Week 1 (11-18 January) - Introduction and first steps together
Welcome to Week 1!
Objectives of the Week
This week's objectives are the following:
1. Gaining an overview of this EVO project
2. Introducing yourself and your teaching context and sharing experiences of teaching with other participants. 3. Building a sense of community with other participants For objectives 2 and 3 the focus will be on sharing recent successful teaching experiences. The emphasis will be on confidence-building and relationship-building via recognition of yourself and your colleagues as experts in your own classrooms.
You will also watch and react to videos of other teachers sharing their experiences of successful teaching in a workshop in Nepal.
This is a 'closed group', which means that anyone can find the group and see who is in it. However, only members can see or contribute posts.
Join.https://new.edmodo.com/home We will be using this as a place for you to post your answers to questions as we go through the five weeks.
Watch this video for a brief Introduction to Classroom-based Research.
TASK 2: Self-introductions, 3-2-1 style
You are all welcome aboard! Let's get to know each other!
In 'Self-introductions' in https://new.edmodo.com/home, please share: 3 things about yourself 2 things you like doing when you are not teaching 1 thing you are curious about and might like to research
Just writing a short text about yourself is fine. However, why not experiment with by uploading a picture of yourself, too? Or how about trying to make an audio- or video-self introduction (2 minutes) with your mobile phone and uploading that? TASK 3: You and Your Classroom
Look at these pictures of different classrooms. Think about how similar/different they are to the classrooms you are used to.
Our community comprises teachers from a variety of places and settings around the world. This activity will help you understand others' teaching situations in the EVO community:
Tell others about your classroom and share a photo if you can. (Please ensure you have permission of parents and students to share before posting any photos of students). Do this in thehttps://new.edmodo.com/homeunder 'You and Your Classroom'.
Describe:
facilities / resources within your class
average number of students in the class
anything else you want to share
TASK 4: Success Stories in Low-resource Classrooms
Together, Amol and Richard ran a five-day workshop in Kathmandu, Nepal (a British Council / Hornby Trust Regional School) on 'Teaching in the Low-resource classroom', for teachers from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan.
Please watch some videos / read some stories from this workshop.
A) Why success stories?:Watch this clip from a webinar - Richard explains why it is valuable to share success stories, based on his and Amol's workshop experience.
2. What solution did Rupinder adopt? Consider also: Are theresimilar challenges in your teaching context, or different ones? Have you had any successes in overcoming these challenges?
We experience difficulties but we also experience successes in our teaching, and by reflecting on these we can consider both what 'works' in our teaching context and how improvement can come from within ourselves and our experience. We can also learn from colleagues' successes, which can be a valuable source of inspiration. A) Think of a recent successful teaching experience and share it in thehttps://new.edmodo.com/homeunder 'A Recent Success in Your Teaching'.
You could write about a problem you were facing and what you did to solve it. Consider: how do you know that it worked? (what did you see, hear and feel?). Or you could simply write something that 'felt right'. Again, consider what you saw, heard and felt that made it seem successful.
Try to recreate the experience for others by writing a paragraph or two about it. What told you that it was a success? What did you see, hear and feel?
B) Visit other posts and comment on / respond to other teachers' success stories which make an impression on you.
Summary: hoped-for achievements
By the end of this week (week 1) we hope that you have:
established a sense of community with other participants
shared a recent success story
begun to see the value of collaboration with colleagues as a source of insight and support for teacher-research (we will take this idea further next week)
NEXT LIVE SESSION: Identifying a focus, and research questions
You can watch video-recordings of other teachers from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan sharing their stories of success in low-resource primary and secondary classrooms here: