Relevance: prelims/mains: G.S paper II: Schemes and policies intervention
The Union Human Resource Development Minister has launched ‘National Initiative for School Heads and Teachers Holistic Advancement (NISHTHA)’, a national mission to improve learning outcomes at the elementary level.
- NISHTHA Website, Training Modules, Primer Booklet and a Mobile App were also launched by the Minister.
About ‘National Initiative for School Heads’ and Teachers’ Holistic Advancement’
- NISHTHA is the largest teachers’ training programme of its kind in the world.
- Objective: To motivate and equip teachers to encourage and foster critical thinking in students.
- Teachers will get awareness and develop their skills on various aspects related to:
- Learning Outcomes,
- Competency-Based learning and Testing,
- Learner-centered Pedagogy,
- School Safety and Security,
- Personal-social qualities,
- Inclusive Education,
- ICT in teaching-learning including Artificial Intelligence,
- Health and well-being including yoga,
- Initiatives in School Education including library, eco-club, youth club, kitchen garden,
- School Leadership qualities,
- Environmental Concerns,
- Pre-school, Pre-vocational Education and School-Based assessment.
- Aim: To build the capacities of around 42 lakh participants,
- Covering all teachers and heads of schools at the elementary level in all Government schools,
- Faculty members of State Councils of Educational Research and Training (SCERTs) and District Institutes of Education and Training (DIETs),
- Block Resource Coordinators and Cluster Resource Coordinators in all States and UTs.
- Implementation: Training will be conducted directly by 33120 Key Resource Persons (KRPs) and State Resource Persons (SRP) identified by the State and UTs, who will in turn be trained by 120 National Resource Persons identified from National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA), etc.
- States and UTs have an option to contextualize the training modules and use their own material and resource persons also, keeping in view the core topics and expected outcomes of NISHTHA.
- The prominent features of the programme are activity based modules including in-built continuous feedback mechanism, online monitoring and support system, training need and impact analysis (Pre and Post training).
- A Mobile App and Learning Management System (LMS) based on MOODLE (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) have been developed by NCERT.
- LMS will be used for registration of Resource Persons and Teachers, dissemination of resources, training gap and impact analysis, monitoring, mentoring and measuring the progress online.