Gnanadeepa Teachers Training
“The future of India depends upon the quality of education imparted to her children. Enabling these teachers will have a multiplier effect in reaching hundreds of thousands of students."
Narayana Murthy
Founder, Infosys Limited
About The Program
The Infosys Science Foundation started the Gnanadeepa Teachers Training program to impact educators at the grassroots level.
STEM education in Indian schools needs to be rigorous, inclusive, and wide-reaching. The main challenge in such initiatives is funding—a challenge that can be overcome in part by a collaboration between the corporate world and the education sector.
The National Science Foundation projects that 80% of the jobs created in the coming decades will require math and science skills. The key to good education is the quality of teachers. In order to create the workforce of the future, we need to train our educators in how to make math and science fun and accessible.
Our Goal
In our effort to introduce students to fundamental concepts in math and science, the Foundation introduced the Gnanadeepa program. This knowledge is foundational to understanding the world.
Teachers are the key to imparting knowledge in an accessible and exciting way that would encourage the students to be ever more creative and curious about these subjects and to apply what they learn.
Our Partners
The Gnanadeepa program is designed to train teachers with the help of our partners Agastya International Foundation and Connecting the Dots (CTD).
Agastya International Foundation
Through our partnership with Agastya International Foundation, we sponsored mobile science labs that travel to communities in rural areas, awakening them to the joys of learning and science; helping train government school teachers; hosting science fairs etc.
Connecting the Dots
Through our partners Connecting the Dots (CTD), we trained teachers in the field as well as teachers in training (pursuing B. Ed. and D. Ed.) to go through a 2-week training program with a refresher course the following year.
The Program
In the pilot session in 2014, a heterogeneous mix of higher primary teachers from government and government-aided schools were part of the 2-week training program held at Infosys Mysore.
Teachers were split into groups to engage daily in sessions on
- How to create hands-on learning opportunities and make conceptual learning fun for students
- Learning fundamentals to strengthen concepts and clear doubts
- Computers, communications and how to search for resources online
- Group discussion sessions to present mock lesson plans
Impact
This program continued through 2015, 2016 and 2017. Close to 6000 teachers were trained in innovative ways of imparting science and math concepts to their students. The importance of hand-on activities that would translate concepts from books into the real world was impressed upon the teachers .
