4.2 Using the TESSA handbooks

TESSA handbook ‘Working with Pupils’ has been created to support student teachers and ‘Working with Teachers’ has been created for teacher educators and Teaching Practice Supervisors to provide support in the use of the TESSA materials. Both handbooks can be accessed from the ‘Handbooks and Toolkits for teachers and teacher educators’ page on your country homepage on the TESSA website.

‘Working with Teachers’ guides you, the Teaching Practice Supervisor, in the use of TESSA. In the handbook, look at the diagram on page 3 and the table of contents on page 4 to direct you to the sections that are of immediate relevance to the task you want to carry out. ‘Working with Pupils’ is a useful tool for you and your student teachers. You can give a copy to student teachers for them to have and refer to or you can take loose sections with you to school or fortnightly seminars to give your student teachers as appropriate.

Activity 4.4: Using the TESSA handbook Working with Pupils as support

This activity will help you to identify ways of adapting the use of the TESSA handbook ‘Working with Pupils’ to different scenarios.

Imagine the following situations at a face-to-face seminar. How could you use ‘Working with Pupils’ to support you and your student teachers?

Part 1

You asked your student teachers to look for TESSA materials with the idea of incorporating a new strategy into one of their next lessons. The following week, they have done this task and two of them, Likando and Musonda ask you the questions below.

  • which sections of ‘Working with Pupils’ are you going to direct them to in order to help them?
  • what advice would you give them?

Part 2

Another week, you want to hold a discussion on the quality of learning.

  • do you have all the questions that you need to ask students to guide the discussion?
  • is there a page or a section of ‘Working with Pupils’ which you could give students to help them to remember the discussion?

The answers to the situations in Activity 4.4 may be obvious. The advice to Likando is to consult ‘Working with Pupils’ Section 4 ‘How you can teach using the TESSA materials’ and Musonda should refer to Section 3 ‘How can you adapt TESSA materials to use in your lesson plans?’. For your session on the quality of learning, Section 6 ‘What do you think you learnt from teaching with TESSA materials?’ will provide support.

Make sure you familiarise yourself with both ‘Working with Teachers’ [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]   and ‘Working with Pupils’ to avail yourself of these extra training resources. These can be accessed from the TESSA website.

4.1 Introducing student teachers to the TESSA materials

Tool 5: Recognising effective teachers