…are here for you!
Hello and welcome to the 94th edition of our fortnightly newsletter, Things in Education.
Another year has passed at Things Education, and we are entering our 5th year of existence. We have seen multiple educational organisations come and go in our time. It is a testament to all of you for continuing to show faith in our work. In fact, we increased the frequency of this newsletter from fortnightly to weekly. It has been a good experience for us. Each time we hear “We love your newsletters…”, “Clear and precise…” it gives us more fuel to carry on and take newer and bolder steps.
Today, as we turn 4, we would like to introduce you to TEPS Courses – our online courses platform. We have three courses live on this site and more to come before the year is out. These are paid courses, and you earn a certificate on completion. Each course is a mix of videos, texts and informative graphics to learn from.
Due to your loyal support through the last few years, we are giving you a code which will allow you to access these courses almost for FREE! Use the promo code TEPSEARLY at checkout and start learning! Only the first 50 users will get the benefit of this code!
Calendars help us to reflect on the year that has passed. And in this edition of our newsletter, we are taking a look back at Teacher Professional Development.
At the beginning of the year, we wrote about the steps schools need to take to ensure Teacher Professional Development programmes are effective for them. We wrote about how continuity is at the heart of any effective TPD. Continuity builds trust, which leads to a culture of supportive feedback for the teachers.
We also wrote about our experiences of TPD in India. We work with a bunch of schools, and we reflected on how almost all TPD programme mandates are top-down and that this creates a wide variety of motivations to conduct training programmes. We also wrote about lesson planning and learning outcomes in the context of Indian TPD.
It has been more than 6 months since we wrote this, so let’s reflect on how our experiences with various schools have been. In the graphic below, the red line indicates where on the green spectrum Indian schools are in their TPD thinking. So, it is good if the red line is toward the right in the green bar.
As you can see, most TPD sessions are still top-down initiatives, and classroom observations are rare. However, the sessions themselves are academic, help teachers in practice and are not too theoretical. Continuity is not the highest priority.
So, we have created TEPS Courses as an online resource for teachers, educators and school leaders. Even without continuous in-person sessions, teachers will be able to access these courses whenever they want.
In our attempt to help school leaders and teachers decide on the topics for TPD, we broke down the motivations and knowledge of the teachers into a simple model. And went further to break down teacher knowledge itself – into content and pedagogical knowledge.
To clarify specific pedagogies, we also wrote about the myths of direct instruction, active learning and why a combination of pedagogical approaches sometimes work best.
Over the past 4 years, we have remained true to our mission of making educational research accessible to all educators in India. We have done this through our newsletter, our various playlists on our YouTube channel, and through our online planning tool, TEPS. Now, TEPS Courses helps all educators access this knowledge and upskill themselves through structured courses and get certified as a TEPS trained teacher!
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Edition: 4.01
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