NCF FOR SCHOOL EDUCATION 2023: What children should learn When the 628 – page ‘pre-draft’ National Curriculum for School Education (NCFSE) 2023 was released on April 6, the Union Education Ministry emphasized that it was made public to solicit feedback from “various stakeholders, including students, parents, teachers, educators, experts, scholars and professionals”. In response to this appeal, based on the Cover Story written in our August 23 issue (https://www.educationworld.in/national-curriculum-framework-for-school-education-23-comprehensiveroadmap-implementation-challenge) we present EducationWorld feedback to tighten NCFSE 2023. Curriculum & Pedagogy reforms NCFSE is a roadmap for teachers to implement the goals and objectives set out in the National Education Policy 2020. The policy recommends joyous learning through comprehension rather than memorisation and rote. Therefore, the guidelines and provisions of NCFSE should be implemented through experiential learning in which teachers and students learn together. NEP 2020 encourages revival of India’s ancient pedagogy of peer-to-peer learning. This should be encouraged by teachers following NCFSE through students learning one-on-one or in clusters. NCFSE recommends continuous testing by setting curricular goals and illustrative learning goals. These are important recommendations that teachers should heed. NCFSE reiterates that “teachers are at the heart of the practice of teaching”. Therefore to realise the goals of NEP 2020, teachers need to acknowledge the critical importance of their role in the national development effort. In particular, relatively well-remunerated government school teachers need to improve their attendance records and take responsibility for children’s learning outcomes. State governments who fund the majority of the country’s 1.2 million government schools need to tighten up their administration of these schools — fill vacancies, ensure full teacher attendance, eliminate multi-grade teaching and provide enabling infrastructure to transform government schools into inviting institutions which children look forward to attending. Guidelines for teachers The shift from chalk-n-talk to inquiry-based, experiential pedagogies is overdue. The country’s 10 million teachers need to break away from memorisation pedagogies to equip children with 21st century thinking and problem-solving skills. Intensive and continuous teacher training will be required to implement NCFSE recommended pedagogies. There is inadequate emphasis on teachers using new digital technologies in the classroom. The final draft should stress that teachers use technology to make teaching-learning engaging and meaningful. Commendably, the NCFSE 2023 recommends that teachers “value and respect all students, get to know students individually,” listen and observe them carefully and build positive teacher-student relationships. This requires more positive teacher-pupil ratios. Again, the emphasis on remedial teaching and differentiated instruction requires improved teacher-pupil ratios. NCFSE’s direction to teachers to use varied resources and not overly depend on textbooks is important. Given the predisposition of political parties to rewrite textbooks to reflect their ideological biases, it’s critical for teachers to use textbooks as only one among several resources to achieve curricular objectives. Care should be taken that the pedagogical ‘strategies’ and ‘considerations’ prescribed don’t dilute teacher autonomy and flexibility to innovate teaching-learning. The framework fails to provide a roadmap as to how the country’s 10 million teachers will be equipped with the skill-sets to implement NCFSE 2023.…
