Our teachers have been asked to teach through art with no training in it. What does that CPD look like?
It looks like a day in which teachers learn the pedagogy by undergoing it. NEP 2020 makes art integrated and experiential learning standard pedagogy across subjects, and CBSE asks every teacher in an affiliated school for fifty hours of professional development a year, twenty five of them open. Only 29 percent of teachers say they feel prepared. A teacher who has spent a day inside the method has something to teach from on Monday. A teacher who has watched a presentation about it has a handout.
The short answer. It looks like a day in which teachers learn the pedagogy by undergoing it. NEP 2020 makes art integrated and experiential learning standard pedagogy across subjects, and CBSE asks every teacher in an affiliated school for fifty hours of professional development a year, twenty five of them open. Only 29 percent of teachers say they feel prepared. A teacher who has spent a day inside the method has something to teach from on Monday. A teacher who has watched a presentation about it has a handout.
- Its name in a budget line
- Teacher continuing professional development. Art integrated learning. NEP 2020 implementation.
- The programme
- Schools and teacher development. A day for a staff room, on the school's own site, in term time or in the vacation. Longer formats for a cluster of schools.
- Where
- On your own site, in Kochi and across Kerala, and elsewhere in India for a full day or more. Eight people or more. No artistic background is assumed and nothing is graded.
What is actually going on.
The circular arrived before the training did. NEP 2020 asks every teacher to integrate art and experience into the teaching of every subject, and most teachers were trained to do neither. A 2023 Central Square Foundation survey found only 29 percent felt adequately prepared to implement the mandate, which is a generous figure, because feeling prepared and being able to run a lesson are different things.
The usual response is a presentation about art integration, which is a lecture about not lecturing. It fills the hours and leaves the teacher exactly where they were, with a handout and a timetable that has no room in it. The mandate is not an extra period. It is a way of teaching the periods that are already there, and a teacher can only teach that way after having learned something that way.
This is not an extra period. It is a way of teaching the periods that are already there.
What a session does about it.
Teacher professional development that is itself art integrated. The staff room spends a day inside the method: a history chapter becomes a standup set, in three parts, performed, because writing comedy about a period forces you to know it well enough to find what is strange in it. A science syllabus becomes an anime series in which continuity errors are conceptual errors and the class catches them. A lesson about time begins with a clock and does not stop until cosmology.
The teachers do these things themselves, with no artistic background assumed and nothing graded. On Monday each of them has a lesson they have already run once, on themselves, and the confidence that comes from having survived it. None of this arrives from outside the Indian tradition. Tagore built a school around it, Gandhi argued that the hand and the head learn together, and Aurobindo held that the teacher is a helper rather than a source.
How you would know it worked.
What a teacher has actually done in a classroom at thirty days, recorded by the head of department, rather than a feedback form at four o'clock. A lesson plan that exists and has been run is the measure. One that was described is not.
For a cluster of schools, the same check across the cluster, so a management can see which staff rooms took it up and which need a second day.
What we do not claim.
We do not claim to teach art, and this is not an art class for teachers. It is a way of teaching mathematics, history and science that happens to use what artists know about attention and making.
We do not decide what counts toward a teacher's fifty hours. That is the school's decision under the CBSE framework. We supply the attendance record and the content outline that the decision needs.
The full list is on one page, alongside the evidence and the claims we have retired.
In Kochi and Kerala.
Kerala's CBSE and state board schools face the same mandate with the same gap, and a staff room in Kochi, Thrissur or Kozhikode is where we run this most. The traditions the work draws on are the state's own: Theyyam, Kathakali, Panchavadyam, chenda melam and the folk and independent music of Kerala, treated as working bodies of technique about attention and timing rather than as exhibits.
We work from Kochi and run sessions on the client's own site anywhere in Kerala. Elsewhere in India we travel for a full day or more. If you would rather meet before you book, here is how.
Related questions.
Our teachers have been asked to teach through art with no training in it. What does that CPD look like?
It looks like a day in which teachers learn the pedagogy by undergoing it. NEP 2020 makes art integrated and experiential learning standard pedagogy across subjects, and CBSE asks every teacher in an affiliated school for fifty hours of professional development a year, twenty five of them open. Only 29 percent of teachers say they feel prepared. A teacher who has spent a day inside the method has something to teach from on Monday. A teacher who has watched a presentation about it has a handout.
Does this count toward the CBSE fifty hours?
Twenty five of the fifty hours must come through CBSE or government regional institutes. The remaining twenty five are open, and whether a given day counts is the school's decision under the framework. We supply the attendance record and the content outline that decision needs.
Is this an art class for teachers?
No. It is a way of teaching the subjects already on the timetable through making, performed by the teachers themselves. A mathematics teacher leaves with a mathematics lesson, not with a drawing.
Do teachers need any artistic skill?
None. Nothing is graded, no prior training is assumed, and the day is built so that a staff room with no artistic background can take part from the first minute. The examples on the schools page were all run by teachers who said the same thing.
A staff room is the fastest place to see whether this works.
Eight people, one room, no preparation.