Mumbai:
After students, now teachers have found a way to cut back on homework. Instead of preparing their own lesson plans, many schools have outsourced it to companies who specialise in providing front-line services like drawing lesson plans, worksheets and designing activities for students. Since Compulsory Continuous Evaluation (CCE) emphasises interactivity in class, teachers are required to think of new activities and exercises for every lesson. However, instead of coming up with their own lesson plans, many city schools are taking outside help.
These agencies prepare minute-by-minute lesson plans that can be easily followed by teachers. "The demand for lesson plans grew especially after educational reforms like CCE. We've created over 8,000 lesson plans across all subjects for nursery to seventh standard, and it reaches 450 schools across the country," said Ramgopal Vallath, chief operating officer of a company that supply such plans.
According to Stanny Pinto, trustee of Holy Family group of schools, such measures are necessary due to the shortage of quality teachers. "Preparing lesson plans is a very time-consuming affair. Not all teachers have the time and energy to go back home and work on it. Having readymade plans helps in organising lessons better and in maintaining a consistency in the quality of teaching across classrooms," he said.
Schools are provided with a detailed guide that has a description of the learning process. Teachers are given a tool kit that has minute-by-minute plans for the teacher to follow in the class, including group work, experiments and other forms of experiential learning. "In case of a science lesson, we get a manual that has divided the lessons into concepts and has detailed instructions on how to teach those concepts. They also tell us what examples to give, which concept to elucidate further, and how. All we have to do is come to class and follow the book," said a teacher from St Stanislaus School, Bandra.
Another teacher, Ruta Puri, from Modern English school, Dadar, admits that due to readymade lesson plans she does not devote much time to think about group activity in class."It saves us a lot of time. At home, I am busy with household chores and do not have time to sit and prepare plans. Also, it is very exhausting to come up with new ideas for activities in class every day," she said.
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