Training guide

4. Using TESSA resources

TESSA provides resources for teachers to use in their own classroom to support active learning. TESSA materials have been written by teachers and teacher educators from different countries in sub-Saharan Africa and are designed to help teachers by: 

• developing teachers’ understanding of teaching and learning
• encouraging teachers to think about their role in helping pupils to learn
• developing teachers’ understanding of how pupils learn
• exploring different ways of organising and working in the classroom.

The TESSA materials are open educational resources (OER). This means they are free to be used by anyone either online or downloaded and used offline or printed. They can be adapted, modified or integrated with other materials in any form. The TESSA materials have been adapted for Zambia by a team from the University of Zambia. They are approved by the Zambian Government.

The TESSA materials are organised into five curriculum areas (as shown in Table 1 below): Literacy, Numeracy, Science, Life Skills and Social Studies and the Arts. Each curriculum area has three modules and each module has five sections or units. Each section has activities for teachers to do in their classrooms to help them develop their teaching skills.

For example, Module 1 of Life Skills (Personal development) has 5 sections, and each section follows the same pattern. Table 1 highlights the first section in the Personal Development module: Ways to explore who pupils are.

Table 1: The five TESSA curriculum areas

There is a total of 15 modules in the TESSA library and, if you print them out or view them as pdfs, each module is one book. When you read the subject resources you will see that there is not an exact match with the Zambian Revised School Curriculum. So for example if you are teaching Creative and Technology Studies you will find resources that can help you in TESSA modules from Life Skills, Science and Social Studies.