The OER4Schools programme is a school-based teacher professional development programme initiated in Zambia around 2010 and later expanded to other countries such as Zambia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.
OER4Schools in Zambia
OER4Schools aimed to improve the quality of education in sub-Saharan Africa through research and teacher professional development. The programme developed substantial open materials for work-based teacher education (OER4Schools), including self-paced elements.
Through our research in Zambia, we developed a practical professional development (PD) programme for school-based teacher education, supporting teachers to embed interactive methods of teaching and learning into classroom practice through the exploitation of mobile technologies. It moves beyond technology and skills-focused initiatives by highlighting the crucial role of teacher support in promoting innovation and experimentation with teaching styles.
Our overall goal is to focus on learning, meeting the challenge of moving away from superficial repetition of facts towards deeper learning and understanding. We aim to develop teachers’ capability to use tablets, netbooks, e-book readers, Open Educational Resources (OER), and Open Source software effectively to support students’ learning in mathematics and science through active participation, dialogue, and collaborative enquiry.
Our participatory approach especially values the ‘voices’ of everybody involved. The research is founded on principles of effective pedagogy in teacher education and classroom teaching in sub-Saharan Africa. The professional learning programme is suitable for low-resourced primary schools and colleges (combined with teaching practice) and is freely available as an OER.
The resource consists of 28 two-hour sessions, organised in five units, covering interactive teaching principles, group work, questioning, dialogue, Assessment for Learning, and enquiry-based learning. Each session is clearly structured and includes unique, professionally filmed video exemplars of interactive practices in Zambian and South African classrooms, accompanying texts co-authored with teachers, and facilitator notes. It builds on an established, sustained teacher-led process for sharing and trialing new practices and digital resources; peer observation; discussion, and joint reflection.
Publications about OER4Schools are available in our evidence library.
ANTSIT (Zambia)
The ANTSIT report is available in our evidence library.
ORBIT (UK)
Transforming Teacher Education and Learning (Ghana)
The school-based approach of OER4Schools was re-used in the TRANSFORMING TEACHER EDUCATION AND LEARNING (GHANA) programme in Ghana. The extensive materials from the programme are available here.
Mpumelelo High School (Zimbabwe) & FHNW Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz
The programme was adapted for a secondary school in Zimbabwe, as part of an educational technology-enabled programme.
- Publications
- Resources
- See more of OER4SCHOOL in our Evidence Library
