A Professional Learning Community Approach for Teacher Development and OER creation - A toolkit/PLC-OER model of TPD
Programmes must build on the principle of creating ‘spaces’ for sharing of experiences of communities of teachers among themselves, to build stronger shared professional basis of individual experiences and ideas. Giving teachers a space to develop and hear their own voices is of utmost importance.
- National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education, 2010 (NCFTE)
Since teacher education is accepted as the most important factor in quality of school education, the first priority for ICT integration in education, should be in teacher education. The aim of such integration should be to achieve the aims of teacher education, and be based on the principles of teacher education, as envisioned in NCFTE and other documents.
Subject Teacher Forum program
The Professional Learning Community (PLC) approach to TPD evolved out of the Subject Teacher Forum program (STF) in-service teacher education program, in Karnataka and Telangana, which was designed and implemented by Centre for Education and Technology, IT for Change in partnership with the education departments of both states. The model focused on building professional learning communities, using FOSS digital applications for e-content creation, subject-teaching and networking.
The Karnataka STF (2011-16) developed the capacities of 20,000+ Mathematics, Science, Social Science, English and Kannada teachers across 4,500 government high schools, built the bi-lingual Karnataka Open Educational Resources repository and contributed to curriculum revisions and e-learning courses. Teachers have exchanged resources and experiences on the mailing lists and on several mobile phone based learning communities, most deal with academic issues and resources. The academic resources from 150,000+ emails shared in the forums, have been published on the Karnataka Open Educational Resources (KOER) web portal. KOER contains 8,000+ web page teacher created resources and 4,000+ files for Mathematics, Science and Social Science subjects in English and Kannada languages.
In Telangana STF (2015-ongoing), ITfC developed ICT textbook as per NCERT ICT Curriculum and the Telangana Repository of Open Educational Resources. 1,500+ teachers are members of virtual professional networks, learning to integrate ICT for professional development, e-content creation and subject-teaching.
Components of the PLC-OER model
The model has the following components:
- Teacher capacity building to integrate ICT in the following areas
- Digital literacy
- Using generic and subject based applications for creation and revision of Open Educational Resources
- Subject teaching
- Participating in virtual professional learning communities
- Development of the state Open Educational Resources repository and creation, revision and curation of Open Educational Resources and publishing on this state repository
- Development of student 'text book' and teacher hand book for ICT integration
- Blended learning courses for teachers
These tool-kit discusses the design and implementation of each of these components