O5. Teachers professional development course for designing IBMT lessons
Designing interventions and educational resources is a profession in itself. Being an experienced teacher does not imply being a good designer. In countries where lesson study is strongly embedded in the educational infrastructure teachers build up experience in designing interventions and scenarios gradually and junior teachers are supported by senior colleagues. In the project partners’ countries teachers begin a lesson study with very limited experience in designing interventions and scenarios. For example, teachers usually base their lessons to very large extent on text book series. For this reason we hypothesize that, for countries where LS is newly introduced, teachers will benefit significantly from a preparational course on educational design for IBMT.
The goal for O5 is to produce such a course. Its learning goals will be:
- Teachers learn to codesign in small groups.
- Teachers learn about design basics and how to avoid design pitfalls.
- Teachers learn to justify their design choices using design principles (taken from the compendium, O4 ). The notion of design principle provides them with language to communicate about their design on a level that transcends the practical. This supports them in the process of writing the research supported practice report as mentioned in O3.
- Teachers learn about the basic idea of design research in mathematics education and get an idea of the results it produces.
The course will be built up from units called activities. The project will deliver five or six such activities. Some will be focused on the themes (and design principles) selected in O4. Others will be more general about how to set up an educational task design and how to avoid pitfalls. The course will be flexible and adaptable to the needs of the occasion and the country, by combining activities in a way that is desired.
Task design has been shown as a very challenging job for the teachers and it is often doubted if the teachers could design innovative materials. The project TIME revolves around the idea that teachers will be innovative when supported with enough time and the appropriate course on the methodology of task design. The course for IBMT lessons will be produced mostly by university partners that already have experience with some design principles and this will follow closely the production of O4. The leading organisation for this process will be UU, while at least one partner from each partnering country will be involved to ensure that the course is applicable to all groups of teachers.
Read more in a result: