Dear friends, let me take the opportunity here to share with you with greater detail my impressions from the brief visit to Sebata Special Needs CTE that the REB organized for us last week. You will recall the five-day training on implementing the competency-based curriculum that I delivered in March to about six lecturers and deans from all 13 CTEs in Oromia. They followed up by cascading the same training to all lecturers across these same colleges. The purpose of the visit was to observe how the competency-based methods I presented have now translated into classroom instruction.
Quite simply, I was amazed. They were implementing many of the methods I had shared. Briefly, among the things I loved from the three lessons I observed – English, ECD, and Calculus – were the following:
• Seating the teacher trainees in small groups, actively prompting them to come up with their own solutions or answers, or even questions, and then to consult with each other to check their work and understanding, agreeing on their responses
• Engaging the teacher trainees to learn and understand the lesson’s concepts and then to apply the concepts practically
• Following the practical application with shared reflections on how the experience might influence them to refine how they define or characterize the concept
• Passing from group to group while they work, alone and together, on the learning task, engaging both individuals and full groups, in turn, to answer questions, check their understanding of both the concept and the task, and to check and provide feedback on their reflections and responses
• Providing a multitude of examples of how the concept translates into meaningful practice
• Selecting a rich range of learning tasks by which to demonstrate, practice, assess, and solidify the teacher trainees’ understanding of the lesson’s content and learning objectives
• Remaining quiet while the teacher trainees work on their learning tasks (this is something teachers routinely have enormous difficulty doing, including me 😊)
• Using humor to create a joyous learning atmosphere and to diminish the common barriers between teachers and students
At the same time, I took the opportunity to make the following recommendations:
1. It will be useful for each class to identify the strategies and behaviors that group members should use and exhibit to achieve the greatest small group learning – What are the strategies and behaviors of effective collaboration?
2. Rather than the instructors’ providing all the lists, examples, and practice applications of a lesson’s topic, give the small groups the chance to produce these first, perhaps competing for the list with the most items and with the most items that no other group has also identified
3. Follow up the small group’s contributions first by asking the other groups to Confirm – Correct – Complete their responses and then by Confirming – Correcting – Completing, as the instructor, the responses on which the whole class agreed
4. Let the members of the class produce their own tasks – calculations, sentences, questions, etc. – for a peer to perform in the groups, then for another peer to correct, and then for all to review and agree on
5. Give teacher trainees the chance in their small groups to create their own activity-based, learner-centered lesson plan or scheme with which to teach the topic to their own future students
These recommendations do not in any way undo my excitement for what I saw. If the few lessons I saw were truly representative of all the lessons at Sebata CTE and, hopefully, at all the region’s CTEs, primary education in the region can only change, for the better; that is if we also train, supervise, and support the cluster supervisors and school leaders so that they don’t undo what the CTEs are doing. My hope is to repeat the Oromia CTE training for the other regions’ CTE instructors soon.
