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Teacher Resource Centre

Displaying 1 - 11 of 11

  • 2023

Pedagogies of Belonging: Educators Building Welcoming Communities in Settings of Conflict and Migration

What would it take to ensure that all young people have access to learning that enables them to feel a sense of belonging and prepares them to help build more peaceful and equitable futures? This is a question we have found educators in contexts of conflict and migration ask of themselves each day. And each day, in classrooms around the world, educators are acting in response to this question.

Educators are figuring out what to teach, ways to teach, and how to foster relationships of learning and belonging.

We learn from educators how they create space for dissent, for dialogue, for trust, for new identities, for future-building, and how they envision and build newly imagined and welcoming communities.

Pedagogies of belonging, featured in this book and in its title, emerge from these ways of thinking and acting by educators. We see across educators that what they teach, how they teach, and why they teach in the ways they do come together to enable all young people to feel a sense of belonging and prepare them to help build more peaceful and equitable futures.

This book is about educators and for educators. It is about the practices educators have developed to create welcoming communities in settings of conflict and migration. Each chapter is a “microportrait” of one educator who we have come to know by spending time in their classroom and school.

We focus on the why and the how of practices educators use. We show, through text and art, how educators learn about their students’ experiences, needs, and desires. We describe how educators develop practices to meet these learning and belonging goals. And we recognize how educators address struggles that necessarily arise in this work. We hope the practices give us each ideas to try out in our own classrooms, schools, and other educational sites.

Each microportrait is grounded in research about educator practices. Authors of the microportraits came to know the educators through research projects that included interviews, observations, and sometimes participatory methods. Each project was at least a few months and at times spanned many years. The microportraits include links to articles that can support deeper learning about the contexts and practices of the educators.

This book is a collective project, and we welcome your participation. The intention of this book is that it lives and grows to include more microportraits over time and more patterns of practices that may emerge. Please be in touch with suggestions, to share your experiences with the practices of these educators, or to contribute a microportrait to the collection.

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  • 2019

Research Methods: Developing your research design

This MESHGuide is designed to provide teachers with practical strategies to develop interesting and relevant research questions and to formulate a research design to engage in research-informed practice in their school or setting.

This MESHGuide draws on a range of key literature in the field of social science research, and it has been informed by lessons learned from the author's research. The guide aims to help teachers to:

  • understand the purpose of a research design
  • understand the significance of formulating a research question
  • develop the initial focus of your research by exploring different potential starting points for this
  • understand different ways of categorising research questions
  • identify the characteristics of good research questions and apply these in practice
  • develop and evaluate your own research questions
  • operationalize your research aim so that you can develop appropriate research tools to answer your research questions by developing question-method connections in your own research
  • improve your research data through understanding the nature of validity and reliability and exploration factors that could impact on these 
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  • 2019

Research Methods: Doing a literature review

This guide is designed to help teachers to:

  • understand how to use other people’s writing to inform their own research;
  • develop a strategy for carrying out a search of the literature;
  • organise the themes logically;
  • evaluate the research they read;
  • think about the features of a reflective literature review and explore how to achieve this in practice

This MESHGuide draws on a range of key literature in the field of social science research. Also its design has been informed by lessons learned from the author's research, which has focused on the following areas:

  • developing effective collaborative learning in science
  • factors influencing learning through play in the early years
  • student teachers’ engagement with research and its impact on their developing practice
  • constructivist informed practice in science within initial teacher education
  • creativity in learning and teaching.
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  • 2019

Research Methods- Considering Ethics in your research

This MESHGuide draws on a range of key literature in the field of social science research ethics. It is designed to help teachers to:

  • Understand the significance of ethical concerns in the research process
  • Identify the nature of the ethical issues that may be of significance in the design and implementation of their research
  • Develop their research design in a way that takes into account ethical considerations, so that their research is as ethical as possible
  • Understand the complexity of the process of gaining informed consent and enable them to achieve this
  • Reflect on the complexity of research ethics
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  • 2020

Active Teaching and Learning Manual

The Active Teaching and Learning booklet presents the principles and practices of learner centered pedagogy as a teaching approach to achieve quality education. It is accompanied by cards on methods, techniques and tools, which provide teachers with examples and tips for classroom implementation. The booklet was developed by the Teacher Instructor Education Training department of the Ministry of Education, Science Technology and Sports of Uganda, with support from the Belgian Development Agency, in the framework of the Teacher Training and Education project.

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  • 2021

Mathematics lesson starters for Grade 3 learners

A set of teacher guides containing each 6 Mental Mathematics Lesson Starter units for Grade 3 learners, in alignment with the South African curriculum. A different calculation strategy is in focus in each unit. These calculation strategies are taken from the curriculum. Each unit covers a particular group of connected skills, and the aim is to move learners on from counting in ones on their fingers or with tally marks on paper.

Each unit is three weeks long; it begins and ends with a short test for the learners. Marking these tests provides information for the teacher and the learners about how much they have improved in using that particular set of skills during the three weeks. Within each unit, the focus is on three types of calculations: fluency, strategic calculating and strategic thinking.

Working through the Lesson Starters in each unit should lead to improvements in learners’ performance from the pre to post-tests. These improvements show progress in mental mathematics skills and number sense.

The guide is available in 11 official languages of South Africa.

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  • 2022

Putting PIRLS to use in classrooms across the globe. Evidence-based contributions for teaching reading comprehension in a multilingual context

This book aims to bridge the gap between science and practice and help teachers transform the latest scientific insights regarding reading comprehension into didactic guidelines to use in everyday practice for all students. It consists of two parts:  Part I, Reading Comprehension: From Research to Practical Teaching Guidelines, comprises three chapters and discusses the teaching of reading comprehension in general. In Part II, Teaching Reading Comprehension in a Multilingual Classroom, the focus is on multilingual students.

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