School teachers adopt open
educational resources to improve teaching and learning, under an international
project
It was the usual drill.
School
teacher Deo Sudan Singh, 45, used to deliver monologues in class at Purv
Madhyamik Vidyalaya, Surajpur Garha village, about 32km from Lucknow. As the
students looked at him in silence, he thought they were learning. The children
would write term exams which did not reveal much about what they actually
learnt. One day, the drill was disrupted.
About
a year and a half ago, someone introduced Singh to open educational resources
(OER) at DIET Lucknow, where he worked part time after school. A coordinator of
an international project gave him hard copies of two sets of OERs on maths and
science. The material included experiments, such as measuring the length of the
shadow of a stick in a garden through the day. It was developed under TESS
(Teacher Education through School Support)India, a project funded by UK aid and
started by the UK's Open University (OU) in 2012 at the behest of the Indian
government, initially for a first phase of four years till 2016.
The
project focuses on the professional development of teacher educators and teachers
in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Karnataka, Assam and West
Bengal. It has involved Indian experts at the an experts at the national and
state levels to develop a multilingual OER toolkit. The project covers
elementary science, English, maths, language and literacy as well as secondary
maths, English and sci ence. In addition, “A complementary set of OER for head
teachers addresses skills for the leadership of learning at both the elementary
and secondary school levels,“ says Freda Wolfenden, academic director,
TESS-India.
“I
was searching for some special activity which could involve all students in a
class. I wanted learning to be constructive, not theoretical,“ says Singh, who
teaches classes VI-VIII.
He
downloaded the free OER for science and maths -15 each -from the project
website to use in class. The OER is aimed not only at providing academic
material but also resources on how to organise a class, plan courses (by
talking to colleagues, for example), peer working, group working, etc.
“The
practice has changed my mind. Earlier I used to think I am the best teacher,“
he says adding that the new pedagogy made him think he was the opposite.
Singh
recounts a change in the students as well. “First of all, I saw the joy on
students' faces; they were keen to learn.“
After
using the material for 15 days, he says he introduced TESS OER in class on a
regular basis in August 2014. Even the headmaster and another colleague took to
the resources, says Singh.(The school has a teaching staff of only these
three). It has adopted the resources for English and Hindi as well.
According
to Singh, he switched to continuous assessment as opposed to the term-end
evaluation used previously. He put down different topics, students' names and
their performance on a board in the classroom to assess them while they learnt.
He categorised learners as: need help, satisfactory and excellent. “I would
write how students were grasping the lessons,“ says Singh.
“I
am assessing every period. Earlier I gave lecture-type classes, and homework.
Now I am evaluating every day.Now I can give you monthly data of students'
performance in black and white,“ says Singh, adding that previously he would
not know whether students answered exam questions by rotelearning or copying.
According
to him, the students had no fear when they took the exam in April.
And
the work continues.To begin with, project partic ipants have prepared seven
versions (six languages) of OER, which can be translated and adapted for
further contexts, says Wolfenden.“To date, the project has met its aims of
producing a large multilingual text and video resource bank (125 text OERs and
four hours of video in six languages) together with a MOOC for teacher
educators to help them develop their use of the TESS-India OER and OER in
general.“
It
is now likely to be extended as a TESS-India state resource group (SRG) of
experts from teacher and school education has been formed in every state.The
group is supposed to work towards adoption of OER in each state.
“I was searching for some special activity which could involve all
students in a class. I wanted learning
to be constructive, not theoretical”
Source | Times of India | 27 July 2015
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