I believe that a teacher is a resource-a renewable, collaborative, growth-oriented skilled resource. Hence my header Economics of Teaching.

To this I want to add capacity building? What does that mean? I think for an educator there are various capacities that have to be thought of;

An educator has the capacity to Love, to be empathetic, to be that bridge between the curriculum and the student. Like Rita Pierson in her ted talk says ‘Every child needs a champion’.

A lot of these capacity builders are non tangibles. I would like to focus on the tangible one- how to increase productivity of the teacher so that the best outcome may be possible for both the teacher and the learner. And you hence Economise the resource. I definitely do not mean economising in terms of cost but rather in terms of efficiency.

As an educator, there is never a dearth to better your best. You compete with yourself and, with each step, improve your learning curve. This is because your objective is the chid who is bound to grow, evolve, adapt, and succeed, so as an educator, a teacher’s motto also becomes one of self-learning, evaluating, adapting, and developing. For the educator, it is a journey that involves a growth mindset, exploring options, and engaging in the learning process to reach out to students.

A basic fundamental equation we are all aware of is that of input and output. The more well-defined learning outcome or output, the better is the skill development of the input- in other words, capacity building. Capacity building in simple terms implies identifying focus areas to pull in resources to sharpen that area and finally train the individual (here teacher) resource to build that capacity. In a teacher’s profile, capacity building is a lifelong skill, and hence I say this resource will never deplete.

Coming back to my topic Economics of teaching, I want to urge that there is a need to in-depth training for this resource – the teacher. This will help increase the productive capacity of the individual and that in turn will lead to overall development. I call it the HEART capacity- train the educator on:

Humane delivery of curriculum, Emotional understanding of students, Adaptive learning modules, Research oriented delivery of curriculum and Technology enabled and embedded delivery. This is bound to give us happy, involved and enriched educators. As they say do not deliver the product, deliver the experience- an experience that will help improve human life!

Ms. Chavi Behl
Vice Principal, Senior School
The Shriram School,
Aravali Campus
Gurugram