Teach For India is excited to announce that Firki –The online teacher training portal is live!
For the past year, we have been working on this initiative that takes all the growing knowledge and pedagogical practices that we know have worked for us as an organisation in our 5 years, and shared them online through Firki – in a way that is simple, easy to learn, and free to use for all of India’s six million teachers.
Six million is a daunting number, and teacher training for these six million teachers in India is sporadic and mostly absent for those serving low income communities. As teachers are the single most important contributors to increase learning levels of a student, Firki is a step towards working for our vision for all children attaining an excellent education they deserve. We hope Firki enables teachers to push for excellence in their classrooms, and build the larger movement for education reform.
A first of it’s kind, FIRKI is an engaging and interactive, online teacher training solution by Teach For India which focuses on the “how of teaching”, providing strategies and tools to improve teacher competencies. We have gamified all our content to make the experience joyful and encourage healthy competition, and included reflective quests to push teachers to dig deeper for the why behind each course.
The main focus of the courses is to strengthen classroom practice, invest students and other key stakeholders in the child’s education, shaping a vision of excellence and most importantly continuously working towards becoming a reflective practitioner. Firki can be accessed in both English and Hindi so that language is not a barrier in accessing our content.
We will be running an eight-week pilot program for teachers to sign up and use Firki during the pilot. We will then capture evidence to know the impact of this program, with the main objective of understanding how much of online teacher behaviour translated into classroom practice via Firki.
