This is highly unlikely unless there is a massive increase in the budget (currently, the national government in India spends less than 0.7% of its national income on education (taking the allocation for FY 2017-18): https://www.indiaspend.com/budget-2018-falling-education-spending-aggravates-indias-learning-crisis-wastes-its-demographic-dividend-96241/ ). My suggestion is not that: throwing money at it will solve the issue. Yet, financial constraints are there. And due to the exit by the middle- and upper-class from the public system, there is a low probability that this will change in the near future.
6. Yes, I did not suggest the opposite.
7. I disagree here. See also 8.
8. The context really matters here. I have outlined what in my opinion will happen if your suggestion would be implemented. There is little correlation between official roles assigned and what is actually happening on the ground. To say: But we didn’t say that when it will actually happen is in my opinion a too simple excuse. My point is that irrespective of your de jure role description, what will happen is that the assistants will be used to take over the teaching and thus not be an add-on. Both of us make assumptions here. I think it is fine if we disagree.
9. Exactly, and that is part of the problem. Context does matter. The approach to make policy prescriptions for a whole region is part of the problem, not the solution.
I however agree with your closing line in a fundamental way: I believe that proposals like yours are ‘part of the problem’, not the solution.
Once again, I honestly appreciate that you took the time to answer in such a length. To open a debate and to answer to criticism is truly an amazing spirit. Kudos!
– Martin
Thank you!
The rebuttals may be continuous and inconclusive on this platform.
As for your fourth point, request you to not misconstrue our statement. There is no question of experiential superiority here! Reference to background is only to share some context (of what one may have observed and absorbed)- in response to a specific comment on a blog post and not in an academic piece of writing.To reiterate- there was no assumption made about anybody else’s.
We look forward to constructive engagement.
All the best for your endeavours!
The article provides an interesting solution to the many problems plaguing the South Asian education system. The article is worth commending for considering the probable shortcomings in the proposed scheme. I would like to add another point of consideration ( which by no means is directly related to the proposed intervention, but the intervention being situated in a particular regional politico-economic context, might face as a negative externality)
The teaching assistants might be used by the governments in a similar fashion as contract based lecturers and professors are being employed in the universities across India. They become an easy source for reducing permanent budget expenditure, along with a source of vote bank mobilisation ( for providing permanent jobs). This if employed for political benefits, might result in drop in permanent vacancies, and increased exploitation of the TAs, in turn affecting the educational outcomes, and further politicisation and corruption of school education.
This point in no sense seeks to delegitimise or discard the intervention, but is just a concern, which might assist the writers in their further works, on developing a near full-proof education scheme.