Capacity-building for teachers: From policy to classroom reality
This article is authored by Antony Nellisserry, head, Sterlite EdIndia Foundation.
Whenever I visit a school, whether a small rural cluster, an urban government institution, or a low-income private school, I often carry a familiar juxtaposition: The promise of policy versus the lived reality of classrooms. India today has a bold vision for its education system: to transform teaching, curriculum, and learning through the reforms of the National Education Policy (NEP 2020). But vision without grounded execution is like a building without a foundation. In these years of transition, our central task is to ensure that capacity-building for teachers moves off paper and becomes a classroom reality.
NEP 2020 placed teacher education at the heart of its reform agenda. It envisages a shift to a four-year Integrated Teacher Education Programmes (ITEP), a more rigorous and multidisciplinary approach to teacher preparation and a greater emphasis on continuous professional development throughout the teaching career. ITEP is designed to create a seamless training continuum for aspiring and in-service teachers, combining pedagogical depth, subject knowledge, and local context sensitivity.
The policy has also introduced the idea of National Professional Standards for Teachers (NPST), a common guideline to define what it means to be a high-quality teacher across subjects, and career levels. These standards are intended to anchor key aspects of teacher selection, career progression, professional development, appraisal etc.
In addition, the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) has developed a comprehensive report on NPST, envisioning the alignment of in-service training, pre-service curriculum, and periodic teacher learning for continuous growth and support.
The capacity-building initiatives from agencies like CBSE, DIKSHA, and NCERT complement the newly envisioned changes. For example, CBSE has recently launched 14 domain-wise training programmes, which seek to strengthen teachers in areas such as assessment, foundational skills, and inclusive education. The intent is evident throughout this ecosystem: India positions teachers not as passive recipients but as a centrifugal force for reform. Even as India advances ambitious reforms, the journey from policy design to classroom impact is far from simple. The challenge is not intent but transition, how to turn well-meaning frameworks into experiences that empower teachers and improve learning outcomes.
In many parts of the country, particularly rural and economically weaker contexts, teachers play several roles; teaching multiple grades and subjects, managing administrative tasks, and addressing diverse learning needs. For such educators, professional development opportunities are limited by time, connectivity, and peer support. Capacity-building, therefore, needs to be both aspirational and flexible, meeting teachers where they are.
Ensuring that the training modules connect to the reality of schooling is equally important. Any session on digital pedagogy or differentiated instruction, for example, must take into account teachers’ daily lived experiences in terms of infrastructure, language, and classroom size. Professional development is powerful when grounded in teachers’ lived experiences and students' learning needs. Professional training that provides teachers with need-based and differentiated training will ensure that capacity building tends to various student learning needs while equipping teachers with fluid strategies that may emerge in each moment, within their context. Learning does not truly take hold until professional learning represents the realities teachers experience practice every day.
Another crucial dimension is maintaining a balance between accountability and autonomy. The NPST framework, while establishing clear professional standards, also encourages teacher growth through structured mentorship and continuous feedback. Platforms such as NISHTHA have already begun integrating mentoring support to help teachers align with these standards while nurturing professional creativity. Standards do not restrict innovation; instead, they provide the foundation upon which teachers can build reflective and contextually relevant practices.
Shared accountability is equally vital. Teachers cannot take the sole responsibility for translating training into practice in classrooms. Resource persons, administrators, and academic leaders must fulfil their roles, through mentoring, follow-up support, and through creating the space and encouragement teachers need to practice new learning. Capacity-building is not an event; it is a collective process of continuous reflection and reinforcement. It must ultimately evolve from being an event to become part of the teaching culture, a teaching culture which values growth, collaboration and reflection.
Around the world, countries that have developed strong teacher development ecosystems have a fairly consistent set of practices across contexts. Finland invests deeply in teacher autonomy, collaborative professional learning, and trust in teachers' judgment. Singapore includes structured mentoring platforms, cycles of classroom observations and reflective communities of practice. As India continues to refine its frameworks, it would do well to draw from such experiences and incorporate mentoring systems and Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) into policy operationalisation.
Several SCERTs and DIETs have already included peer observation, reflective workshops, and collaborative lesson planning into their training calendar for the year. Similarly, national organisations such as NCERT and CBSE are promoting PLCs and blended forms of capacity building through initiatives such as DIKSHA and NISHTHA. While these programmes are still in exploratory stages, they represent a turning point, a beginning in which collaboration, reflection, and collective learning are becoming embedded in the profession itself.
As I interact with teachers, district leaders, and policymakers, one inquiry seems to emerge in much of our discussion: how do we move from training to transformation? The solution may not be in policy but in the implementation of it.
How may we house professional growth in the national frameworks, such as NPST, but remain sensitive to the context of local realities? For example, a teacher in a single-teacher school will face a different set of challenges than a teacher in a densely packed city classroom. If capacity building is to be empowering, it needs to acknowledge and harness these differences, not overcome them.
Can schools themselves become living laboratories for professional growth? Cluster-based Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) could invite teachers to observe, share, and learn from one another and promote sustaining change beyond the initial professional learning workshop? Can school complexes mentioned in NEP be a fulcrum to steer the PLC?
Accountability must be shared. Can administrators and resource persons co-own the responsibility of supporting teachers in applying new pedagogies, using recognition and mentoring as levers to ensure sustained implementation?
As ITEP evolves, perhaps its structure can also allow two modular pathways, one up to the Preparatory Stage and another beyond it, ensuring both specialisation and continuity across teacher education levels.
And finally, how do we measure success? Beyond attendance or satisfaction metrics, the focus must shift to what truly matters: whether teachers feel more confident, students learn better, and schools become more equitable and inclusive spaces.
These questions are not meant to critique policy but to humanise it, to remind us that behind every framework stands a teacher, and behind every teacher, a child whose future depends on how well we bridge policy to practice.
Encouragingly, several states and ministries are already spending on capacity-building dashboards that are tracking training completion, in addition to mentoring, follow-up and observation in the classroom. The NPST framework is supporting the alignment of training to purpose; enabling co-designed modules, reflective learning and local ecosystems of practice.
In classrooms where teachers experiment with new formative assessment methods learned through training, the spark of engagement among students often reignites their motivation. That moment of connection shows that real transformation begins when capacity building steps beyond workshops and into everyday practice.
Policy frameworks like NEP 2020, NPST, and ITEP, create a bridge to reimagine teacher education in India, not just by design but by execution. For this to work, teachers must not be seen as the recipients of reform but as co-creators. Resource persons, administrators, and system leaders must ‘share the accountability’ to move the vision into practice.
By asking practical questions, designing context-sensitive modules, and embedding ongoing mentorship, we can start to close the gap between promise and practice. And if we do, we will not have to build another training system, but rather a living, evolving community of educators to sustain transformative learning for all children.
This article is authored by Antony Nellisserry, head, Sterlite EdIndia Foundation.
