Teacher's Day is going to be observed on September 5 with the same rituals as usual. This time, amid Covid-19 pandemic scare, there will be virtual events and on-line award functions.
However, there is a need to discuss certain serious issues of educational practices and emergent roles of teachers, says Lalit Kishore[2]
Some recent surveys have indicated that there has been an up-swing in the number of children with learning delays and deficits due to ways children are being brought up and educated in their pre-primary and early primary grades. The mainstream schools are blaming children as non-educable are being thrown out for being admitted in special schools.
For children with normal IQ but having learning disabilities, in special schools, no educational therapists are available to mitigate children's problems. In our country, special schools are clueless about the education of children with learning disabilities of dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia. Special educators are also, ill-competence because most of them do not event the content mastery, information processing skill master and skilfulness in multi-modal communication.
There is need for preparing educational therapists and a special paper on it in B.Ed. courses. Educational therapists are professional educational functionary like a doctor or a clinical psychologist educated and trained to meet academic or learning needs of children and adults. Elsewhere, for people with Bachelor's degree in education or special education undergo the post-graduate courses and trainings in educational therapy.
In the present times, when education has become commercialised, socially isolating due to use of technology, rote-learning or low-quality teaching, leading to learning deficits and gaps among learners, an educational therapist can fill the gap by assessing individuals' learning disabilities, deficits, delays and dysfunction. Often, educational therapists have the general education content mastery; have keen pedagogical skills intervention designing, clinical psychology techniques expertise and tools and formative evaluation techniques and tools use-aptness.
With their expert competence and sensitivity towards learners, educational therapists teach skills and strategies that help learners manage their learning deficits and delays to improve their academic performance and attention span by enhancing their time on designed learning tasks by working as support system to the child and the caregivers.
Unfortunately, in India, the recognised courses for educational therapy are not available. Often, one-shot workshops of a few days are held for special educators or school counsellors which are ineffective since both the trainers and trainees are ill-prepared due to their own learning-deficit regular courses based on rote-learning. With hardly any expert educational therapists being available, even mentoring to create more educational experts is not possible.
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