This immediately begs two questions. How does one ensure so much equipment? How can the teacher stand up to such a demanding task? In the urban setting, the kind of equipment needed is neither extravagant nor excessive. Any normal school should be able to stock and maintain it. In municipal or government schools and in rural setting it may appear difficult both from the point of finance and availability. Happily, over the years many efforts have focussed precisely on this issue; that of inexpensive and locally available material for instructive experiments. During the course of development of HSTP, which is both rurally based and in government schools, this particular aspect was vitally incorporated from the start. The so called "kit supply" for all the classes is inexpensive, yet does not sacrifice on what may be essential such as test tubes, magnets, lenses and so on. The expense is modest enough that it has been sanctioned in M.P. where education budget is low. It has been found sufficient to charge students one Rupee a month to compensate for wear and tear.
We now turn to the question of how teachers can be prepared for this kind of open ended classroom. The first thing to be realised is that once children begin to do things on their own and begin to throw up questions about everything they see, it becomes difficult even for experts to answer everything satisfactorily and on the spot. This has to be experienced to be believed. Observations concerning phenomena are not neatly divided into Physics Chemistry and Biology. So that every once in a while a child will ask something, that I as a Physics person had to say "Hmm ... may be due to some process occurring here that Organic Chemists may know."
Other than that, a simple query may well cross the limitations of the curriculum and the level of the class. "How does a tube light work?" immediately requires you to say something about electrons and ionisation. This can perhaps be evaded out of hand by saying "too advanced", but other questions of great practical importance cannot be avoided, such as what is ``earthing'' of electrical equipment. And one is instantly off to a discussion of electrical forces at large. Not that this is not done in the usual curriculum. But if you can tell the child "read up this paragraph on earthing and memorise these four questions that can be asked on it", it is much easier than a carefully worded discourse answering all the major queries the child can raise in her own language and couched in her own overall perception.
Thus, the kind of classroom session HSTP results in is a challenge to everyone, at some level or the other. The strategy adopted by HSTP to meet this challenge is to have monthly meetings of all the science teachers from one educational block in the presence of a resource person who should preferably be a college level teacher. This does well to resolve questions that arose in the class and to share common experiences. But the meetings also bring very valuable feed-back from the field about the experiments. Many important suggestions for improving the experiments have been incorporated into the textbooks.