The Science Program at DIL develops the science curriculum, related resource materials, and conducts trainings for primary science teachers across the projects. The main objectives for the year 2012 are to train teachers in selected units for which Teachers’ Guides and Activity Books are ready. In addition to this, follow up visits, peer tutors’ meetings, cluster wise meetings, video development, and curriculum development are integrated into ongoing activities. Training for teachers of partner projects are also incorporated as and when the need arises. Last year saw two phases of science trainings being delivered across the projects. This year, however, realizing a gap in the science concepts of the teachers, a third phase of Summer Content training has been introduced. Here, teachers will be given an intensive training on selected topics that they find difficult and challenging.
Teaching Strategies
Each training demonstrated a variety of teaching and learning strategies like group work, pair work, individual work, presentations, questions and answers, role play and science projects. Moreover, throughout the course, participants were given an opportunity to discuss and share their learning with the whole class. The facilitators assisted participants through different cooperative learning techniques and encouraged their discussions, group work, and presentations of relevant activities with an objective for the teachers to replicate the same in their classrooms.
Can you tell me more about the teacher traininig programs? Do you train teachers in India by any chance? We would love to have our teachers participate.
Thank you
Thank you for your comment. Please visit our Contact Us page and get in contact with our Program Development Director about our teacher trainings.
I agree that the textbook arugment is the wrong one to have. Textbooks lay out a route for developing understanding (for both the teacher and the student). But they cannot take into account that every child and teacher comes to the work with different prior knowledge and sets of experiences. What helps one child move forward does not make sense to another. That is where the art of teaching comes in deciding how to make clear the underlying concepts and generate meaningful examples for each learner.When we focus on the textbook as the curriculum, we give teachers the message that following the exact route that the textbook producers lay out is the way to learn, in this case, math. We are ignoring the fact that curriculum development really happens at the classroom level based on understanding the content, having expectations for outcomes, knowing what the students do and do not understand, and seeing multiple routes to get students there. The real promise for improved learning is in supporting teachers’ practice in their classrooms as Maria has begun to do via instructional rounds. Teachers have to understand the strengths and limitations of different instructional strategies for developing different concepts. They have to look at student work together, to see what their students do and do not understand, and then they need to figure out how to help them move forward using whatever resources are appropriate. And I could not agree more that is what our strongest teachers already do.