This course is offered through the National
Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA).
The course exposes teachers at Grades 4 - 6
to the teaching of environmental science in the
National Standards Curriculum (NSC).
Participants will learn about the natural
environment be exposed to tools and
strategies for planning and delivering the
content associated with environmental science.
The course, Teaching to Reach Boys, exposes participants to instructional approaches that encourage boys to learn and effective strategies for building the confidence of boys. The course provides concrete examples of pedagogy and instructional strategies that have been proven to be effective at engaging boys. Participants in the course will identify underlying principles to be observed when designing lessons for boys and will use these principles to develop and examine boy-friendly lessons and learning activities.
The course is opened to all teachers, though those who teach at the upper primary or secondary level are particularly encouraged to participate. The course will adopt a task-based or a collaborative learning approach - participants will work in small groups to develop authentic learning activities that could be used to engage boys. The major learning from the course will be derived from the process of developing, reviewing and reflecting on these boy-friendly tasks.
Participants will be expected to complete all aspects of the course assessment in order to receive a certificate of competence. Teachers who complete the course will be invited to implement an Action Research in their school/classroom for an additional certification.
Throughout the course, we will:- Examine the differences between boys and girls and what these mean for teachers.
- Explore teaching strategies that can be used to engage boys effectively.
- Identify activities and opportunities to enrich the curriculum that boys experience.
- Look at the nature of the classroom environment that enables the optimal engagement of boys.
The diversity of skills, talents, and interests of students that we serve in our schools requires a remarkable range of teachers’ time, resources and competence.
In order to accommodate the needs of students across many different levels of academic achievement, teachers have been encouraged to make an effort to differentiate their instruction.
However, teachers often struggle to implement differentiation in a sustainable manner – the effort to facilitate differentiation for one day is hard to routinize across multiple lessons. This course looks at easy-to-use strategies to acknowledge and accommodate student differences.
During the course, we will:
- Examine different strategies for making differentiation sustainable
- Identify and exploit entry points for differentiating instruction
- Develop and apply 'look fors' in effective differentiation.
Reluctant learners have the capacity to achieve more but lack either the confidence, interest, motivation or organizational skills to make the effort.
This course has been designed to help teachers develop and implement strategies, classroom structures and systems to improve reluctant learners' levels of academic interest, motivational drive and success orientation.
The design of the course is consistent with the view that "The students are not the problem. They are struggling with the problem." There are 3 core beliefs that drive the course:
- Every reluctant learner is struggling with an underlying challenge. They are not simply 'rude and disobedient' or 'lazy and talkative'.
- Students become victims of the challenges they cannot properly navigate. Failure to navigate personal, social and academic challenges cause students to become reluctant learners.
- How we see reluctant learners - whether as 'rude and disobedient' or as 'victims' of the challenges they cannot navigate will determine how we plan for them.
This 4-module course is offered primarily asynchronously (10 hours) with 2 hours of synchronous engagement.