Millions of teachers worldwide need help to improve the quality of teaching and learning. There aren’t enough ‘expert’ trainers to meet this need directly, and cascade training doesn’t work - ideas and practices get lost in transmission. Teachers need to see real life examples of how they can make teaching and learning more effective through small changes that make a big difference.
The Trainer in your Pocket replaces ineffective one-off workshops with ongoing support to improve teaching. Teachers use authentic videos, available on their phones, to improve their teaching in a specific subject or stage of learning. They see teachers like themselves, their classrooms, and students in the videos and a narrator highlights what the teacher in the video is doing differently and how this impacts learning.
Teachers use the videos whenever they like, at home or at work, on their own and with peer teachers.
Government policies often foresee regular teacher development meetings at a school or between schools. The Trainer in your Pocket makes these meetings effective by inspiring teachers with new ideas.
Under English in Action (www.eiabd.com), authentic video was used by 54,000 English Language teachers teaching 8 million students across Bangladesh. Students’ ability to communicate in basic English rose from 36% to 70% and from 40% to 80% at primary and secondary level.
The Trainer in your Pocket spread from Bangladesh to India, Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
In India, two years after project end, the videos have 10,000 weekly YouTube views.
Zambia’s teachers use the videos on their phones linked to Raspberry Pis during Teacher Group Meetings (TGM), prior to planning classroom activities. As a result, TGMs are more frequent and attended.
In Zimbabwe, #WeAreStory uses participatory video storytelling by teachers to share authentic classroom practices with other teachers (e.g. on assessing learning, pair work).
We aim to embed the Trainer in your Pocket across teacher education programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia & the United Arab Emirates in the areas of Early Childhood Education, Foundational Literacy, Numeracy, Metacognition and Science.
It’s crucial to provide teachers with examples of classroom practice that they can identify with, be inspired by, and learn from. All that’s required are teachers willing to explore how to improve teaching and learning, academic advisors to coach them, and a narrator to guide other teachers in applying variants of these practices with their own learners.
Contact tom.power@open.ac.uk for more info
