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India needs teachers who mentor
This article is authored by Mekin Maheshwari, founder, Udhyam Learning Foundation.
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Deepa Raikwal has taught social science in a government school in Nainital for 19 years. When a new entrepreneurship programme called Kaushalam arrived, she watched students who never spoke in class begin arguing over whose idea to pursue next. Today she describes herself as something she never set out to be: “More than a teacher — a mentor who helps every child discover the confidence to think, act, and lead.” A colleague of hers in Uttarkashi, Nitesh Chauhan, who has taught mathematics for 16 years, put the same shift more simply: “The role of a teacher is not to provide all the answers, but to help students discover opportunities that have always existed around them.”
Whenever I think about what it means to be a teacher today, I end up evaluating the differences between a teacher and a mentor. Especially around this time of year when Teacher's Day arrives and everyone reaches for the same sort of tribute to thank them for the knowledge that they have passed on to us. Parents might remember themselves in school or their school going children today, making thank you cards as a school-driven activity – but putting in a little more effort and thought into the card meant for their favourite teacher. Often, this teacher is more of a mentor and guide, going beyond teaching from textbooks.
The true dividing line in a classroom has very little to do with how warm or strict a teacher is and instead comes down to what they regard their role to be. For much of the history of education, teachers possessed and passed on knowledge that students had no other means of obtaining. This no longer works because a phone has more facts stored on it than any teacher currently exists, and in just a few years it will probably explain most of them better than we can.
Yet, in a world of free information, a teacher can offer their students so much more - inspiration and motivation, seeing the students for who they are, understanding their context and then providing relevant scaffolding, allowing them to do, fail, and learn from their failures, and, finally, be the champions for the students. Imagine a world where a teacher knows deeply what is special about each of the 50 or so students in their class, and facilitates their learning--mentoring them on pathways unique to each learner.
No one downloads this kind of skill; it has to be drawn out of a student patiently by someone sitting with them as they make a number of mistakes. That is what mentoring consists of. When a teacher, who is respected and liked by students, says a few words of authentic appreciation and belief in the learning, what it does to the learner’s identity and their willingness to try is magical. This shift in teachers from being instructors to mentors makes all the difference.
The figures show just how much this change is required. From 2014 to 2022, about 22 crore young Indians applied for government posts with selection rates below 1%. It is common for employers to state that almost half of India's graduate students are not job-ready when they leave college. Indeed, the entrance barrier designed to admit only qualified individuals is being stretched to breaking point: just one quarter of the candidates passed the CTET, the teacher eligibility exam, this year. We have created a system specialised in producing people who clear examinations, and it does this task very well. It was never intended to create individuals who can cope with a world that doesn't provide answer keys.
This is by no means an argument against teachers; it is an argument against the limited role that we have given them. Since I have now spent a good deal of time in classrooms and in training rooms attempting to assist teachers in making this particular transition—from that of an instructor to that of a mentor—I have arrived at a number of beliefs or principles about it which is simple to state but in fact very difficult to put into practice.
The first thing is to understand the context in which a teacher operates. It's impossible to bring about this change from a distance. A teacher who is looking after 60 children in three subjects without any break between them has a completely different experience of her classroom compared to what is described in a policy document. If any programme genuinely wants to help teachers to act as mentors rather than simply delivering rote learning, it must, over time—both before the training begins and throughout the training—create real opportunities and procedures for listening: To the teachers' actual situation, to the particular pressures facing their school, and to the fact that some of their students turn up hungry or exhausted or quietly brilliant but entirely unnoticed. If you omit that stage, even a well-designed curriculum will still end up being another thing that is done to teachers rather than with them.
The second one—encouraging agency, collaboration and co-creation—is more difficult since it requires people who are used to giving instructions to cease doing so immediately. For example, if a teacher says, "Every time I try this activity my classroom becomes noisy and my principal walks in," the natural reaction is to offer a ready-made solution—either change the activity or discipline the students who are making the noise. The more helpful approach, however, is to return the question to the group of teachers and ask what they themselves would do. Let them discuss it. Let them jointly decide what a sensible classroom rule should be or what 'failure' is meant to signify in their own classroom. A rule that a teacher comes up with on their own is likely to last in an actual classroom in a way that a rule taken from a training manual probably would not.
The third principle involves a cycle of action, reflection, and further action; it is dull, difficult to finance, and the first thing to be removed from a budget. A teacher does not turn into a mentor simply by attending a workshop any more than a batsman can learn how to bat by listening to a lecture on batting. One has to try out a lesson, observe what takes place, receive honest feedback about what actually happened, make adjustments and then try it again, on more than one occasion. It is only after having faced many duck balls and scored a number of single runs that one becomes skilled at hitting boundaries. In India most teacher training still works in the opposite way: it consists of an initial burst of instruction, after which there is a long period of silence. This situation can, to some extent, be improved by very ordinary technology, for example AI assistants based on Whatsapp which send a brief message to help a teacher assess their students' work. However, such a tool can only free up some of the teacher's time so that they can concentrate on being mentors; it cannot carry out the mentoring itself.
Last but definitely not least, the fourth principle is that of trust. It is generally possible for teachers to judge within the first ten minutes whether a new programme regards them with respect or is merely passing through en route to a report. The kind of trust that is meant here can't be achieved simply by having a slogan about empowerment; it has to be earned by being honest about the reasons for asking teachers to make the change, by listening to them at least as much as we ask them to listen to their students, and by seeing a sceptical teacher's scepticism as useful information rather than as a problem to be dealt with.
This kind of change occurs when headteachers cease to judge a teacher simply on whether her class came top of the district in the board examination. It occurs when education departments provide teachers with the same kind of ongoing coaching that we are now asking teachers to give to their students. It also happens when parents, including myself, stop seeing a low score as an emergency and a difficult question as a distraction from 'real' studying. A teacher cannot mentor a child by themselves; everyone surrounding them also has to want that.
This Teacher’s Day, let’s give a shout out to teachers who see a student struggling in and helped them believe that they have got what it takes. Those who went beyond promoting rote learning and encouraged us to find our own answers. And if we want more teachers like that, we have to stop asking them to be drivers of high ranks and grades, and start giving them the training, time, and trust to be something far more valuable: A mentor.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Mekin Maheshwari, founder, Udhyam Learning Foundation.
