Training guide

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1. Introduction

Welcome back to this SPRINT school-based continuing professional development (SBCPD) programme designed to support active teaching and learning in line with the revised Zambian school syllabus. The programme will take six terms (two school years) and will be the focus of your Teacher Group Meetings (TGM). The topics for each course will be:

  • Course 1: Classroom management for learner-centred teaching 
  • Course 2: Inclusive teaching 
  • Course 3: Assessment for Learning

Year 2

  • Course 4: Managing and supporting learner-centred classrooms 
  • Course 5: Literacy across the curriculum 
  • Course 6: Being a reflective practitioner 

Over the past two courses you have looked in detail at classroom management for learner-centred teaching and inclusive teaching, using and improving your skills in developing pair and groupwork activities, storytelling and songs, and using appropriate questioning.

In this course you will be looking in more detail at how to decide what you want to teach and how you will know that your learners have learnt it – the use of formative assessment in your classrooms. This will involve how you monitor learning in your class and offer effective feedback to your learners, how you find out what they already know and how to assess their learning both during and following your lessons.

You should now be in the habit of recording your thoughts and ideas in your Teacher Notebook. If you haven’t yet started using your Teacher Notebook on a regular basis, you are strongly encouraged to start doing so now as this will help you to plan activities or lessons, record your response to the different activities in these resources and important aspects to note from your lessons, and reflect on how your teaching has gone and how to improve it next time. As indicated in Part 1 of this SBCPD programme, in your Teacher Notebook you can include:

  • ideas that may come to you when you are either studying or in the workplace, or at any other time
  • your responses to activities
  • notes about the audio you listen to, or the videos you watch as you go along
  • notes about discussions you have had with others
  • questions that occur to you while you are studying and planning your lessons
  • reflections on what you think or feel about your learning.