Integrating OER

Joacim works with Primary school teachers as a Zonal In-Service Co-ordinator in Zambia. In his zone there is concern about some of the teachers’ subject knowledge of Maths. He has been asked to run a session on fractions. He is confident about his own subject knowledge but it is a long time since he has taught it in school. He consulted the Zambian school curriculum and found a reference to a TESSA unit about fractions. He decided to use the ideas in the unit to teach the teachers. They did all the activities in the unit, with him pretending to be the teacher. At the end he checked their understanding of fractions, but realised that by doing it in this way, he had also taught them how to teach fractions. There was an animated discussion at the end about resources that you could use instead of some of those suggested.

Charity is a lecturer at a College of Education in Ghana. She had recently bought a SMART phone and was thrilled with all the things it could do and the quality of the pictures she could take. She had been introduced to TESSA materials in a workshop but had not accessed them very much; her friend pointed out that she could get them on her new phone. Her student teachers were out on teaching practice so she downloaded the Teacher Practice Supervisor’s Toolkit. It helped her to think about the sorts of things she should be looking for when observing her student teachers’ teaching. In one lesson, Peter, a science student was doing a demonstration. Many of the pupils could not see the demonstration properly and became quite restless. Charity took some photos of the view that the students at the back of the room had, and in the discussion after the lesson, she showed them to Peter. He was quite shocked and they had a really helpful discussion about how to set up a demonstration and the different strategies he could have used. Next time he did a demonstration, he showed half the class, while the other half worked in pairs on a different task. This time they could all see. Charity started using her phone to support other students; she took small video clips and photos in order to help her students appreciate the learner’s perspective.

Tomaida attended a workshop in her college about the TESSA materials. They sounded really interesting and she was able to download them on to her laptop. However, as she browsed the resources she realised that they were mostly based on the school curriculum; that term she was teaching Child Development and Psychology. But she had been struck by what was said in the workshop about making her own teaching more learner-centred. She looked at some of the Key Resources. In the next session she organised her student teachers into groups to work together on various aspects of Child development. In the first task she asked them to think back to their own childhood and identify any milestones they remember about themselves or their siblings. She briefly introduced some theory and then set another task in which they had to think about how these ideas might manifest themselves in the classroom; what sorts of things teachers should be looking for and what sorts of things they could do to support children at different stages in their development.

On the diploma course in a College of Education student teachers in Kenya were assessed on an exam and on whether they passed their teaching practice. Lecturers decided to introduce an element of course work so that they could assess their student teachers on a greater range of skills. The task involved planning three lessons in a sequence, based on TESSA activities or case studies and then evaluating how the lessons went. They had to submit three lesson plans; a short piece of writing about why they had made their planning decisions; the lesson resources and an evaluation of the lesson which focused on whether the pupils had met the learning outcomes and how they knew. Some lecturers were concerned that because it was not an exam, the students would cheat. However, since they had to write about their own planning and teaching, it was very difficult for them to cheat. If they were concerned that a student could cheat, they could always look in their teaching file and check which topics they had taught. The assignment proved popular with the students and some of the teachers in their schools helped the students by giving feedback on the lessons. The feedback was more helpful than the normal comments about their appearance, punctuality and the quality of their plan.