Every module. Tried on her own class.Every module. Tried on her own class.

A new teacher in the batch.

When Aiswarya Das first spoke to the mentors at Suraasa, she was in two minds. One option was the regular B.Ed, the route she saw other teachers in India take: complete a teaching course, find a job at home. “I just wanted to do something different,” she says. She had come across PgCTL but knew little about it, or about what would follow it. “I absolutely had no idea about what is this course.” She researched on her own, asking people who already knew Suraasa and people she met on social media who had some idea of the programme. “So I just took the chance and I started my course.”

She joined batch 40 and found that her batch mates were experienced teachers who wanted a professional accreditation. She was at the other end. After her master’s she had got an opportunity in a school and joined, and only then realised she wanted a teaching course. “I was a bit tensed, nervous,” she says. “All the pedagogical terms, everything were new.” The sessions turned out to be interactive, and after the very first class the batch set up its own WhatsApp group, where they talked every day about the opportunities they had.

Assignments Google could not do.

She stresses that the course could not be finished at a desk. “You will have to go to your school, implement what you have learned from the class, in the school, to your students,” she says, “and then you have to see what results you are actually gaining.” The difference, she says, shows in the classroom. She sets it against rote learning, where a teacher teaches something and receives the response back.

The assignments after every module worked the same way. “We cannot just go and search Google and complete the assignment and submit,” she says. They follow structured criteria, and they took effort and a lot of research. She came away sure that an older style of teaching would not be enough. “We have to be updated. We have to be one step ahead of them,” she says of her students, “because they are expecting a much lot from us teachers.”

Opportunities from two countries.

After the coursework came interview preparation, and she is clear that it was more than a single day. “You have a complete module only based on that,” she says: how to attend an interview, which questions to prepare, how to interact with the interviewer, with two or three sessions with mentors. Then the opportunities came. “I got a lot of opportunities both from India and UAE,” she says. She attended those interviews, she says, with confidence she had gained from the programme and its mentors. A separate placement team, she explains, shares school profiles that match a teacher’s own, and teachers can apply for jobs posted on the Suraasa platform.