Guide
 Contents
|
The
rationale of the workshops
Teachers’ decisions about what they do in their classrooms are dependent
on a variety of factors, which can be usefully summarised under the following
four headings:
-
Content – includes the content of the proposed innovation and the
content of the existing curriculum, and the perception of the teacher about
how the new relates to the old.
-
Beliefs about learning – include what teachers think that they ought
to be doing to support pupils in the classroom, what pupils find easy or
difficult and why, and the role and nature of motivation.
-
Values – include what teachers believe about the nature of their
subject, about the purposes of education, about their own role as a teacher,
and so on.
-
Contexts, customs and constraints – includes a wide range from local
factors such as classroom layout or the availability of resources, to more
global factors such as prescriptions laid down by government, as well as
teachers’ knowledge of the subject they are teaching, their repertoire
of pedagogic strategies, their social skills, and so on
The training materials are modest in scope, and can have only limited
impact on these factors. What can be done in these materials, however,
is to make teachers aware of some ways in which the curriculum is transformed
in implementation, and how these factors affect the transformations that
teachers make.
The training materials should have some small impact on teachers’
capabilities, and they may have a role in helping them to change some of
the contextual factors within which they work, though the materials are
unlikely to have any major effect on teachers’ values. The materials should
however help in making these factors explicit so that teachers can make
informed choices in their implementation of new ideas.
If teachers are to be able to make explicit the factors that inform
their decisions, they need to do this in the context of their own teaching.
Training which is divorced from their own practice is unlikely to have
long term consequences. The materials therefore use an approach in which
there is an initial and final training session, with a period of some weeks
in between in which teachers can use the ideas in their own practice.
|
