Teacher Education is one of the important components to determine the quality of a teacher. Untrained teachers remains deprived of becoming aware realising many good qualities of a teacher. Teaching is a profession which requires the development of typical the feelings and skills of harnessing the good qualities in a learner. To ensure that all untrained teachers acquire the requisite qualifications, SSA provides for 60 days of training for teachers who have not received any training before their recruitment. But this training cannot be deemed to be equivalent to requisite training qualification as prescribed by the NCTE. However, after the notification of the " Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 effective from 1st April 2010, it is imperative that all teachers teaching at the elementary level, if not trained, shall have to acquire training qualification within a period of five years. 
The number of untrained teachers is so large that it may not be possible to train all of them through face to face formal system. Alternative strategies like Open & Distance Learning system is considered to be an effective strategy to complete this gigantic task. With this backdrop, it has been decided to develop and implement an elementary teacher training programme through Open & Distance Learning mode for untrained teachers teaching in elementary schools. The entire training strategies for in-service untrained teachers need to be based on the basic principles enumerated below:
i. Promotion of child friendly and barrier free education for all children,
ii. Promotion of child centred pedagogical processes leading to more of activities for experiential learning, exploration, inquiry, discovery, etc.
iii. Based on NCF 2005 and to guide all our plans for facilitating teaching-learning processes in different subject areas. It centers around five key guiding principles:
· Connecting knowledge to life outside the school;
· Ensuring that learning shifts from rote methods;
· Enriching the curriculum so that it goes beyond textbooks;
· Making examinations more flexible and integrating them with classroom life;
· Nurturing an overriding identity informed by caring concerns within the democratic polity of the country.
iv. Promoting a non-threatening assessment system with in-built process for a continuous assessment system. Teacher preparation needs to look at CCE as an important area of learning for the teachers.
v. RTE Act 2009 bans corporal punishment and private tuitions by teachers. Accordingly the teacher preparation plan also will provide ways and means of making the classrooms more child friendly for children so that every child learns well as desired under the Act.
The objectives of the Programme are to :
· enable teachers to understand and address diversity in their context;
· empower them to improve quality of classroom processes/transaction;
· develop capacity in them to promote child friendly, child cantered processes in school;
· familiarize them with appropriate teaching learning processes;
· facilitate them to develop leadership & problem-solving skills among children;
· sensitize them to contribute towards safeguarding child rights
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