Current Affairs Brain Booster for UPSC & State PCS Examination (Topic: NISHTHA Programme)

Current Affairs Brain Booster for UPSC & State PCS Examination

NISHTHA Programme

The Department of School Education and Literacy has launched a national mission to improve learning outcomes at the elementary level through an integrated teacher training Programme called ‘NISHTHA’ under the centrally sponsored scheme of ‘Samagra Shiksha’ in 2019-20.
‘Samagra Shiksha’ is a sector-wide development programme which subsumes the then existing centrally sponsored schemes of ‘Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’ (SSA), ‘Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan’ (RMSA) and ‘Teacher Education’ (TE) to help harmonising the implementation mechanisms and transaction costs at all levels, particularly in using state, district and sub-district level systems and resources, besides envisaging one comprehensive strategic plan for development of school education at the district level.

NISHTHA is a capacity building programme for "Improving Quality of School Education through Integrated Teacher Training".
It aims to build competencies among all the teachers and school principals at the elementary stage.
The functionaries (at the state, district, block, cluster level) shall be trained in an integrated manner on learning outcomes, school-based assessment, learner – centred pedagogy, new initiatives in education, addressing diverse needs of children through multiple pedagogies, etc. This is being organized by constituting National Resource Groups (NRGs) and State Resource Groups (SRGs) at the national and the state level who will be training 42 lakhs teachers subsequently.
A robust portal/Management Information System (MIS) for delivery of the training, monitoring and support mechanism has been infused with this capacity building initiative.
Keeping in view the COVID-19 pandemic situation, it is now planned to organise SRG and teachers training in online mode.

Improvement in learning outcomes of the students.
Creation of an enabling and enriching inclusive classroom environment.
Teachers become alert and responsive to the social, emotional and psychological needs of students as first level counselors.
Teachers are trained to use Art as pedagogy leading to increased creativity and innovation among students.
Teachers are trained to develop and strengthen personal-social qualities of students for their holistic development. Creation of healthy and safe school environment.
Integration of ICT in teaching learning and assessment.
Developing stress free School based assessment focused on development of learning competencies.
Teachers adopt activity based learning and move away from rote learning to competency-based learning.
Teachers and school heads become aware of new initiatives in school education.
Transformation of the heads of schools into providing academic and administrative leadership for the schools for fostering new initiatives.

This programme will be conducted in customized cascade mode, in which national resource group of experts will train Key resource persons or KRPs (identified by the state/ UT for further teacher training) and state resource persons or SRPs (identified by the state/ UT for further training of school principals and other functionaries). These KRPs and SRPs will directly train teachers and school principals.
The KRPs will help in the mentoring through NISHTHA portal and training will include text modules and videos along with live sessions by National Level Resource persons on #SwayamPrabha TV channels.
National Resource Persons (NRPs) are educationists, Subject-Experts and teacher educators drawn from national level institutions such as NCERT, NIEPA, etc. Key resource person (KRPs) are faculty members of SCERTs, DIETs, IASEs, CTEs and teachers from senior secondary schools identified by the states/UTs.