Celebrating 5 years...

...of Things Education.

Hello all. Welcome to the 146th edition of TEPS Weekly!

Things Education is now 5 years old. YES! We have passed a huge milestone for a bootstrapped startup! We have reached your inboxes every Friday with ‘something useful’ from various branches of school education for another year. The newsletter in its 4th year now, focused on Classroom Management, Pedagogical Content Knowledge, Assessments, Foundation Learning and Teacher Wellness. We also wrote about integrating art, value education, design thinking and socio-emotional learning into everyday teaching.

We were (and still are) working with a number of schools on different aspects of Classroom Management – we worked with teachers and wrote about the different approaches to classroom management, then we went deeper into behavioural management and also espoused the idea of restorative practices practices to preempt student behaviour and manage classrooms more efficiently. We saw the role of Thinking Routines in classroom management, as well.

Pedagogical Knowledge is my knowledge (or skill) of teaching – irrespective of the content, do I know how to teach? Will I be able to call upon different scaffolding techniques or pedagogical approaches? On the other hand, Content Knowledge is my expertise in a subject. Pedagogical Content Knowledge combines these two and asks if I know the best way to teach a specific topic. It combines subject expertise and depth of knowledge with knowing the best way to teach the topic to the given cohort of students. 

In the last year, we wrote about why and how History or Grammar teaching need not be boring for students and that Mathematics does not need to be scary for students and that English literature can be made relatable. Also, have you noticed that sometimes Physics is unintuitive, or at least what we learn in Physics goes against our lived experiences? We wrote on how we can leverage this to create conflict in students’ minds and subsequently scaffold so that students achieve deep understanding. Also, subjects like Economics and Sustainability may appear to be dry information on pages, but when we can show that topics in these subjects are directly linked to the students’ day-to-day life, they come alive. We wrote about how to do this within the parameters of a school curriculum and timetable.

One important component of teaching and learning is assessment of student understanding. And this begins with assessments which are inter-leaved with the process of teaching. For example, observation-based assessments – what does this mean, is this only meant for foundational years, what type of structure helps in such assessments? With CSBE’s push toward competency-based assessments, a lot of schools want to move their assessment to align with CBSE’s guidelines. But for that it is essential to understand what competency-based learning is, and then we can focus on competency-based assessments. We also wrote on the art and science of making good multiple-choice questions and long-answer questions along with their rubrics.

In the field of foundational learning, we tried to share our thoughts on a variety of topics that we had not previously written on – like what form STEM takes in foundational learning or how to set up a library specifically for the needs of students (and teachers) in the foundational years. We also wrote about how learners can be supported at home beyond mindlessly filling in worksheets. 

Another new area we wrote about last year was reading and writing beyond the foundational years. This is something that we have been working on with a bunch of teachers for almost a year now. However, the most unique frontier we have opened at Things Education has been on teacher wellness and mindsets – expect a lot more on this in the upcoming editions. This year we focussed on why teachers may not be happy in their current roles, or why their salaries need deeper investigation, or what it means to have agency and choice as a teacher.

We have been asked multiple times how we write on such diverse topics and with such depth. The answer is two-fold: one, we write about topics that we are actively working on. Most of the topics that we write on, our team is working on them either as part of a consultancy with schools, or while creating a curriculum which integrates value education, SEL and design thinking into the existing curriculum, or while creating assessments question banks for various state education boards. Secondly, we have a team with expertise in various different areas and that also shines through in our newsletter. 

Thank you for your continued support of TEPS Weekly! See you again in the new year!! In the meantime, we have more than 80 online, self-paced courses available on TEPS Courses. See if any of them could help you or someone you know.

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Edition: 5.01