Teaching-learning materials, ICT, lesson planning and microteaching

What this heading covers

Four practical areas the syllabus groups near each other, and which share one principle: the aid, the device, the plan and the practice are all in service of learning, and none of them is evidence of good teaching by itself. A classroom with a projector is not better than one without; a forty-page lesson plan is not better than a clear one-page plan. Questions here test whether you know that.

Teaching-learning materials

A TLM is anything that makes an idea more accessible than words alone: real objects, specimens, models, charts, maps, flash cards, a number line, an abacus, dice, a globe, pictures, audio, film, the school garden, the local market, and the learners' own experience.

Why they matter

• They take the learner towards the concrete end, which is where understanding is built before it is abstracted.
• They engage more than one sense, which helps every learner and is essential for some.
• They hold attention, and make a class active rather than receptive.
• They let a learner handle and test an idea rather than accept it.

Dale's Cone of Experience — and a caution

Edgar Dale arranged experiences from the concrete to the abstract: direct purposeful experience at the base, then contrived experience, dramatised experience, demonstrations, field trips, exhibits, film, recordings, visual symbols and, at the apex, verbal symbols. The idea is sound and matches the concrete-to-abstract principle used throughout this syllabus.

The percentages are not. The widely circulated figures — "we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 90% of what we do" — appear nowhere in Dale's work and have no research support behind them. They were attached to the cone later and have been repeated ever since. Learn the cone; treat the numbers as folklore, and do not reproduce them as fact.

Choosing a TLM

Criteria the paper expects:

• Relevant to the specific objective, not decorative.
• Accurate and correctly labelled.
• Simple enough that it does not need explaining itself.
• Visible and audible to the whole class.
• Locally available, low-cost or no-cost — improvised from bottles, caps, seeds, sticks, card, cloth, newspaper.
• Safe, and usable by learners rather than only by the teacher.
• Free of stereotype in its pictures and examples.

The best aid in most lessons is the one learners handle themselves. A model passed around teaches more than the same model held up at the front.

The textbook

The syllabus takes a definite line: the textbook is one resource, not the syllabus. It is written for an average learner who does not exist, and it cannot know the local context. A teacher is expected to supplement it, reorder it, and sometimes argue with it — and to use the classroom's own multilingual resources, the languages the children bring, as material rather than interference.

ICT

What it usefully does: shows what cannot be brought into a room (a volcano, a heart beating, a distant city), allows simulation and repetition, gives access to material in several languages, supports children with disabilities, and helps a teacher prepare and record.

What the syllabus is careful about:

• ICT is a tool, not a method. A video watched passively is a lecture on a screen.
• It does not replace direct experience. A simulation of a plant growing is not a substitute for growing one when growing one is possible.
• Access is unequal, so teaching that depends on devices at home excludes some children.
• It requires critical use: material found online needs checking, and learners need to be taught to check it.

Lesson planning

A lesson plan is a teacher's thinking made explicit before the lesson, not a document to be submitted.

Objectives that can be observed

The usable form states what the learner will be able to do — because that is what can be checked.

• Weak: "to teach the water cycle", "students will understand fractions". Neither can be observed.
• Usable: "learners will be able to label the stages of the water cycle and explain what drives each", "learners will be able to compare two fractions with unlike denominators and justify which is greater".

Bloom's taxonomy (revised) gives the ladder: remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create. The complaint the syllabus makes is that most planning stops at the first two. Its three domains — cognitive, affective, psychomotor — are also examinable.

The parts of a plan

Class, subject, topic, duration; previous knowledge assumed; objectives; teaching-learning materials; introduction; presentation in steps with the teacher's and learners' activity; questions to be asked; blackboard work; evaluation; recapitulation; and homework or follow-up.

Two structures the paper names

Herbartian steps: preparation (linking to previous knowledge), presentation, comparison and association, generalisation, application, recapitulation. Traditional and teacher-led, but still asked.

The 5E model, which fits the constructivist position better: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate. Note the order — learners explore before the teacher explains, which is the whole point, and the commonest way the model is got wrong.

A plan is a plan, not a script. Adjusting it because of what the class actually does is good teaching, not failure.

Microteaching

A training technique, developed at Stanford in the 1960s, for practising one teaching skill at a time under simplified conditions.

Scaled down on every dimension:

	Ordinary class	Microteaching
Duration	35–45 minutes	about 5–10 minutes
Learners	30–40	about 5–10
Content	A full topic	A small unit
Skills practised	Many at once	One

The cycle: plan → teach → feedback → re-plan → re-teach → re-feedback. The feedback, immediate and specific, is what makes it work; without it the exercise is only a short lesson.

Skills commonly practised: introducing a lesson, questioning (including probing questions), explaining, illustrating with examples, stimulus variation, reinforcement, blackboard writing, and closure.

Its value is that a complex performance is broken into parts that can each be improved; its limitation is that a real class is not the sum of isolated skills, which is why it is training, not teaching.

A question of the kind the paper sets

A teacher plans a lesson on air pressure. Which is the best-framed objective?

The distractors will include "to explain air pressure to the students", "to complete the chapter on air", and "students will know about air pressure". The first two describe what the teacher will do; the third uses a verb — know — that cannot be observed.

The expected answer describes an observable learner performance: "learners will be able to demonstrate that air exerts pressure using a simple activity and explain the observation." You could watch a class and tell whether it had happened, which is the test of a well-framed objective.

Mistakes that cost marks here

• Quoting the retention percentages attached to Dale's cone as research findings. They are not.
• Writing objectives in terms of what the teacher will do, or with unobservable verbs such as know and understand.
• Putting Explain before Explore in the 5E model.
• Treating microteaching as a short ordinary lesson. It is one skill, with a feedback and re-teach cycle.
• Treating ICT or an expensive aid as good teaching in itself.
• Treating the textbook as the syllabus rather than as one resource.

In one line

Aids, devices, plans and practice are all instruments — judged only by whether the learner understood something they would not otherwise have understood.

In the classroom

Before preparing any aid, finish this sentence: at the end of this lesson, a learner who understood will be able to ______. If the blank cannot be filled with something you could watch a child do, the lesson has no objective yet, and no amount of material will supply one.