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.
Allow approximately 30 minutes, plus consultation time
As a teacher educator, you need to know about the needs and views of the teachers you work with.
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.
OpenLearn - Week 4: Developing your own practice with OER Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.