Week 1: Visions for teaching and learning

Introduction

In this first week you will start to think and reflect upon your ideas about teaching and learning. How do you recognise good teaching? What ideas of learning and knowledge do you find convincing? Would you describe your own practice as ‘learner-centred’? This week will provide an opportunity to explore these questions and relate them to your own practice. You will also find out about Open Educational Resources (OER) and TESS-India, a large-scale OER Teacher Education programme.

In total there are seven activities in this first week, including a quiz that is part of your portfolio of participation. In this first activity you will start to consider and articulate your vision for effective teaching and learning.

1 A global vision for teaching and learning?

International and national policy documents each offer a vision for education in their context – they may vary in their emphasis, but there are common themes. A very large number promote the ‘learner-centred’ classroom as an ideal, and good teaching as teaching that leads to students learning for understanding, rather than just memorising information. In India, the National Curriculum Framework (2005) outlines educational policy direction in India as follows:

If you are working in India and are not familiar with this policy, you should refer to Chapter 2 of the National Curriculum Framework.

However, implementing these policy visions in classroom teaching is challenging. UNESCO’s Global Monitoring Report (2014) shows that not all children in school benefit from their education and many do not achieve the basic learning outcomes needed for work and a productive life. (Chapter 4 in the Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2013/4 gives further detail.) 

In India, research on educational quality is conducted annually by ASER. Findings from the most recent report, while contested by some, suggest that a large percentage of students in Indian schools are not achieving basic skills in reading and mathematics. Factors such as poverty, gender, disability, ethnicity, language and geographical location all significantly affect how much students learn when they are in school classrooms.

2 What needs to change?

Figure 1

Giving all students access to a high-quality school education is the central aim of global and national education policies. As you have seen, there is an emerging consensus that quality in education is achieved through promoting:

• learner–centred practices that give value to each learner’s prior knowledge and experiences
• school structures that enable student participation.

Realising this change depends on the quality of teachers; this in turn depends on teacher education. Research shows that teacher educators play a crucial role in developing skilled teachers (Musset, 2010:3).

What changes might you initiate in your own practice as a teacher educator and with teachers that you work with? In Activity 1.3 you consider changes needed in classrooms in your area.

3 Open Educational Resources

There are many materials available to help teachers develop their practice. Some of these are Open Educational Resources (OER).

In most countries – and in India since 1957 – the author or creator of an original work such as a book, learning resource or video is given exclusive rights to its rights and distribution, usually for a limited time. This is known as copyright and allows the author or creator to charge users for access to the work.

With the invention of the internet, it has become much easier for everyone to share content across the world and for educators to share and adapt materials. This idea of sharing resources is the basis of OER. These are resources with an open licence, where the author or creator remains as the rights-holder but chooses which rights to retain and which rights to waive (see the Creative Commons website for more details). In an OER the creator allows users to access and reproduce the materials without cost and, under certain open licences, to adapt or change the resource.

OER have been defined as:

Advocates of OER argue that they can support improvements in curricula and support teaching by giving everyone access to a much wider range of materials. This is particularly important in contexts where there are few materials or limited access to universities or other institutions of learning. But remember, just accessing OER will not bring about change; it is using the ideas in classrooms and workshops that matters, which is the theme of this MOOC.

You will find out more about OER in Activity 1.4.

4 Introducing TESS-India

TESS-India is an example of an innovative project that uses collaboratively created, original OER for teacher education.

The TESS-India OER provide structured learning opportunities for teachers, helping them to move from generalisations about learner-centred practice to specific, contextualised instances. There are eight core sets of text OER to support teachers of different subjects in primary and secondary schools:

• Elementary English
• Elementary Maths
• Elementary Science
• Elementary Language and Literacy
• Secondary English
• Secondary Maths
• Secondary Science
• School Leadership.

Each of the first seven OER sets in the list above contains 15 units modelling key pedagogic practices through topics from the appropriate school curriculum. (The School Leadership set contains 20 units.) You can view the lists of units by visiting the TESS-India website.

Each OER offers several activities for teachers to carry out in their classrooms with their students, alongside case studies and links to videos – which are also OER – that exemplify these pedagogic practices in Indian classrooms. The OER have been localised for use in each of the seven states where the project is available (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Karnataka, Assam and West Bengal) and are available in six languages.

It is important to note that the TESS-India OER are not a discrete course or programme, and do not aim to replace the textbook. Instead, they are resources that can be incorporated in a variety of pre-service and in-service teacher education programmes. Depending on the teachers you work with, the TESS-India OER can be used in multiple ways to meet teachers’ needs.

5 TESS-India pedagogy

The TESS-India OER are designed to help move teacher educators and teachers towards deeper engagement with the participatory ‘learner-centred’ pedagogy articulated in Indian policy documents (NCF 2005, NCFTE 2009). Through engaging in the OER activities, teachers are encouraged to move away from practices based on traditional assumptions about learning and learners, which are teacher-centred and hierarchical. Instead, they are supported in moving towards understandings of effective teaching and learning that are underpinned by research. This learning movement is described in the table below.

Maximise

Figure 3

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A learning movement table that illustrates how teachers are encouraged to move away from traditional assumptions about learning and learners, and towards understandings of effective teaching and learning that are underpinned by research. Between each pair of phrases is an arrow going from the first to the second. So teachers should move:

• from ‘Knowledge is objective and external’ to ‘Knowledge is constructed and situated’;
• from ‘Learning is a process of transmission from teacher to learner’ to ‘Learning is an active process of knowledge construction between people interacting’;
• from ‘Learning is determined by innate biological abilities’ to ‘Learning depends on what is available to learn and the time available’;
• from ‘Learners are passive in the learning process’ to ‘Learners are agents in the learning process’;
• from ‘Learning happens in the mind’ to ‘Learning is minds-on and hands-on as students participate in learning activities’;
• from ‘Learners are extrinsically motivated’ to ‘Learners are intrinsically motivated’;
• from ‘Teacher are givers of knowledge’ to ‘Teacher are guides of learning’;
• from ‘Learners receive knowledge; what they know does not influence new learning’ to ‘Learners are knowledgeable; what they know and have experienced matters’.

Figure 3

The pedagogy in the TESS-India Teacher Development OER focuses on modelling practice for teachers that consistently conceptualises students as:

• knowledgeable
• constructors of meaning and problem solvers
• self-regulated and self-directed
• intrinsically motivated if learning activities have personal meaning and cultural authenticity.

The pedagogy of the TESS-India OER challenges a ‘teacher-centred’, lecture-driven approach, and positions learners in a way that is congruent with the policy that you encountered earlier this week. But what does this pedagogy look like in the classroom? You will explore this in Activity 1.6.

6 Reviewing your learning

7 Moving forward

In this first week you have looked at how contemporary education policies tend to emphasise a ‘learner-centred’ approach, and what this might mean for classroom teaching. Many teachers are unfamiliar or unconfident with enacting an active, participatory approach to learning in their classrooms.

In Week 2 of this MOOC you consider how you, as a teacher educator, can give teachers experiences that help them to develop more learner-centred, participatory practices.

Now go to Week 2: Active learning in practice.

References

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.