Week 4: Developing your own practice with OER

Introduction

This week focuses on how you can develop your own practice, using OER, to support teachers in developing more participatory, student-centred processes in their classrooms. The four activities will support you in thinking about your own needs, as well as those of the teachers you work with. The Assignment for this week is Activity 4.3.

Teachers are continuously involved in making decisions that are of great importance to their students. There are no fixed answers or rules that can be put in a manual or applied systematically in different situations. This is why teachers often find changing their routine practice is challenging. It is not uncommon for teachers to be resistant to change and give different reasons for not being able to take a different approach or try new ideas. This reluctance is understandable – after all, moving away from the relative comfort of routine practice involves taking some personal ‘risks’ as teachers.

It is likely that you and your colleagues have identified a number of different priorities for teacher development to improve student learning in their classroom.

One of the issues often highlighted by teacher educators and District Officials is teachers’ subject knowledge. Often, pre-service teachers learn about the subject and about teaching methodologies in separate departments with different people, which can make it difficult for them to develop expertise in teaching different topics. By engaging with the TESS-India OER activities, teachers develop both subject knowledge and their repertoire of teaching approaches. This is because all the approaches are modelled in the context of the school curriculum.

In Activity 4.3 you will think about how to use the TESS-India OER to address some of the priorities that you have identified. But first you consider your own professional development needs.

1 Considering your own professional development

In Week 2 you considered the need for teacher educators to model the pedagogy that teachers are expected to use in their classrooms. Teacher educators cannot rely on lecturing and are faced with changing their views and ways of working with teachers and pre-service teachers. Therefore, as a teacher educator, you need to pay attention to your own needs and professional development so that you are better placed to support the needs of others.

The issues that classroom teachers face in changing their practice apply to teacher educators too. For example, more time will need to be spent on planning for active learning. Collaborating with colleagues – such as through joint planning, observation and reflection – can be very beneficial. In Activity 2.2 you analysed the knowledge and skills needed to use active, participatory teaching approaches successfully. As part of planning your own professional development, you need to identify your current skills and the ones for development. A skills audit is a useful starting point.

2 Using OER with teachers

Change is challenging, often leaving teachers feeling unsettled, vulnerable and no longer in control of their classroom.

Some active teaching approaches are easier to implement than others. It is unrealistic to expect a teacher who has always lectured from the front to immediately start organising role plays and groupwork, or to be successful on their first attempts. Change takes time and starts with small, easy steps – but even these can make a difference to students’ learning. For example, asking open questions, promoting pair work or conducting a brainstorm will encourage students to be more involved and give the teacher the confidence to try other approaches. This will also help students to adapt to a new environment in which more is being asked of them.

As a teacher educator, you need to be able to support teachers in developing more participatory and inclusive teaching approaches. Previously, you considered the importance of modelling these approaches in your own teaching. You can use OER to introduce and promote change in teachers’ classroom practices.

Activity 4.3: Assignment 4 – Using TESS-India OER with teachers

Timing: Allow approximately 1.5 hours

This activity is Assignment 4 and is part of your portfolio of participation.

Figure 1

1. First read the document ‘Active teaching and learning methods’ and listen again to Professor Patricia Murphy’s talk in Week 1.
2. Identify what knowledge, skills and ideas you want teachers to learn. This might link to a session you are running on teaching a particular curriculum topic or approach, or the work you do with teachers in school. 
3. Choose one TESS-India Teacher Development OER that you could use to support teachers’ learning.
4. Consider how you will use the OER with teachers. Think about the following:
   • What are the learning outcomes you want the teacher to achieve?
   • How will you introduce it to the teacher(s)?
   • What parts of the OER will you use with your teachers – the whole unit or particular parts of it? Which activities will they do?
   • What evidence will you look for to evaluate the teachers’ learning?
   • How will the teachers be expected to use their learning in their future planning and teaching? 
5. [] Summarise your ideas from point 4 above in no more than 200 words.
6. Discuss your ideas with some colleagues or peers.
7. [] Reflect on what your colleagues said and note the ideas that you would like to try in the future. You may find this helpful when completing Activity 5.4 (Assignment 5).

3 Reviewing your learning

4 Moving forward

You have now considered how you might use OER in your work as a teacher educator.

Next week you will look at how you can select, evaluate and modify OER to suit your context.

Now go to Week 5: Selecting and using OER.

Acknowledgements

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence.

Specific content from the TESS-India OER, including images from the TESS-India video resources, are made available under this licence unless otherwise stated.

The TESS-India project is led by The Open University, UK and is funded by UK AID from the UK government.