SUBJECT SPECIFIC PEDAGOGIES

A Handbook for FF Faculty

Page 1 of 123
 Preface

Read in the name of thy lord who created, He created man from a clot of blood
Read and thy lord is most bounteous, who taught by the pen, taught man what he knew
not……

This handbook contains all of the information, support and tools teachers will need to
implement "Student Centered Teaching & Learning Strategies‖ in their classroom. It has
proven methodologies and techniques that can bring positive change in students'
knowledge, skills and attitudes.

The handbook supports teachers in four essential ways:

1. Practical ideas and methods to teach different subjects
2. Teaching resources and supports for teachers.
3. Interactive activities and daily life application of the subject and topic
4. Assessment tools to measure students' knowledge, skills and attitudes

This book also guides teachers in learning about and applying assessment for learning
(formative assessment) sensibly to serve student learning and improvement in teaching
practices. We believe in the power of the assessment for learning process as a tool to
assist and empower students in learning and to encourage them in the process. While
the book focuses on building teachers‘ skills in the use of formative assessment, most
importantly it provides effective strategies for building habits that serve teaching and
learning. The book centers on instructional strategies and assessment. Here we guide
development and use of strategies for gathering and using information in ways that
serve daily instruction and encourage strong working relationships between students
and teachers and among students themselves.

Finally, in keeping with our intention to help you grow in your teaching skills, we seek
your feedback. As you read this book and apply its ideas, please note which ideas work
best, what you find problematic, and what alternative strategies can apply, and let us
know. This book also is a work in progress. We know that with your input it can be
improved.

Together we can make a difference!

IE&T Department

Page 2 of 123
Table of Content

Page 3 of 123
 EFFECTIVE TEACHING STRATEGIES

Teachers needs to ensure that whatever students learn prepares them not only to do
well in examinations, but successfully face the challenges of a global society, and
develop their social consciousness to the extent that they become the agents of social
change. In order to achieve this objective teachers need to adopt innovative
instructional strategies.

Avoiding the spoon-feeding style of traditional classroom teaching, the strategies should
intellectually engage the students‘ degrees of interests, abilities and styles of learning,
strengthen their power of reasoning and stimulate their active participation through
different activities and exercises.

Lecture
Lectures must be well-planned, problem-oriented and accompanied by the use of
appropriate diagrams, photos, graphics, chart, etc. These can also be displayed by an
overhead or multimedia projector if possible and wherever available.

Lectures should not be one sided. In order to make a lecture interactive and keep
students engaged, the teacher should from time to time ask questions. The student
should also be encouraged to ask questions which may be answered by the teacher or
directed to other students inviting them to answer. This strategy is highly effective as
students participate equally, practice social skills, and individually demonstrate what
they have learned from their partners.

Discussion
Discussion is yet another important form of group interaction which yields a number of
benefits to the students. It increases their knowledge of the topic and provides them
with an opportunity to explore a variety of views which in turn help them to examine their
assumptions in the light of different perspectives. It also strengthens their
communicative skills and familiarizes them with the art of academic discourse. In
planning a discussion, the teacher should review the material and choose such a topic
builds upon the contents the students have recently covered and allows them enough
room to come up with innovative ideas. It should not be merely a repetition of the facts
they have learned from their books or the teacher‘s lecture.

All students should be given equal opportunity to participate and contribute in the
discussion and by putting probing questions, such as ―Why do you think so?‖ and ―Can
you elaborate further?‖, etc, they should be encouraged to come up with appropriate

Page 4 of 123
answers. All discussions should be summarized briefly and precisely, identifying the
questions for further inquiry and discussion.

Cooperative Learning
Cooperative learning is one of the most important strategies in which students work
together in small groups or pairs to maximize their own and each others‘ learning.
Improved self-esteem, increased on-task time, increased higher order thinking, better
understanding of material, ability to work in collaboration with others and improved
attitude towards school and teachers, are some of the more prominent benefits of
cooperative learning. Besides, it creates opportunities for students to use and master
social skills necessary for living productive and satisfying lives.

Inquiry / Investigation
Inquiry/investigation is a process of framing questions, gathering and analyzing
information and drawing conclusions from it. There are a number of steps in conducting
an inquiry, for example:
1. The teacher may choose a topic and have students frame inquiry questions(s)
based on the topic, for instance, What were the factors leading to the Muslim
demand for Pakistan?
2. Students formulate a hypothesis, i.e. provide possible explanation or educated
guesses in answer to the question, for instance, Economic, social, political and
cultural suppression of Muslims led to demand for Pakistan.
3. Students plan the inquiry. For example: What is the best place to find information
on the topic? /What is the best way to gather data? How to allocate time? Whom
to consult?
4. Help students locate information/gather data. For example: Read books on
Pakistani history, society and culture; visit a museum; search the intern et.
(depending on the availability of facilities)
5. Student record information as they find it. For example: Students using books
should note main idea and support evidence (note down the reference for future
use) or students can record the interview of a community member.
6. Help students evaluate their findings and draw conclusions. Students may look
for relationships in the information gathered, analyze the information and try to
find an answer to the query. Teach them to support their opinions evidence from
their data.
7. Have students communicate their findings in creative ways, written, oral and
visual. For example, as a poster, article, talk show, role-play, PowerPoint
presentation or presentations on charts or even the blackboard.
8. Encourage student to suggest possible action based on findings, if required by
the theme. Select actions that are doable. Look at possible consequences of

Page 5 of 123
 each action, Choose the best action. For example: Write a letter to the
government to build a monument in the area to commemorate the contribution of
the local population for the creation of Pakistan.
9. Make an action plan and carry out the action. For example: Write the letter.

To conclude, these strategies besides promoting academic achievements would enable

students to explore a range of views on a topic, gather information, answer question,
improve their problem-solving and communicative skills and teach them how to work as
a team. It will also increase higher order thinking and improve their attitude towards self-
learning and the environment.

Page 6 of 123
 Core Teaching Methodologies / Basic Teaching Techniques

1. Appreciation: Appreciation plays an important role in effective learning. It has been

proved to be an valuable tool for continuous motivation. Appreciation should be an
integral part of all activities i.e. at every stage of lesson teacher must appreciate
children excessively. Appreciation will be part of every activity/ Model Lesson.
During and after the completion of activities teacher will tell the children for clapping
or if any child answers question even then the teacher will ask the whole class for
clapping and making ―Stars‖ on hands, face and note book of the children.

2. Brainstorming can be used to encourage creativity, generate a lot of ideas very

quickly, solve a specific problem, answer a question, introduce a new subject,
arouse their interest and determine what they already know and project possible
endings for an unfinished story.
o Steps involved in Brainstorming
• Decide on the issue you want to brainstorm
• Form it into a question which will have many possible answers
• Ask students to contribute their ideas
• Write the ideas where everyone can see them
• Read them back to the children
• Encourage everyone to contribute
• Do not judge the ideas as you write them down, only give your ideas to
facilitate the students
• Ask the child to clarify a vague suggestion
• Creative suggestions are the most useful and interesting!
• Stop the brainstorming when ideas are running out

3. Sight Word Vocabulary: Sight words are important to the reading process. Sight
words are the words that readers recognize by their appearance. Early readers
should be exposed to the concept of the sight words to enhance vocabulary and
reading speed. These are the words which a person must be able to recognize
without actually reading them. Sight words are learned in the course of everyday life.
It is important that an emerging reader develops a store of sight words. The larger
the fund store of sight words a child has the more rapidly and fluently he or she can
read.
Ways to expand sight words vocabulary:
o The sight words must be shown and spoken properly to the children. They
must ―look‖ at the pointed words when they are spoken.
o Write the sight word on the flash cards.

Page 7 of 123
 o Locate the sight word in book, stories or newspaper.
o Use as many senses (sight, hearing, speaking) as possible to learn sight
words.
o The teacher should use the word in a sentence to provide a context for
learning the word.
A developing reader can build an amazingly large bank of sight words. It is as
thought the person takes a snapshot of a word in his or her mind and can match it to
the word when encountered in reading. Teaching sight words is an instructional
strategy that is important to the reading process. Teacher must introduce & display
1-5 words per week as sight words.

4. Asking Question: Questioning will be used as one of the core teaching

methodologies. These will be used as tool for organizing the already available
information with children into meaningful thinking pattern (concept formation) and to
develop mental abilities of the children.
Model lessons will be devised in a way to provide guidelines to teachers for using
the question tool as every stage i.e. to stimulate child‘s sense of curiosity, to get a
clear idea about the learning achievements of children, to ensure 100%
participation of children, to improve observation skills of children etc. Classroom
activities will be designed to encourage teachers to ask from children and
encouraging children to ask questions, which should provide opportunities foe
acquisition of new knowledge.
An important thing to be noted is that ‗it is not essential to get a right answer from
children on first attempt but to sensitize and encourage them so that they THINK.
They can learn right answer, if they have started THINKING and have developed the
sense of observation and curiosity.

5. Story Telling: story telling is a very useful tool for enabling children to acquire
academic skills, life skills and for providing basis for inculcating social norms in
children. Story telling combined with asking questions during the process has proved
to be a high impact tool for development of thinking process of target age children. It
is also very easy to capture the attention of children by using this tool. It can be
utilized in many ways e.g. telling stories by teacher, making story from key word
given by the teacher or suggested by the children, telling stories by the children to
the group / whole class. Benefits of story telling are
• It addresses the needs of students with different learning styles
• It provides opportunities for cooperative learning and building social skills .
• It builds motivation for reading and writing and give experience for speaking and
listening
• Effectively develops listening skills

Page 8 of 123
 • Motivates hard to reach students, they participate more and learn more when
storytelling is involved in the unit.
• They stretch the audience‘s attention span and their imagination, teaching the
audience etiquette and the important concept of knowing when to listen quietly
and when to listen actively by joining in.
• Improves vocabulary, which in turn improves
sight reading
• Improves their comprehension by re-telling and interpreting the story.
• Recall basic facts, names, places, and the order of events;
– summarize the story
– explain the main idea behind the story
– interpret the moral of the story/ predict the end of the story
– problem solving
– compare and contrast various characters in the story
– Gives students role models to follow
– Develops empathy , understanding and tolerance by exposing listeners to
a variety by providing new information
– Gives children the material / new information

6. Drawing: Drawing is another important tool, which not only captures the attention of
children quite easily by, also provides opening for children to think creative by
means of presenting unusual elements/variables. It helps to develop observation,
cooperation skills, imagination, creativity and feelings of empathy for people in the
pictures. Pictures of the objects in the lesson, pictures of the specific objects put in
front of the class by the teacher and tell the children to draw this. Activities designed
using this tool may include, telling children to draw and colour an object which may
be present, they may also draw objects which may not be present in front of them.
This exercise will help to enhance/enrich imagination, creativity and observation
skills. Benefits of drawing are
• To enhance their observation
• To encourage creativity and imagination
• To develop skills to describe something and the other child draws it.
• To improve their expression in drawing

7. Role Play: A role-play is a little drama played by the students. It aims to dramatize
unfamiliar circumstances / events to students. Role-playing plays very important role
in learning, especially for young children. They get an opportunity to practically
experience situations and feelings in a simulated and safe environment. Activities
will be designed for children to act/perform situations where they practice social
norms and develop cognitive and life skills. Teachers will ensure participation of all

Page 9 of 123
 children in such activities. It is very important to develop characters and role
according to the abilities and maturity of the largest group children. While giving
situations to children for role playing activities focus should be more on real life
situations.
o Why use role-play?
 To improve understanding of a situation
 To encourage empathy towards those who are in it
 To practice/ develop social attitudes and norms
o Conducting a role-play
 Identify the learning, which the role play will illustrate.
 Decide on the situation, characters & number of participating
students
 Encourage maximum participation, specially the shy students.
 Group the shy students with the confident ones.
 Take students‘ input about the situation and their roles
o During the role-play, it might be useful to stop the action at a critical
point and ask the participants and the observers about what is happening.
o After the role-play, it is important that students reflect on the activity, to
make it a meaningful learning experience.
o When planning a role-play, be sure to leave time at the end to reinforce
the purpose and learning points of the activity.

8. Projects/Practical Assignments: Projects/assignments should be used for

providing children with chances for practical implementation of the
concepts/knowledge acquired through regular classroom activities.
Activities will be designed, wherever deems necessary, for assigning practical
assignments to children where they use the principles/themes learned in the class
room e.g. establishing a bazaar in the school where children become the
shopkeepers and buyers and use the pieces of paper as currency, making a map for
roads in the school yard with artificial traffic signals and footpath and explaining to
other children how to observe traffic rules etc. (this may also use role playing where
children act as cars and other vehicles) Projects/assignments may be used as
homework.

9. Songs, Poems, Jokes and Riddles: Activities will be designed to convey the
theme/concepts through songs, poems jokes and riddles, keeping in fore the mental
abilities of the target age children. This may include Hamd, Naat, folksongs, national
songs, from text books, collected from children magazines, new papers etc. Children
will also be facilitated and encouraged to write songs, poems jokes and riddles in the
classroom and as homework.

Page 10 of 123
 o Riddles develop
• curiosity
• skill of analyzing information in the process of finding an answer
• critical thinking
• the ability to think and solve problems
• Tell the riddle slowly and in simple words so that children can think
• Use facial expressions, hand movements as you tell the riddle.
• Ask the students to raise their hands to answer
• Ask the children to decide if the answer is correct
• Give all children a chance to participate
• Hold group competitions to decide which group can guess most riddles
• Ask children to tell riddles

o Poem
By reciting poems
• Children‘s musical intelligence is enhanced and language is developed
• Children learn to express themselves in a different way
• Children‘s vocabulary is developed
• Children‘s imagination is developed
• Read poems with a rhythm
• Pause between verses
• Use a clear voice
• Use simple words
• Make sure the children listen with concentration
• Attract individual attention by inviting children to join in and looking and
smiling at them

10. Model Making: Students make clay, card or wooden models of the objects, suitable
for homework at weekend. This activity uses the same philosophy as elaborated
under projects/assignment.

11. Talking about pictures with the lessons: Discussing and taking about the pictures
provides opportunities for developing communication skills, observation skills, logical
relationship amongst different objects presented in the picture. The pictures which
come with the lesson, almost always, carry the theme of the lesson. Pro-activate,
ask questions from children to make them learn the theme by answering back and
talking about the picture. After some practice children should be encouraged
themselves to ask questions about pictures.
This activity if done with the pictures taken from different magazines, newspapers,
supplementary reading materials, cartoons, hocus-focus (puzzle books) etc, will very

Page 11 of 123
 easily catch the interest of the children and help them learn range of cognitive and
life skills.

12. Working In Pairs & Groups: Dividing the class into pairs or groups gives students
more opportunities for participating and cooperating. It can be useful to:
• generate ideas quickly
• help the students to relate personal experiences with the classroom learning.
• Organize groups according to ability, mixed ability, friendship, mechanical, etc.
• Decide on the group leader &
• assign other roles where necessary
• Explain the role expectations/ task/time management clearly.
• Seating arrangements should facilitate communication and visibility.
• Discourage unproductive noise.
o Pairs & Groups Working
• Stand back, but be available.
• Allow group and pair discussions
• Interrupt only to clarify a misunderstanding of work or to redirect if the
group loses focus.
• Circulate in the class.
• Encourage groups to get them going
• Remember- Students are more likely to stop work when you approach
expecting support & correction.
o Pairs & Groups Reporting
• It might be necessary for groups to
– report their work to the whole class
– involve reporting a decision,
– summarize a discussion
– give the information about the group discussion.
– Remember - The group must know at the start that they have to
select someone for report back.
o Evaluating pair/group work
Ask students
• what they did
• what they learned

13. Educational Games: Activities will be designed in the form of games to facilitate
learning process e.g. children use to play book-cricket I.e. that they open the book
and use the extreme right digit on the page number as score for the shot and the
page numbers with zero at the end claimed the wicket of the player.

Page 12 of 123
 COGNITIVE MAPS / GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS

A map is a useful guide to where we are and where we whish to go. A map is a useful
geographical tool. It is a way of making our thinking about space and location visible,
showing us the interrelationships of places. We carry within us many mental maps that
help us find our way round the locations we know and locations where we have never
been. Maps can be pictorial or made with symbols (usually printed maps are both
pictorial and symbolic). Maps can also be made out of words, ideas and concepts.
These can be called cognitive maps, and they can be powerful tools for learning.
Cognitive maps go under a variety of names. They are known as concept mapping,
semantic mapping, knowledge mapping, word webbing, networking, clustering, mind-
maps, think links, idea branches, structured overviews or graphic organizers. All such
processes that involve the diagramming of thinking can be called cognitive maps.
Cognitive maps attempt, visually and graphically, to portray a relationship of ideas or
concepts. They are sometimes called concept maps because identifying key words and
concepts makes it easier for us to use language, not only to make study notes but also
in thinking, learning and remembering.
Memory is primarily a process of making links, connections and associations between
new information and existing patterns of knowledge. Memory depends in large part on
key words and key concepts that, when properly remembered, are transferred from
short-term memory into long-term memory. It is through the linking of information to
existing patterns of knowledge that we create new forms of understanding. If we cannot
identify key words and concepts, and have not created patterns of understanding then
our understanding and our memory become fragmentary- we have not grasped things,
we have not created an effective map. In a sense all our knowledge is fragmentary, our
understandings are partial. Like in fifteenth-century maps of the world there may be
large areas of ignorance and incomprehension in our understanding of things. However,
there is some terra firma, some firm foundations in our knowledge. We can show this by
making our thinking visible through words, numbers, pictures etc and through mapping
concept words.

Why concept words, and not sentences?

We have become so used to speaking and writing in sentences that we could easily
assume that sentence structure is the best way of learning and remembering verbal
images and ideas. In recalling information we rarely use a word-for-word verbatim
process, we do not re-read from memory what we have learnt. This would be a very
long and demanding process It would be like having to learn and remember play-scripts
all the time. We are able to access to many memories because all we need is to
remember the key ideas, words or images and we re-create what we remember from
these. When people describe a story, event or idea they usually extract the key

Page 13 of 123
elements and weave them into a fresh re-creation. Exceptions to this are when specific
scripts have been learnt, as in joke-telling- though often here memory will rely on key
phrases and images, and the tale will vary in the telling. This is why gossip (and many
sorts of news-gathering) is often unreliable in its details. Memory is selective and
episodic. We can research this with children through the use of memory games.
The world is filled with a rich multiplicity of objects and experiences. We make order out
the world through transforming our perceptions (what we see, hear, feel etc) into
concepts (words and ideas).We are greatly helped in this process by sharing our
experiences and ideas with others. A concept is an organizing idea, it is an abstraction
that pulls together a lot of facts, attempting to make sense of them by organizing them
into categories or classes. Concepts help us to classify and order thoughts and
experiences, providing the labels that we give to these patterns of ideas. For instance,
the scientific taxonomy (category system) for animals on our planet uses concepts such
as class, order, family and species to organize our thinking about the creatures we have
identified. Concepts group certain facts together to make distinctions and relationships
between things. They express patterns of similarities and differences that organize and
help to explain experience. They are constructions of the human mind that enable us to
make sense of and to learn from experience.

Concepts are the labels we give for ideas that may be simple, such as dog and cat, or
that may have complex layers of meaning, such as democracy and revolution. To
understand a concept well, it is not sufficient to be given a dictionary or textbook
definition. Many concepts have a variety of definitions that help explain the meaning of
the ideas contained in the word. Another key aspect of understanding a concept is to be
able to see what is and what not an example of it is. Skilled teachers combine these two
processes of giving explanations and examples with a third process- that of helping the
child to come to a communicative understanding of the concept.
Explanations are important since children often have an incomplete grasp of what adults
mean when they give a label to things. Examples are important, for children will often
misapply concepts, such as the young child who calls geese and swans ‗ducks‘
because they are duck-shaped. We do not know, however, even after careful
explanations and examples whether a concept has been assimilated into a child‘s wider
knowledge the world until we ask the child to represent and to share what they know
Creating a thinking map (or concept map) is one way of representing and
communicating their understanding of concepts.

Page 14 of 123
 Higher brain Lower limbic
(concepts) brain (perception)

Perceptual categorization
(sensing) LEARNING

Conceptual categorization
(reflecting)

Communicative understanding
(reporting)

The understanding of a concept can vary enormously between children. What the
concept of a colour or number is to a three-year old is very different to what it is to a ten-
year old. A nursery teacher may talk of a child ‗knowing his colours‘ when he knows, for
example, what is green. The older child will have a fuller understanding of what green is
such as it can be made from yellow and blue, and knows many more examples of
‗greenness‘. He may know that green is also an abstract term referring to environmental
issues. However, his understanding may not be perfect. He may find it difficult to identify
green in a painting of the sea, or know that green can be a symbol of jealously. So
learning a concept is not an ‗all or nothing‘ process, it is the building up of successive
approximations, of finer distinctions, of a widening network of related ideas, of coming
closer to the common understandings of a culture and to the knowledge structure of
experts. We increase our understanding by constructing and developing a wider
network of meanings.
We make meaning by creating links between words and ideas. We learn more by
making more links, by exploring and by testing links.

Concept Development
Vygotsky identified two levels of concept development. The first level is where concepts
are spontaneously developed through perceptual and practical experience in everyday
activity. These concepts are developed through rich experiences, but they are
unsystematic and relate to particular human contexts. The higher level is ‗scientific‘
concepts which are theoretical and structured, and depend on the use of language and
learning. Concepts are either:
 Spontaneous: learned through direct sensory experience such as learning what an
orange is through touch, taste, sight etc, or

Page 15 of 123
 Scientific: abstracted from experience and learned through language for example,
that all oranges have certain common dements such as roundness.
Scientific or abstract concepts are powerful because they can be applied to different
contexts and fields of learning. They can be translated into increased abstraction,
awareness and control of thought. These more advanced concepts can easily be cut off
from experience and become unconnected with the concepts of everyday life. Hence
the need for explanation – explanation from others (learning) and explanation to others
(communication). The use of examples helps to embed knowledge in a human context.
The use of explanation linked to examples is inductive reasoning and the basis of
scientific method.
There are different levels of explanation, for example:
 Labeling: giving no explanation, ‗things just are‘ e.g this is an orange.
 Enumerating: giving odd facts, ‗this is what they are‘ e.g. there are oranges in
shops.
 Making a link: pairing contiguous ideas e.g. ‗oranges grow on trees‘
 Identifying common characteristics: e.g. similarities oranges are round, have an
orange colour, have pips etc.
 Identifying concepts as belonging to a class: knowing class name e.g. oranges are
fruit food.
 Identifying concepts as belonging to a pattern or hierarchy of concepts: relating to
other classes e.g. orange as fruit/food/plant/living thing.
 Identifying concepts as relating to other patterns of concepts: identifying
similarities/differences with other classes e.g. orange related to linguistic,
mathematical, scientific, historical, geographical, economic and other conceptual
patterns.
Piaget argued that concepts are organized into ‗schemas‘ or ‗models‘ which are mental
representations of things or ideas, and it is through these that we process information.
For Piaget, cognitive development was very much to do with conceptual development,
and this was often best achieved through cognitive conflict when our existing concepts
or schemas are challenged and our existing ideas disturbed. To learn is to change.
Cognitive development must entail some change, some re-arrangement or enlargement
of the conceptual structure. It is these conceptual structures that underlie skills and
understanding. Cognitive mapping is one way that we can try to make visible a
conceptual structure, not simply to see what it is, but to process it, to challenge it and to
help enlarge it.
Concepts change and become more complex over time, and this process of conceptual
development is helped by sharing our understandings and being challenged by the
thoughts of others. One way of sharing an understanding of a concept is to list
characteristics, and compare, contrast or discuss our ideas with others. For this any
concept can be chosen- one that is in the news one that is under study, one chosen by
a child and so on. It can be a simple concept like ‗tree‘ or ‗wet‘, or something more
complex like ‗anger‘ or ‗democracy‘.

Page 16 of 123
Concept Mapping
How do you introduce children to the language of concepts? One way is to describe
concepts as any word that means something, for example names of people, places,
things, events, ideas. It can help to say that a concept is a word which you can picture
in the mind, not a linking word like ‗and‘, ‗but‘ or ‗here‘. We might say that a concept
word has some connotation – it means something. Some words have no connotation,
they merely act as connectors with other words for example ‗the‘, ‗an‘, ‗and‘. It is not
always clear what a concept word is ,or if a fixed meaning can be given to all, or any,
words. Must all concepts be clear and open to definition, or are some concepts ‗fuzzy‘
and never fully defined? Who defines what words or concepts mean? Philosophers
have argued about the nature of concepts for centuries. Children too can partake in this
discussion, at their own level and for the purpose of coming to their own understanding.
The best way to begin introducing concept maps to children is to construct some of your
own, first with general topics such as animals or vehicles, then with topics of study in
school. The mapping of a subject should help you to think more clearly about it. When
you have practiced the process you may wish to introduce your pupils to the process.
One way of generating initial concept maps with children is set out below.

Generating initial concept maps

1. Invite children to close their eyes and ask them if they can see a picture in their
mind when you say a familiar word for an object such as dog, chair or grass.
Print these on the board and ask children for more examples.
2. Children now close their eyes and see a picture while you say an event word
such as raining, running or painting. Ask children for more examples, and write
them on the board.
3. Explain that words have meaning for us if we can see them as pictures in the
mind. Try a few unfamiliar words to see if they can picture them in the mind. (If
you have bilingual pupils you might try to introduce a few familiar ‗foreign‘ words
to show that people use different labels for the same meaning).
4. Introduce the word ‗concept‘ and explain it is a way of describing a word that can
be pictured in the mind. Review some words on the board to see if they are
concept words.
5. Write some linking words such as the, is, are, when, that, then. Ask if these
words bring pictures to the mind. Explain that these are not concept words but
words that link concepts in sentences. Ask for more examples of linking words.
6. Ask the children to read some sentences from a book and to identify the concept
words and linking words.
7. Ask children to pick a concept word, and begin to list information brain-storm)
about the word as a preparation for making their own concept maps.

In a concept map (or mind-map) a key word or concept is one that is linked to many
others, and serves as a focal point for making connection with other parts in the pattern.
A key concept in the study of nature might be ‗animal‘ or ‗plant‘ and each of these could

Page 17 of 123
be linked to a family of related concepts. A pattern working out from the centre of a main
idea has number of advantages in that:-
 The central, main or key idea is clearly defined
 The relative importance of ideas can be clearly shown by being highlighted or put
nearer the centre.
 Links between ideas can be clearly shown
 Visual patterning allow for easy overview and review
 The structure is provisional and organic, allowing for additions and adaptations.
 The open-ended nature of the process encourages the making of connections
between ideas.
 Each pattern is individual and unique, making it easier to remember, recall and
repeat.
The first stage is often the brainstorming of ideas and connections. An important feature
of thinking maps is that the connecting ideas are made explicit, either through
discussion or through being written along the line that connects the concept words. It is
the making of connections visible or explicit that differentiates thinking maps from the
simple brainstorming of ideas. The process can be an important aid to learning. Once it
has been tried in a class or group with others it can become a learning tools to be used
whenever needed and for a variety of purposes. What purposes can this think-mapping
serve?

The Purposes of Cognitive Mapping

Cognitive mapping can serve a number of purposes. Three of the main aims or
purposes of making thinking visible though cognitive mapping (think mapping, mind
mapping or concept mapping) are:
 To explore what we know: identifying the key concepts, showing links between
ideas and making a meaningful pattern out of what we know and understand.
 To help planning: as an aid to planning an activity or project by organizing and
grouping ideas and showing links between them.
 To aid evaluation: helping the evaluation of experience or knowledge through a
process of reflection on the key elements of what we know or have done.
Cognitive maps can provide children with a means to articulate their ideas. They provide
a tool for planning and assessing or evaluating what they know. They stimulate active
thinking, develop cognitive skills of analysis, categorization and synthesis and provide a
visual means for communication and evaluation. A major benefit of mapping is that we
can use this practical, visually oriented strategy within the context of any topic in the
school curriculum. There are a number of different map structures that can help
students to represent and organize what they know and can find out. Mapping
strategies can allow teachers to cover topics in greater depth, where meanings can be
found and created in an organized and ongoing way. A map design can be displayed on
a board or transferred onto a transparency and projected onto a screen, that can be
viewed, adapted and developed over time. Mapping provides a framework which can be

Page 18 of 123
added to over time. Mapping provides a whole language framework in which all the
areas of language skill- speaking, listening, reading and writing can be used in
meaningful ways.
Rather than supporting a passive teaching/learning environment, mapping encourages
children to be actively engaged in thinking, to elaborate and build on ideas. They not
only receive information, but need to rethink it, interpret it and relate it to their schemas
of understanding. Mapping can help information flow to, from and among pupils and
teachers. Most importantly children learn a procedure for investigating visualizing and
organizing information. learning to organize ideas is an important pre-writing strategy
and is an important study skill in helping to understand the structure of any text they
read? . Mapping can be used in all curriculum areas. In addition, with mapping pupils
and teachers

Illustrations Lotion names Habitats

Desert wider
country’s

Types cobra Food diet

patron
SNAKES:

Anatomy
Antidote Pigments
Bones structure
etc

FANGS Killing Methods

Venom constriction
Forward middle room
back

Have the opportunity to use computers to reinforce the skills of both mapping and of
learning curriculum content; because mapping is a highly visual and spatial activity, the
computer is an excellent medium to display a network of visual information. What then
are the forms that think mapping can take?

Forms of Mapping
A map visually consists of any arrangement of shapes such as boxes, circles,
rectangles, triangles etc, connected by lines and/or arrows drawn between and among
the figures. The map conceptually contains verbal information within and between the
shapes to create a pattern or relationships of ideas. The aim of the map is to show how
the whole topic in question can be portrayed. There are several forms that this mapping
can take.

Page 19 of 123
Hierarchical concept mapping
Simple concept maps create a semantic web from a simple idea or key concept. A more
advanced strategy is to map concepts into a hierarchical form. A hierarchical concept
map show pupils how to represent a hierarchy on ideas within a given topic and to show
the relationships between them. Research shows that children as young as five years
can create hierarchical concept maps of a simple kind, but it is not usually until around
ten years that children produce maps that show quality and complexity of thinking and it
is around this age that some teachers have found group work on hierarchical concept
mapping to be most beneficial.

Graphic Organizers
Children should be introduced to a variety of ways of organizing information in graphs
form. In having experience of different ways of mapping information they will have a
means of processing any information for better understanding, but also will be able to
utilize their preferred way of making thinking maps. Research shows that there is no
one way that is best or which suits all people. Some prefer a linear arrangement, some
geometric forms others more free flowing organic structures. This has a lot to do with
individual learning style, as well as the experience of the learner. Which ways of
organizing thinking have you tried? Which suit you best?

Graphic organizers and other forms of cognitive mapping can provide a good focus for
co-operative learning and can engage students in the shared processing of information
and ideas in many ways.

Teaching Children to Learn

Whole

Part Part Part Part

Spider chart or
web
Part/whole relationships web

Sequence Sequencing or ranking

Chain web Chain web

Page 20 of 123
 Grouping in sets (Venn diagram)

Chain web
Linking
Chain
web

Sets Networking
Chai Chain web
n
Ways in which graphic organizers can help students include:-
web
 Using cognitive mapping as a group activity to create a common frame of
reference for thinking.
 Using a cognitive map as a tangible outcome of group discussion.

Cognitive mapping will not only help students to remember more, and provide
opportunities for ‗higher order‘ processing of information, it also provides opportunities
for shared and co-operative thinking that can be both stimulating and enjoyable. The
use of cognitive mapping can teach students how to shape, organize and communicate
their thinking. As one child put it: ‗I like seeing what I think and I like seeing what others
think‘. Another added: ‗It is easier to show what you think than to say what you think‘; A
third said: ‗It gives you a chance to see what you think first and to think about it
afterwards‘. Wherever they want to go, or whatever they need to learn knowing how to
make a map could help them to find their way.

Summary
Cognitive mapping can be a powerful aid to memory, understanding and concept
development. Concepts are organizing ideas that help us make sense of the world, and
a child‘s learning is developed through organizing information and ideas into patterns
and frameworks of understanding. Graphic organizers and other cognitive mapping
strategies help students to represent thinking in visual form, to depict relationships
between facts and concepts, and relate new information to prior knowledge. Mapping
can take many forms and be used to support a wide range of contexts for learning.

Page 21 of 123
Cognitive mapping can also provide a focus for group discussion and be a means to
facilitate co-operative learning.

Page 22 of 123
 Role of School / Class Soft boards in Teaching – Learning Process

Teachers are under a great deal of pressure in the busy school day, and some
feel that they haven‘t got time for display or that it is simply not worth the effort.
However, concern for the environment has never been greater and display plays
a vitally important part in the education of our children. The conditions and
surroundings in which we live have a tremendous effect on our mood, efficiently
to make the very best of resources that we have.

Every teacher knows the thrilled reaction of children to strange new things
imaginatively displayed. Such stimulating visual experiences can help to develop
aesthetic sensibilities whilst extending general knowledge. New points of interest
can form the basis of much thought, speech and expression in various media,
such poetry, drawing, painting and modeling, as well as more research into the
subject, and possibly a scientific study.

Display is used to provide stimulus, set an example and show children‘s work off
to its best advantage to be admired. There are times, however when work which
may be a child‘s best effort, needs to be well presented to be properly
appreciated by all. Having said that, even a masterpiece will look better, if it
displayed attractively.

If you feel that you haven‘t a flare for display, don‘t worry. It is true that some
people have a gift for selecting colour, line, shape, and so on, but all of us can
learn through trial and error to develop an idea of what is best for the purpose
and occasion. What you do need is the ability to be inventive, to adapt ideas to
suit your own purpose. Be on the look-out for display ideas in other classrooms,
schools, shops, exhibitions and on television. You may spot a colour, shape or
textural idea which is just right for your current topic. Collect trifles and unusual
odds and ends to make a display store, and above all be open to suggestion.

The children can and should be involved in most display work around school,
particularly in the discussion stage, when they can be part of the exchange of
ideas and t he decision-making. Neatness and attention to the detail of layout are
part of good practice in all children‘s work, and the craftsmanship involved in the
mounting and presentation of work for displays can be taught from infants
onwards.

Page 23 of 123
It is vitally important that the teacher draws the children‘s attention to displays
around school, so that they will learn to observe as well as be involved in their
own environment and, not least, be appreciative of others‘ effort. Above all,
display is a teaching aid, and there should be one or two items which can be
handled and many that contain children‘s work.

The Purpose of Display - Basic Principles

What is the point of display? Isn‘t it just a waste of time and money? These are
the questions that lurk at the back of many teachers‘ minds. One aim of this
section is to try to answer these questions‘ minds. One aim of this section is
important and how it can be done well without too much expenditure of time or
money.

Why Do We Have Soft Boards

Softboards play a crucial role in promoting teaching and learning in schools.
They are a very effective resource and teaching aid.
The main and only function of the softboard is to give information. The nature of
information differs for different levels and situations.
Softboards give an insight into the school functioning and should be updated
regularly and projects where softboards are out dated or not properly maintained
clearly indicates lack of monitoring skills of the administration.

Displays should aim to:

 Make the Environment Attractive - Displays can add colour, textures,
variety and order; to areas which would otherwise be drab.
 Communicate Ideas and Information Clearly - By careful planning and
selection of materials, ‗thematic‘ or ‗special interest‘ displays should help
children to understand more about the subject.
 Stimulate Interest and Questioning - A display can sometimes act as a
starting point for a particular area of investigation. Children studying a display
are encouraged to ask questions and seek solutions. Displays can also act as
vital link between the end of one programme of work and the start of the
another.
 Show Appreciation of Children‟s Work - Good display acknowledges the
value of work well done and the satisfaction which is to be derived from
thoughtful and deft presentation. By displaying a child‘s work you are
demonstrating your interest and approval. This can improve your relationship
with him and also that between the child and his peers.
 Respond to the Interests of the Children - And acknowledged their many
and varied contributions to learning. The teacher has a responsibility to

Page 24 of 123
 children to display, in context and with sensitivity, the objects of interest the
bring into school and any related work.
 Reflects the General Ethos of the School - By showing that pupils are
encouraged to take an interest in their immediate environment and gain an
awareness of the world beyond school.
 Display in the primary school often reflects the interests of the children at
given time, this may be connected to any aspect of the curriculum such as a
seasonal display of topic work.
Drawings, painting, prints or rubbings, together with written work, are usually
presented as 2 – D displays, but models, constructions, man-made or natural
objects require different display techniques because of their 3 –D nature.

All work which is to be mounted for display needs to be considered in the

following ways; the materials chosen, the colours selected and the method of
mounting to be used.
An untrimmed, unmounted, unlabelled piece of work fixed by a drawing pin does
not give the impression of a caring teacher.
Since bright colours or brightly patterned backgrounds tend to distract from the
work to be displayed, it is best to use neutral colours, such as pale, blue, gray,
and fawn, black and white. Wherever possible, the colour for the mount should
pick up one of the colours in the piece of work. This often works much better than
a colour contrast as is provides a good balance for the display. It is good idea to
consider the overall colour effect when starting any display.

Important steps of maintaining softboards:

 Softboards should be planned appropriately keeping in view the age and
class level of the students. Ideas of the softboards must be approved by
the principal/vice principal.
 Softboards should be covered with the cloth (any colour) or can be
painted. Avoid using glaze or crepe paper as it does not last for a longer
period. Wherever required, cover the softboards with talc sheet for better
presentation and protection of resource material. If softboard is not
available, paint a boundary to mark the area and paste your displays in it.
 The handwriting on the softboards should be of appropriate size. Only
stencil should be used. Running hand must never be used for writing
information on softboards.
 The handwriting on the softboards should be legible and preferably in print
form. Avoid using block letter in sentences.
 The information should be precise with attractive illustrations.

Page 25 of 123
  The softboards should be fixed at a medium height; should either be too
high or too low.
 Softboards should be updated / changed regularly.
 Softboards should be artistically / attractively displayed.

Labeling and Lettering

The labeling for any display should be clear and concise; the form of lettering
used will largely depend on the nature of the display. It can be used to instruct,
warn, advise, control, inform, direct, identify, persuade, announce, decorate,
remind, advertise, commemorate and command.

The title of the display should be in a large bold block letters to announce what
the display is all about. Large wooden templates are available in both capital and
lower-case letter. These are invaluable for making signs and headings easily and
quickly. Whichever style you use, the spacing and setting out of the letters is very
important so that they can be read easily and understood.

For younger children is best to do all learning on labels in the style of the reading
scheme they are using, which is usually rounded script.

Guidelines for Using a Black/Whiteboard Effectively

 White/ Blackboard is one of the inexpensive teaching aids available in our
classrooms.
 Effective usage of board reflects the teacher's mastery of the classroom and in most
cases, where there's a shortage of aids and tools used within the classroom. Board
is responsible for the success of a lesson / a teacher or for the total failure.
 First, when the teacher writes clearly the students will have a great chance to
assimilate the lesson better without any confusion. They will write down as
clearly as the board is. Hence, there will be no SPELLING problems.
 Second, the students will familiarize themselves with CLEARNESS and
TIDINESS. Resultantly, they will care for their notebooks. Therefore, teachers
must develop effective work presentation habits in notebooks among
students by practicing proper layout and tidiness on board.
 Third, the board is the teacher's FACE. It reflects the teacher's seriousness and
assiduity.
 Board must be divided into two / three parts for explanation (through diagrams,
labeling, & graphic organizers), writing notes, summarizing the topic, assigning tasks
and reinforcing oral instructions (through crosswords, quizzes, or puzzles).
 One way of dividing the blackboard is the H model, which effectively divides the
board into four.

Page 26 of 123
  Write clearly. The writing should be large.
 Write in a straight line.
 Stand in a way that does not hide the board.
 Talk as you write. Involve the class even more, by sometime asking the students
to suggest what to write.
 Clean the board at the start of the lesson
 Involve the students as much as possible in following things for example
 Talk to the students as you are writing and turn round frequently to face
them.
 Ask the students what to write as often as possible and get examples from
them.
 Ask them what they think this work or picture is going to be.
 Get them to read things as you write them.
 Ask them to spell the difficult words for you.
 When writing try standing on the right of the board as the students see it.
This helps you in writing in the straight lines.
 Organize the material effectively so that students can easily understand what you
are trying to do. If necessary, number items that goes together.
 Leave only the correct forms on the board. Do not allow the students to look at a
wrong from for the whole period because they may become more familiar with it than
the correct form.
 Erase the board frequently. Do not leave a mess of material on the board. Much of
the chaotic and untidy work on boards can be avoided if the work is planned in
advance and included as part of the lesson plans. There are various ways of dividing
it up.
 Use coloured chalk/markers for special effect as colourful and attractive board
motivates students for meaningful learning and fosters the students to care for their
notebooks.
 Watch your own spelling and punctuation for correctness.
 Use what is on the board for summarizing at the end of the lessons

Page 27 of 123
 TEACHING ENGLISH

What Language Really Is?

Language is actually a basic Communication Skill. We all have been speaking our
native language since we were between age of one and two but we have done so with
little or no conscious thought on our part. Many of us would find it difficult or even
impossible to explain what we do when we speak our language. The language scientists
have been very active in this field of knowledge for the last several decades. They have
not yet found all the answers to questions about language but they have enough of
them already to point to new directions in Teaching and Learning a Language. Some of
the results which their research has revealed are stated in brief as follows:
a. All normal people in the world can speak.
b. No group of people without a spoken language has ever been discovered.
c. The language is universal. All normal human beings in a community
understand and speak well enough to carry out every activity of human life.
d. Many of these same people cannot read or write yet they are able enough to
communicate.
e. Every language in the world is rich enough and sufficiently complete for its
speakers to carry out their daily activities.
f. When the need arises, expressions can be borrowed from other languages or
can be coined with the elements of the existing language.
For these reasons, the spoken language is considered primary. It is considered primary
also because people learn to speak their native language several years before. They
learn to read and write. The writing is thus considered a secondary system, derived
from speech. Usually, we write much less in a day as compared to the amount of
speaking we do. Even as we write, we always think first of how we would say what we
are pitting down on paper.

The Definition of Language:

Language is defined as a series of sounds usually strung together in groups which
convey meanings to listeners. Scientifically speaking, language is a system of arbitrary,
vocal symbols which permit all people in a given culture or other people who have learnt
the system of that culture, to communicate or to interact.
The various components of this definition of language need explanation:
Every language operates within its own system i.e. its own recurring patterns or
arrangements which are meaningful to the speakers. The sounds which are used to
form words, which in turn, are used in speech utterances, are always arranged in
particular ways or deigns which convey the same meaning to all speakers of the
language.

Page 28 of 123
Every language has its own arbitrary symbols or words to express the meanings of an
object or an idea. Thus each language operates within its own system. Vocal means
that we make sounds with our mouth, using the tongue, the teeth and the lips. We also
use other organs such as the vocal cords and the lungs simply produce air for the
subsequent production of sounds.
The words communicate and interact signify to understand and to speak; to be able to
hear and to respond or react to spoken words. They also imply the ability to talk about
something that happened in past, that is happening in present time, or that may happen
at some time in the future.

Origin / Evolution and Function of Language:

If there is one thing upon which all linguists are fully agreed, it is that the problem of the
origin of human speech is still unsolved. Many kinds of theories have been put forward.
Some are traditional and mystical, like the legends prevailing among many primitive
groups that language was a gift from the gods. Other theories may be described as
quasi-scientific. One hypothesis, originally sponsored by Darwin, is to the fact that
speech was in origin nothing but mouth pantomime, in which the vocal organs
unconsciously attempted to mimic gestures by the hands.
The ancient Greek philosophers, who gave some tension to the problem of the origin of
the language, were led by their speculations. Some of them held that language had
come into being out of ―inherent necessity‖ or ―nature‖, while others believe it had arisen
by ―convention‖ or ―agreement‖. How this agreement had been reached by people who
had no previous means of mutual understanding, they did not explain.
In the past, numbers of attempts were made to isolate children before they begin talking
to see whether they would evolve a language of their own. In recent cases of children
who had reportedly grown among wolves, dogs or monkeys have shown that the human
child, though ignorant of human language when found, takes to it readily and with
seeming pleasure, something that his animal playmates are incapable of doing.
Animal cries, whether we choose to describe them as language or not, are
characterized by invariability and monotony. Dogs have been barking, cats mewing,
lions roaring and donkeys braying in the same fashion since time immemorial. Human
language, in contrast with animal cries, displays infinite variability, both in time and
space. Activity and change may be described as the essence of all living languages.
The language is an expression of human activity, and as human activity is forever
changing, the language even changes with it. It seems that the language changes least
rapidly when its speakers are isolated from other communities, and most rapidly when
they come across foreign people at the cross roads of the world. Whether much or little,
all languages change in due course of time.
Two different modes of change in language are recognized. The change may arise very
gradually, almost imperceptibly, and we as gradually and unconsciously adopted by the

Page 29 of 123
speakers; or it may arise suddenly, as the result of an innovation made by one speaker
who has prestige in the community and is, therefore, widely imitated.
It is estimated by scientists that some ten thousand of years elapsed between its
beginning of society and art (and probably speech) and the first appearance of the
writing. During these long centuries, the language continued to evolve, but we have no
record of that evolution. The oldest languages of Indo-European families of which we
have records are Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, in the order given. The approximate dates
for each are 2000, 1400 and 500 B.C. respectively.
As for the speech of infants, observers are still unable to agree in their views. However,
no view helps us in solving the problem of the origin of speech, save for what concerns
the baby‘s obvious limitation of the language sounds. It is very difficult to explain the
process of association of sounds and sound sequences with ideas and concepts which
seem basic to the human language. If all that is needed for language is the process of
imitation, why do cats and dogs who have been living with us and observing us for
many centuries, fail to imitate our language when we imitate theirs so well.
The main function of language is communication or transfer of meaning. Usually we
think of language as something spoken or written, but there are many other forms or
devices which man has been using for communication. In our day to day life many times
it happens that there exists no interchange of language, spoken or written.
There has however been an interchange of meaning, a transfer of significant concepts.
Thus communication can be classified as Linguistic/Non-Linguistic, Verbal/Non-Verbal.
It may adopt the forms of inter-individual or intra-individual communication.

Components of Language:
Mastery of language depends upon three factors:
Phonetics: The mastery of phonetics of a foreign language requires from students
acute aural and functional sensitivity, which is the basic for distinguishing characteristic
sounds (phonemes) of a foreign language. The students must learn to recognize
accurately the sounds of a foreign language by ear and to reproduce them correctly.
Psychology says that both aural and functional sensitivity are perfected by long training.
The teacher of a foreign language must skillfully recognize the difficulties which pupils
meet and which are connected with the assimilation of phonetic peculiarities.

Some students are distinguished from the outset by poor aural sensitivity and are
therefore unable to catch the subtle differences between the sounds of native language
and of the foreign language and also between similar sounds in the foreign language
itself. It is quite wrong to consider such students incapable of assimilating the phonetic
system of the language studied. On the contrary, they should be specially trained in the
perception of sounds, since training is always accompanied by an increase of
sensitivity.

Page 30 of 123
Other students, well able to catch phonetic distinctions by ear, have extra ordinary
difficulty in reproducing sounds correctly i.e. they have a bad and incorrect
pronunciation. In such a case, too, one must not consider the pupils incapable of
assimilating phonetics. Knowing that functional sensitivity also requires training and the
teacher must more frequently encourage such students to practice the pronunciation of
individual sounds and the whole words and sentences.
―Students must possess sharp aural and functional sensitivity to master the phonetics of
a foreign language. Thus they will be able to distinguish the characteristic sound of the
language. Poor aural and functional sensitivity of the students results in bad and
incorrect pronunciation. This sensitivity can be improved by appropriate training and
adequate practice.‖
Vocabulary: The direct link between the vocabulary of a foreign language and the
thought process of students is the most important. Usually, the teachers of a foreign
language reduce the semantic aspect of a word to what is called its ‗contextual
meaning‘ confining themselves to its translation. Psychology helps the teacher to
understand that the meaning of a word is not the same thing as the category of
reasoning with which the word is connected.

What corresponds to a word in a person‘s reasoning is a concept which is expressed by

the word. The concept and meaning of the word are closely linked but they are not the
same thing. So, to bring to the students‘ attention only the contextual meaning of the
words is to leave them in almost total ignorance of the concept which is actually
expressed by the word in a foreign language.
In order to successfully reveal to the students the semantics of foreign words, the
teacher must have a good knowledge of the psychological characteristics of the process
of forming concepts, of the different kinds of inter-relations between concepts, etc. For
instance when stating that the English word ‗Clash‘ has four meanings (to make loud
noise by striking, to meet and fight, to occur at the same time, to be in disagreement),
the teacher must try to convey a concept corresponding to this word which can be
explained as ‗striking of one thing against another‘.
If he does not get students to understand the concepts expressed by the words of a
foreign language, the teacher will find his pupils confusing the meanings of individual
words and using them wrongly, e.g. ‗sink‘ instead of ‗drown‘, ‗see‘ instead of ‗look‘,
‗season‘ instead of ‗weather‘ etc.
―A foreign language teacher usually gives the students the translation or the contextual
meaning of a word. Psychology helps him/her to distinguish between the meaning of the
word and its concept, which are closely linked. The teacher should know the
psychological characteristics of the process of forming concepts of the difference
between concepts and ideas and of inter-relations between concepts.‖

Page 31 of 123
Grammar: The teaching of grammar also requires the use of psychology. From a
psychological point of view, it is important to distinguish between:
i. Knowledge of grammatical rules.
ii. The practical skills involved in using appropriate grammatical constructions in
speech or writing.
The first will always be conscious while the second requires an automatic reaction
accompanied by the formation of a feeling for a language.
The teacher of a foreign language must have a clear impression of the inter-relations
between knowledge, acquired abilities and habits. Despite the psychological fact that
habits are only formed by repeatedly carrying out the appropriate action, some
language teachers in schools wrongly suppose that a direct transition from knowledge
to habits is possible.
This is not the case. So the students with a good knowledge of grammar are sometimes
incapable of applying it in speech and writing. In order to obtain from pupils, the
necessary automatic approach to using and building grammatical constructions, the
teacher must have a clear impression of the habit forming process and the
psychological nature of feeling for language.
―The psychology helps the teacher in distinguishing between knowledge of grammatical
rules and the practical skills involved in using proper grammatical constructions in
speech or writing. A foreign language teacher must have good knowledge of the inter-
relations between knowledge, acquired, abilities and habits. He should know about the
habit-forming process and the nature of feeling for language.‖
English Language – An Introduction:
 English is the most widely spoken language in the world.
 English has spread around the world since 1500 years.
 Initially, Great Britain‘s were the only ones who used to speak English.
 Today most people who grow up learning English, live in: Australia, Canada,
Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia.
 Some people who live in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and many African
countries speak English as well as their own native languages.
 Some English words are hundreds of years old. These include; woman, man,
sun, hand, love, go, eat, etc.
 A number of languages from different groups of people have combined to
form modern English. Examples:
g. ―Algebra, Sash‖ are Arabic words.
h. ―Fashion, Lieutenant, Bouquet, Pioneer, Apart‖ are taken from
French.
i. ―Piano, Bravo, Bravado, Vanilla‖ are Spanish words.
j. ―Minus, License, Aquatic‖ are Latin Words.
k. ―Tantamount, Pizza, Scherzo (Joke)‖ are Italian Words.

Page 32 of 123
 l. ―Yacht (yot)‖ is a Dutch word.
m. ―Cardigan, Alphabet, Dermatology‖ are Greek Words.
n. ―Fizzer (Failure), Brumby (Partly tamed horse)‖ are Australian
words.
o. ―Verandah‖ is borrowed from Urdu/Hindi.

2. Various Languages Spoken in Pakistan:

PAKISTANI NATIONALS

Speak as their Mother Language

Urdu Sindhi

Punjabi Pushto

Balochi Saraiki

Other Languages

Speak as a Second Language

Urdu English
Other Regional Languages

Status of English Language:

STATUS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE

National Language Foreign Language

Second Language

The Privileged Position of English Complex Position of English in Pakistan

Reasons for Privileged Position of English in Pakistan:

1. Medium of International 2. Storage of Knowledge 3. Language of Higher
Communication Education

4. Storage of Standard 5. Language of Diplomacy 6. Language of Commerce and

Terminology Industry

7. Means of Keeping Pace with 8. Means of Promoting 9. Market Value of English

Page 33 of 123
Modern Developments International Understanding

10. Overall Importance of English Language in Educational Set up

1. Medium of International Communication - Today, English is considered as the
most important and widely spoken language in the world. It is the most extensively
used language of the common wealth countries, the US/UK, Canada, The African
States and many other countries of Europe, America and Asia. According to an
estimate, more than half of the world directly makes use of English.
Rapid means of transportation have conquered time and space, with the result that it
takes very little time to reach various parts of the world. In the absence of an
effective medium of global communication, the tourists and travelers find themselves
in great difficulty. Before some international medium of communication is evolved
English serves the purpose best.
2. Storage of Knowledge – The knowledge has been rapidly increasing in the present
age due to the work of scholars and scientists all over the world. Most of them
present the results of their research in English.
Fresh knowledge in every field of life is constantly appearing in books and journals
published in English language, English has also a great literature which is
continuously expanding in quantity and quality. Besides, all the great books of the
world have been translated into English. To be able to read these books is a
valuable experience.
3. Language of Higher Education - English is the language of higher education in
Pakistan and for the Pakistani students abroad. It is still the medium of instruction for
the scientific and technical subjects. For professions like medicine, Engineering and
Agriculture and in all the branches of higher scientific work, knowledge of English
language is very essential.
4. Storage of Standard Terminology - The standard terminologies in all sciences and
technology are available in English. If we translate them into our national language,
new words will have to be coined which are not in actual use in the language and do
not serve the purpose in the scientific world.
The great scientific advance in the modern age is the result of a joint effort by all the
nations of the world. We can not effectively participate in this team work unless we
learn and use the standard terminology of physical and social sciences.
5. Language of Diplomacy - English is used by our diplomats in foreign countries. Our
delegates to various international conferences, conventions and seminars, express
themselves in English language. English is one of the official languages of United
Nations and its various organs and bodies. Without sound command of English
language, we can‘t effectively represent our country at international forums.
6. Language of Commerce and Industry - The international commerce and trade is
vital for the survival of a nation. The industrial countries import raw materials for their
factories and export their finished products to other countries. In both cases
exchange of commercial information is essential.

Page 34 of 123
 Industry in Pakistan can also benefit from the use of the latest method of production
and sale which are available in English language. Without the knowledge of English
language, it is almost impossible to take an effective part in the international,
commercial market.
7. Means of Keeping Pace with Modern Developments - The knowledge of English
is vital for keeping pace with the latest developments in technical professions.
Members of these professions must acquaint themselves with the modern
developments in their respective fields in order to increase their professional
abilities.
For instance, doctors, engineers and teachers have to remain in constant touch in
the findings of the latest research carried out in their professions all over the world.
They also contribute to the world of knowledge by getting the results of their study
and research published in the English language.
8. Means of Promoting International Understanding - The learning of foreign
languages is one of the most important means of promoting international
understanding ad cooperation.
Dr. West puts forth a similar idea, ―Many subjects are taught in the school not merely
because they are useful to the individual but because they are desirable for the well
being of mankind. Foreign languages are such a subject ….. International literacy
promotes international understanding and goodwill.
To understand a nation, we must appreciate their ideals and these are best
expressed by the nation‘s greatest men, living and dead are met at their best in the
nation‘s literature. International good understanding can best be promoted by
teaching the children of the world to reach each other‘s language.‖
9. Market Value of English - A sound knowledge of English still opens up prospects of
employment both at home and abroad. It has thus market value. Young people
proficient in English language, fare well in various competitive examinations for
prestigious services of the country like The District Management, Foreign Service,
Police, Customs, Magistracy, etc.
Those who wish to proceed abroad for employment or education have first to qualify
certain English Language Proficiency Tests conducted by some foreign countries.
For those reasons, English Medium Schools are more popular than ordinary
schools. This is quite evident from the number of English Medium Private Schools
that has sprung up like mushrooms in the country in the recent years, and a great
rush for admission to them.
10. Overall Importance of English Language in Educational Set up:
Overall prevailing Educational Set up in the entire world is dominated by English
language. If we have a glance at this fact we will find that both internationally and
nationally we ought to learn English to:
a. Communicate at wider levels.

Page 35 of 123
 b. Enable one‘s own self to be understood by others almost in all parts of the
world.
c. Attain higher education not only in Pakistan but also in foreign countries.
d. Learn, comprehend and use standard terminologies used in all branches of
physical and social sciences and in the fields of Commerce and Industry.
e. Interact and coordinate with international organizations, forums and
diplomatic relations.
f. Excel in various fields of educational set up.
g. Achieve better posts in practical fields.
h. Keep pace with modern developments taking place as a result of latest
researches in all spheres of life.
i. Promote international understanding and cooperation.
j. Get attractive job opportunities.
9. Some Psychological Problems faced by T/L Process in ESL:
a. The learning takes place when it is related to the needs and experiences of the
learner.
b. The graduation and the sequence of the language items are important. The
material should go from the known to the unknown and from the simple to the
more difficult.
c. Many repetitions are needed to develop the habits. The learning of any skill
takes place in proportion to practice that skill.
d. The repetitions should be spaced at increasingly longer intervals.
e. The immediate correction of an error is important. Knowledge that a response
is correct leads to the learning of that response.
f. The learning is favoured when meaningful association is established between
sounds and concepts and cultural or social situation.
g. The understanding of the place and function of separate elements promotes
learning. The learners should, therefore, be given insight into the place and
function of various language items in skills involved in broad communications
activities.
10. Teaching of Second Language in The West/ The East and the Difference:
 TSL in The West - In the west, modern languages, especially French, Italian,
German and Spanish were frequently a part of the Englishman‘s education, but
they were for the most part pursued for practical ends and purposes of travel.
However, now it has been established that their study has both practical and
educative value. It is recognized that they serve the purpose of commerce and
industry; they are needed for scientific instruction and information and for the
civil, diplomatic and armed services. Besides, they alone can give us an intimate
knowledge of foreign countries and of the best thought of their citizens. But
foreign languages, like most other subjects, are not learned at school simply as

Page 36 of 123
 an end in themselves. If properly taught, they will serve to train the pupils in
habits of accuracy, and of clarity of thought and expression.
 TSL in The East - In the East, English has been the language of the rulers for
more than a century. Hence, the study of English was considered the special
privilege of those who aspire to join the ranks of bureaucracy. While the children
of upper classes of society studied English Language in English Medium Schools
right from the very first year of their education, the majority of the native children
were taught English language after the completion of the primary level. Although,
it was rightly decided to change the medium of instruction in various subjects
from English to the native language, yet the change has adversely affected the
general proficiency of the students in English language. English is taught to our
students as a compulsory subject upto Degree Level, but most of them fail to
gain the reasonable command of the language.
 The Difference in the achievements of the learners of the second language in
The East and The West is the result of the differences not only in the quality of
their foreign language teachers but also in the methods and the techniques they
use in their teaching. In the west, teachers of the second language have sound
command of that particular language. Moreover, they are well aware of the latest
and most affective teaching methodology with the help of the modern language
teaching aids, which are easily available to them due to their ample resources. In
The East, comprising mostly developing countries with meager resources, the
results of the second language teaching are not satisfactory because they lack all
the above requirements of effective foreign language teaching.
11. Language Acquisition vs Language Learning:
i. Language Acquisition is a sub-conscious process that occurs without
people actually realizing that it is occurring. The information acquired is then
stored in the sub-conscious for later use. It is what children do when learning
to speak their first language.
Basic Interpersonal Communication Skill (BICS): These are the language
skills necessary to communicate basic needs and wants; they do not
guarantee academic success. (There may be students who have ‗acquired‘
native-like fluency in oral speech, who are still unprepared to face academic
challenges of school.)
ii. Language Learning is what usually occurs in schools. It is an overt and
conscious process.
When people are learning, they are aware that they are learning because
they are participating in the process. Therefore, it must be explicitly taught.
Once the information (knowledge) is learnt, it is consciously stored in the
brain, for later use. This learnt academic language is the kind of language
needed for tasks such as comprehension of text, analysis and synthesis.

Page 37 of 123
 Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP): These are the
language skills for students learning English as a second language.

12. Difference Between BISC and CALP:

It is essential for teachers of English Language Learners (ELL)/ Limited English
Proficient (LEP) students to be aware of the differences between BICS and CALP.
It is the only way to understand the distinction between social oral language
development and the demanding academic language necessary for learning content.
We remind ourselves; just because students can speak ENGLISH like a ‗native‘
does not necessarily mean they are ready for the academic language challenges
encountered in the content areas.
13. Aspects of Teaching English as a Second Language:

TEACHING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

Sounds Words Meanings

Phonetics Morphology Semantics

(Study of Physically (Study of Structure of (Study of Structure of

produced sounds) Words) Meanings)
Syntax Composition
Phonology
(Study of Structure of (Study of Speech and
(Study of Speech and
Sentences) Expression)
Sounds)
A Statement from UNESCO:
―The study of one or more modern languages in addition to that of the mother language
must find a due place in any educational set up, aiming to preserve and develop the
highest power of human mind and spirit.‖
Remember!
When a language becomes the vehicle of so much thought and activity in a country, it
does not remain entirely a foreign language and it assumes a great importance in the
educational curricula. As a subject of study, it is taught as a compulsory language from
Class: I to IX and at the B.A./ B.Sc. level.
However, emphasis should be on its functional aspect rather than on literature, except
for those who wish to pursue Post Graduate studies in English language and Literature.
As a medium of instruction, English should NOT be replaced by the National Language.
It should be given careful planning and preparation in order to prevent the decline in the

Page 38 of 123
academic standard, particularly at the University Level where the students need to study
wide range of material in their respective subjects.
14. What Can the ESL Teacher do?
 Collaborate with the subject teachers.
 Explain how language works in the various content / subject areas.
 Teach the language of the content:
a. Discipline Specific:
i. Content is constructed mainly in language.
ii. Each subject has its own ways of using language.
iii. Analyze and talk about language to help students see how meaning
is constructed in English in different subjects.
iv. Look at information that has been left out and has to be recovered by
the student to understand the passage.
v. Provide tools for unpacking dense text.
vi. Identify sentence parts and their meaning relationships.
vii. Examine time-markers and connectors.
viii. Recognize verb choices.
b. High Use:
i. How language makes meaning?
ii. What is going on in the text?
iii. What is the author‘s perspective?
iv. Look at the language choices that an author makes.
v. How is the text organized?
vi. How is information introduced and referred to?

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate ―apparently ordinary‖ people to unusual
efforts. The tough problem is not in identifying winners; it is in making winners out of
ordinary people. (Patricia Cross)

Page 39 of 123
 TEACHING COMPREHENSION

Reading Comprehension
Reading comprehension is the heart and goal of reading, since the comprehension is to
gather meaning from the text. If a student says words in a passage without gathering
their meaning, one would hesitate to call that reading.

Reading comprehension is the act of understanding what you are reading. Reading
comprehension is an intentional, active, interactive process that occurs before, during
and after a person reads a particular piece of writing.

Reading comprehension is one of the pillars of the act of reading. When a person reads
a text he engages in a complex array of cognitive processes. He is simultaneously using
his awareness and understanding of phonemes (individual sound ―pieces‖ in language),
phonics (connection between letters and sounds and the relationship between sounds,
letters and words) and ability to comprehend or construct meaning from the text. This
last component of the act of reading is reading comprehension. It cannot occur
independent of the other two elements of the process. At the same time, it is the most
difficult and most important of the three.

There are two elements that make up the process of reading comprehension:
 Vocabulary knowledge
 Text comprehension

In order to understand a text the reader must be able to comprehend the vocabulary
used in the piece of writing. If the individual words don‘t make the sense then the overall
story will not either. Children can draw on their prior knowledge of vocabulary, but
they also need to continually be taught new words. The best vocabulary instruction
occurs at the point of need. Teachers should pre-teach new words that a child will
encounter in a text or aid her in understanding unfamiliar words as she comes upon
them in the writing. In addition to being able to understand each distinct word in a text,
the child also has to be able to put them together to develop an overall conception of
what it is trying to say. This is text comprehension. Text comprehension is much more
complex and varied that vocabulary knowledge. Readers use many different text
comprehension strategies to develop reading comprehension. These include monitoring
for understanding, answering and generating questions, summarizing and being aware
of and using a text‘s structure to aid comprehension.

Page 40 of 123
What is comprehension?
Comprehension is the complex cognitive process involving the intentional interaction
between reader and text to extract meaning.
It is the ability to understand, remember, and explain to others what you have read. It
helps to
 Construct meaning from words
 Use background knowledge to acquire meaning
 Build vocabulary
 Understand how English language and print works
 Develop knowledge of various types of text
 Identify basic components of comprehension
o Prior knowledge
o Text and picture support
o Intensive writing
o Fluency is the bridge between recognizing words and comprehension.

Why to learn comprehension skills?

Comprehension skills help to address the ability of a child to be more efficient at
recognizing and recalling facts, recognizing and inferring main themes and
relationships, drawing conclusions, making judgments and generalizations, predicting
outcomes, applying what has been learned, and following directions.

It also helps to learn the concept of independent study: skimming, using reference
materials, outlining, summarizing, altering reading rate and focus as the purpose of
reading changes, use of headings, note taking.

Reading without thinking gives one a disorderly mind, and thinking without reading
makes one unbalanced.‖

Success Criteria
Comprehension is an integral to everyday life in our society. Able to understand
 Content / text
 Test to extract important information and transfer their knowledge to read and
respond to different types of questions.
 Use of comprehension skills across different mediums such as text books,
newspaper, the internet, and even video games etc.

Objectives of comprehension
By the end of the lesson, students will be able to
 Connect the ideas on the page to what you already know.

Page 41 of 123
 Get into an interactive process between the writer and reader, with the expression
and reception of meaning.
 Entail the ability to give meaning to information.
 Read the distinction in the book and had to paraphrase it in order to give the answer.
 Predict what will happen next in a story using clues presented in text
 Create questions about the main idea, message, or plot of the text
 Monitor understanding of the sequence, context, or characters
 Clarify parts of the text which have confused them
 Connect the events in the text to prior knowledge or experience
 Most stories have a very definite sequence of events. To help students gain a
deeper understanding of the story by exploring this sequence.
 To address the ability of a child to be more efficient at recognizing and recalling
facts, recognizing and inferring main themes and relationships, drawing conclusions,
making judgments and generalizations, predicting outcomes, applying what has
been learned, and following directions.
 To learn the concept of independent study: skimming, using reference materials,
outlining, summarizing, altering reading rate and focus as the purpose of reading
changes, use of headings, note taking.
 To learn the concept of three elements:
o The reader who is doing the comprehending.
o The text that is to be comprehended.
o The activity in which comprehension is a part.

Types of Comprehension
 Literal Comprehension - Identifying individual words, sentences, paragraphs,
stories, letters and their meanings, etc, the early stages of reading development
include learning the individual sounds of letters all the way to word and sentence
meanings.
 Higher-Order Comprehension - Analytical, critical and reflective
comprehension, As students progress, they need to begin to use strategies that
allow them to monitor their own comprehension and summarize what they read.
Therefore, when they get to intermediate grades they can focus on higher-level
comprehension strategies like inference and critiquing.

What is reading?
Reading does NOT come naturally to all children. These skills must be deliberately
taught. Readers must integrate these facets automatically in order to make meanings
from the print. Effective Reading is based on
 Word Recognition - Identifying Words in Print
o Recognizing that certain letters make certain sounds

Page 42 of 123
 o Breaking apart and manipulating sounds in words (phonemic
awareness)
o Applying knowledge to sound out words that are new to them
(decoding)
o Analyzing words and spelling patterns
o Recognizing the meaning of words instantly (vocabulary)
 Comprehension
o Starting at the pre junior level, teachers should emphasize that readers
read for meaning, not just to be ―word identifiers.‖ Teachers need to
model to students that reading is thinking, and how much we value that
process. Making connections to ones‘ self, to another text, or to the
world are very important strategies.
o ―The direct and explicit teaching of comprehension strategies helps
students become active readers who are engaged in understanding
written text. Teachers provide direct and explicit teaching of
comprehension strategies through explanation, demonstration or
modeling, guided practice, and opportunities for children to practice
using comprehension strategies when reading grade-appropriate
children‘s text.‖
 Fluency
o Identifying words and making meaning so that reading is automatic
and accurate
o Maintaining a rate of reading fast enough to facilitate comprehension
o Using phrasing and expression so oral reading sounds like normal
speech
o Fluency is one of the most important factors in comprehension. It is
also one of the most difficult to remediate.
 Motivation
o If reading isn‘t pleasurable or fulfilling, children won‘t choose to read.
o Reading is an active process, and students require practice to become
fluent readers. It is a social act to be shared with others
o There is a variety of purposes for reading, from enjoyment to gather
information.
o Students should not be ―assigned‖ independent ―free‖ reading for
homework, but need to be motivated to do so.

Success Criteria
 Explicitly teach listening and reading comprehension strategies.
 Provide a range of examples for initial teaching and practice.
 Provide independent practice activities that parallel requirements of instruction.

Page 43 of 123
  Begin with pictures and simple sentence to teach comprehension before moving
to paragraphs and longer text passages.
 Use text passages in which the main idea or comprehension unit is explicitly
stated, clear, and in which the ideas follow a logical order.
 Use familiar vocabulary and passages at appropriate readability levels for the
learners.
 Use familiar topics during initial learning.
 Use familiar, simple, syntactic structures and sentence types.
 Use both narrative and expository texts.
 Progress to more complex structures in which the main ideas are not explicit and
passages are longer.
 Insert questions at strategic intervals to reduce memory load for learners.
 Teach skill or strategy with the aid of carefully designed examples and practice.
 Continue skill or strategy instruction across several instructional sessions to
illustrate the applicability and utility of the skill or strategy.
 Connect previously taught skills and strategies with new content and texts.
 Cumulatively build repertoire of skills and strategies that are introduced, applied,
and integrated with appropriate texts and for authentic purposes over the course
of the year.

Instructional Strategies – How to teach?

Method – I
• Class Settlement and Introduction of the Topic.
• Checking previous knowledge by asking questions.
• Teacher‘s explanation of the topic. New vocabulary introduction.
• Group distribution.
• Aloud reading by students. Students will be guided to underline the main events of
the story.
• Students output in the form of web-diagram.
• Class reflection on the drawn web-diagram.
• Teacher will launch the questions and working in groups students will work on the
questions.
• Getting students‘ feedback.
• Individual written work, facilitating the students, focusing upon the slow learners.
• Recapitulation by asking questions.

Method – II (Good reading strategies)

 Activating prior knowledge
 Monitoring comprehension

Page 44 of 123
 Generating questions
 Answering questions
 Drawing inferences
 Creating mental imagery
 Identifying the text structure the writer has used
 Creating summaries

Method – III (Put Reading First)

 Teachers should incorporate direct instruction in comprehension strategies such as:
o Graphic organizers (maps, webs, graphs, or charts) used to categorize and
classify concepts.
o Answer a variety of questions (literal or inferential) during pre
reading/reading/post reading. It can also set a purpose for reading.
o Ask questions about text meaning during all stages of reading to actively
engage the students.
o Teach students to recognize story structure. This helps them understand
characters, events, and setting and how they contribute to the plot.
o Summarize main ideas. Key details are critical to understanding the author‘s
message.
o Construct meaning of a text using cooperative teaching strategies.

Method – IV (Comprehension Strategies)

Teach comprehension strategies directly and explicitly by incorporating multiple
activities
1. Main Idea - Primary purpose to understand what is explicitly stated in the
passage. What would be a good title for this passage?
2. Select a Text - Meanings of the words in the context of the passage.
3. Explain the Strategy - Author‘s purpose. Use strategies in a variety of contexts
and contents. How one paragraph relates to another?
4. Model the Strategy - Clearly suggested or implied by the author.
5. Guided Support - Did the author provide proof? Where in your reading supports
your belief? What does the author believe? Advertisements
6. Independent Practice - Teach the strategy in text students can "work with"
(simplify the task). Teach students to become strategic (when to use the strategy,
why to use it, how to use it)
7. Reflect - Provide enough practice and examples to learn and apply the strategy

Method - V (Teaching Comprehension Before, During and After Reading)

 Before Reading
o Set comprehension objectives

Page 45 of 123
 o Preview text and prime background knowledge
o Chunk text into manageable segments
 During Reading
o Identify text structure elements
o Answer literal, inferential, and evaluative questions
o Retell stories or main ideas of informational text
 After Reading
o Strategic Integration
o Judicious Review
o Formal and Informal Assessment

Method – VI (Sequencing Comprehension skills)

 Comprehension instruction should:
 Begin in early childhood with storytelling and discussions
 Consist of question answering and lessons on simple story structure in
kindergarten and first grade with accessible texts
 Include comprehension strategy instruction in second and third grade in
narrative and expository texts

Activities – Daily Application of the lesson

• Reading for meaning and detail
• Group work
• Dictionary consultation
• Drawing web-diagram
• Answering the questions

Assessment
Different tests of reading comprehension are
 Vocabulary
 Listening comprehension
 Speed of reading
 Question-answers
o Close-ended questions
o Open-ended questions

Page 46 of 123
 TEACHING POETRY

What is Poetry?
In simple words - Poetry is a kind of writing, usually in verse. Poetry verse is set out in
short lines with words put together in rhythm or rhyme or both. Poetry is about a writer
sharing with the reader an experience or strong feelings. Poems are written with words
chosen for their sounds and beauty as well as their meaning.

In more professional langauage - Poetry is a type of literature in which the sound and
meaning of language are combined to create ideas and feelings. People are often
attracted to poetry by its sounds and rhythm patterns.

Poetry began in prehistoric times when people passed down their oral history in poetic
language and song. Through the years, three main kinds of poetry have developed:
lyric, narrative, and dramatic.
 Lyric poetry is any short poem.
 Narrative poems are ones that tell stories, an epic or ballad.
 Dramatic poetry also tells a story, but in this case one or more of the poem's
characters act out the story.

Teaching children to love poetry is an exciting adventure, and using the best teaching
methods make the adventure easy.

Objectives of Poetry
 The purpose of teaching poetry to students is to experience what so many other
people have found in poetry, not just so you will know more, or understand more,
but so you will enjoy more.
 Exposure to and familiarization with poetic terminology and devices.
 Development of the skills necessary to engage with a poem's components and
thus come to an initial and then refined understanding of the meaning of the
poem.
 Drafting and revision of the original works of poetry, followed by appropriate
written reflection on the creative process, and culminating in a student poetry
reading.
 Independent, careful reading and reflection on a broad selection of poems.
 Creation of their writing to show each student's understanding of the reading,
understanding, writing, and revision process behind poetry and its meaning.
 To cultivate the imagination and ideality; both of which are of this precise
importance that the supremacy, or, indeed, the existence of our race.

Page 47 of 123
Instructional Strategies
 Teach meter, rhythm, rhyme, and literary terminology first.
 Bring in the lyrics to songs that they consider good representations of poetry.
 Define what poetry is.
 Prepare a T chart on the differences between prose and poetry so that students
can of poetry. (syllables, lines, stanzas, couplets, alliteration, metaphors, etc...)
 Sing the poetry as songs work well because poetry is about sounds.
 Give the background of the poet before any of his or her poems are read. Poets
write what they know and feel. Poetry is about emotions.
 Read aloud a poem two or three times before students do anything with it.
 Explain that poetry is good if you like it. Ask students about their interests why or
why not.
 Poetry is the short hand of metaphors, similes, personification.
 Develop students‘ interest by explaining poetry with fun and appreciate its
importance.

Application – Daily Life Activities

 Identify items in the poem that make it great, like word choice, symbolism,
imagery or a rhyme scheme that's unexpected. Provide students with a list of
vocabulary terms and definitions before you read the poem.
 Teach meter using two paper cups and a desk. Place one paper cup upside
down and the other right side up. Read the poem aloud using the right side up
cup to mark the unstressed syllables and the upside down cup to mark the
stressed syllables. Students should hear the difference between unstressed and
stressed syllables.
 Teach the importance of symbolism, metaphor and allusion using objects with
symbolic meaning. Instruct each student to bring in an object they are attached
to. Then, tell them to describe it's symbolic meaning. They should only use words
that are abstract or intangible. Show students pictures of objects that have the
same symbolic meaning for everyone, such as a heart representing love and a
dove representing peace.
 Provide audio samples of spoken word and beat poetry. These types of poetry
are traditionally performance pieces. Students should listen to or watch them and
comment on the performance aspects that make the poem successful. Instruct
students to identify differences from the word on the page and its oral delivery.
You might consider having the end of a poetry workshop occur in a cafe where
students can perform their own pieces in front of each other or a live audience.
 Help students write poetry using a template or pre-written story. Many teachers
have students write a short story, or provide one, with vivid detail, symbolism or
imagery. Students then erase all but the essential words in each sentence. Then,

Page 48 of 123
the remaining words can be fit together to construct a poem. Instruct students
about the differences between rhyming couplets and free form poetry. Writing
Poems
Five W's Poem:
Line 1: Who (the subject)
Line 2: What (what happened)
Line 3: Where (where did it happen)
Line 4: When (when did it happen)
Line 5: Why (why did it happen)
Who: Fahad
What: Played football
Where: In the play ground
When: In his spare time
Why: To make him fit and healthy
Simple Poem:
I loved summer vacation because_____________________________.
I loved summer when I ____________________________________.
I wished I could have ______________________________________.
I had fun ____________________ and ________________________.
But most of all I loved______________________________________.

Use Your Grammar Skills and Write a Poem

Writing a poem can be fun! Follow the instructions .
On the first line write a noun of your choice.
On the second line write two adjectives joined by and to describe this noun.
On the third line write a verb and an adverb to describe this noun in action.
Start the fourth line with like or as followed by a comparison.
Start the final line with if only followed by a wish

Page 49 of 123
 CREATIVE WRITING A SKILL

―Every Artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures‖
Henry Beecher
What is Creativity?
When you are creative, it can mean that you
• Made suggestions for a project
• Built a tree house/ invented a new game
• Built a car out of a wooden orange crate
• Baked a cake/ pizza
• Arranged flowers in vase/ made a tool kit
• Wrote a song/ poem
• Made a tin can telephone /wove a vest
• Told a story/ composed a silly song
• Painted a picture / made a soup sculpture
• Played a musical instrument
• Planned a school book sale to raise money
• Choreographed a dance for a Programme
• Designed an ad / made a slogan
• Made a new simile / metaphor aaaaand etc

What is Creative Writing?

 It is a writing that expresses the writer‘s thoughts and feelings in an imaginative,
often unique, and poetic way.
 It is guided more by the writer‘s need to express feelings and ideas than by
restrictive demands of factual and logical progression of expository writing.
 Creative writing is considered any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes
outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical
forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, short
stories, and poems. To provide students opportunities to write for a range of
different purposes keeping in mind a sense of audience and style

What are the Purposes of Writing

 Activate knowledge
 Generate, organize & reorganize ideas
 Communicate with each other
 Take and record information which lasts over time
 Present information, ideas and feelings for a variety of purposes and audiences
 Enhance oral development and reinforce language structures and vocabulary
that learners acquire
 Demonstrate one‘s creativity and critical thinking by recreating meanings
 Inform, influence and entertain others

Page 50 of 123
Objectives of Creative Writing
 To express their ideas independently,
 To present their ideas in a systematic,
 To describe the relevant material in a logical manner,
 To apply their knowledge/experience in the given topic/situation,
 To apply grammatical concepts in a proper sequence
 To enhance their imagination

Elements of Creativity
Following are the elements of creativity:
 Flexibility
 Fluency
 Originality
 Elaboration
 Sensitivity to problems
 Problem defining
 Visualization
 Transformation
 Analogical Thinking
 Attribute listing
 Synectics

What can teachers do to develop learners‟ creativity?

 Ask them to go beyond the given information
 Allow them time to think
 Reward their creative efforts
 Value their creative attributes
 Teach them creative thinking techniques
 Create a climate conducive to creativity
 Choose interesting topics for students

Conducive environment for developing creativity

 Respect the novel and unusual
 Provide challenges
 Appreciate individuality and openness
 Encourage open discussion
 Absence of conflicts
 Allow time for thinking
 Encourage confidence and willingness to take risk

Page 51 of 123
 Appreciate and support new ideas

Skills Involved:
Enhance skills of planning, drafting, reviewing, proof reading and technical aspects of
language (punctuation, sentence structure, presentation)

Do‟s & Don‟ts of Creative Writing

Do‟s Don‟ts
o Relevancy of material. o Use mixed tense
o Sequence of ideas. o Vague expression or ideas
o Use mind map. o Go for difficult words but clarity of ideas
o Brainstorming. should be preferred.
o Relate with real life o Have repetition of material
o (when required). o Use slang/prohibited language.
o Encourage. o Use contractions
o Imagination. o Exceed word limit
o End abruptly

Remember!
Accuracy is not emphasized at this stage!

Page 52 of 123
 TEACHING STORY WRITING

The golden rules of story writing:

 It Must Be Set In The Past - Write your story as if it has happened already not as
if it is happening now.
 It Must Have A Good Structure (5 Parts) - set the scene - introduce the theme &
characters, describe a problem - solve the problem - resolve the theme &
characters
 It Must Include Detailed Descriptions - Include lots of adjectives, adverbs and
imagery all the way through, Describe characters, feelings, sights, sounds,
smells, not just sights.
 It Must Be Balanced - Make sure you include action, speech and descriptions. In
each paragraph move the story on. Break up long conversations with action or
description.
 It Must Stick To A Genre Or Mood - Make sure your descriptions always ‗fit the
mood‘. Especially when using similes & metaphors. Aim to make your reader
always feel something (scared, excited, embarrassed, sympathetic).
 It Must Link The Beginniing And End - Don‘t just ‗end‘ a story – resolve it!
Comment on something mentioned at the start of your story. Show that a
character has changed or reflected.
Story Writing methodology
 Brain Storming
 Mind/concept map
 Basic features of creative writing

Parts Of A Story
A story has five main parts:
• The plot is the sequence of events that occur in the story. It begins with a
narrative hook; involves a problem or conflict that the main character faces;
builds to a climax / point of highest interest; and then shows the main character
solving the problem and learning something about life.
• The characters are the individuals in the story. A short story may have one or a
few main characters and one or a few minor characters.
• The setting refers to the time and place in which the story occurs. Often, a short
story has only one or a few settings.
• The point of view is the angle from which the story is told—first person by the
narrator or third person by someone outside the story.
• Solution & Moral of the story
Beginning:
Introduce the main character.
Tell where the character is. Start the plot: what happens first?

Middle:
Explain the main character's problem. Introduce other characters as necessary—
perhaps in a new setting. Use dialogue as appropriate.

Page 53 of 123
Move the plot along by telling what problems the character or characters run into. Build
suspense.

Ending:
At the point of highest interest (climax), tell what your character or characters do.
Tell what the characters' action leads to.
Tell what the final outcome

Setting: Where does the story take

Characters: Who are the people in the place?
story?

Events: What happened in the story?

Problem:
Solution:

Choose a writing format and write a story and draw a picture to go with it.
o My aeroplane is important to me because....
o Oh no, my ball is lost in the woods...
o My teddy bear's arm is torn, but I don't want to ...
o My grandmother gave me the best watch ...
o One night my doll began to talk! They said...
o I was holding my bag so tight when...
o If I could design a kite it would look like a...
o If they made a boat about me, it would look like...
o Write an animal story. Decide on your setting, characters, and a problem.
Decide how your story will end. Write words, names, and notes in the story
planner to help you create your story. When you decide on a title, write it in the
center circle.

Page 54 of 123
 TEACHING ESSAY WRITING

Stages of Essay Writing

At junior level, learners go through four stages in developing their writing skills;
1. Copying
2. Controlled Writing
3. Guided Writing
4. Independent Writing

Strategies for teaching Essay Writing

1. Thematic Tree
2. Multi Dimensional Writing
3. Brain Storming and Mind Mapping

Thematic tree
 Start with a common theme
 Reflect on the theme
 Develop sub-themes
 Keep on thinking relevant ideas

Why using Thematic Tree

 Encourage students to think of something in different perspectives
 Build up students‘ flexibility
 More ideas generated for writing
 Help students structure their writing

Multi-dimensional Writing
Assign students a role and they have to write for that role.

Page 55 of 123
  Enables students to view things from different angles
 Helps students to be more focused when they write

Example - Writing a report:

 Discuss a car accident with the students.
 Ask students to discuss how the accident can be avoided. They are required to
imagine that they belong to of the given group of people;
 Driver
 Passenger
 Pedestrian
 Policeman
 News reporter

“Brainstorming” and “Mind Mapping”

 Brainstorming is an excellent way of developing many creative ideas quickly. It helps
students to break out of their thinking patterns into new ways of looking at things
 Mind-maps are Used for arranging and developing ideas to improve the way
students take notes. It is a good format for memorizing and reviewing ideas.

Strategies for Teaching Creative Writing

 Transformation - Creating a new ending / new version to the story
 Reasoning - Justifying any particular situation/turning in a story
 Imagination - Imagining/Personifying while using all of our senses
 Wish Fulfilment - What is your passion? How would you pursue that?
 Dreaming – Write your dream. Use illustrations to explain it.
 Appealing - Imagine you are a wolf; write about why you are so fierce to the goats. I
am fierce to the goats because …
 Concluding - Expressing the lesson learnt from the story and making another story
from the lesson
 Character Empathy - Writing for the characters and expressing how they feel e.g.
letter, diary etc.

Tips for Teachers

 Plan
 Plan twice as much material as you think you need
 Plan activities that will involve the whole
 Develop several brainstorming
 Do a few ―get to know‖ exercises
 Share a little of yourself

Page 56 of 123
 Keep yourself open for every kid
 Don‘t push for the class to participate
 Cover the basic of the business
 Learn from your students

KEEP IN MIND…
 ―There should be no criticism of ideas.
 Students should not worry about people‘s egos or opinions.
 Judgments and analysis will stunt idea generation.
 Ideas should only be evaluated once the brainstorming session has finished.‖

PLEASE……
Follow this sequence for Creative Writing;
 Pick a suitable theme
 Level the strategy according to the theme
 Enlist information about the theme
 Activate the mind-maps
 Supplement the reasoning motives
 Ending ought to be justified

Page 57 of 123
 TEACHING SUMMARY WRITING

What is a summary?
Comprehension is the goal of reading! A great strategy for students to learn when trying
to comprehend a text is summarization. A summary is a paraphrase of the important
information found in a reading selection.

A summary should:
 Tell what is most important to the author by including the main idea, major
supporting details or explanations, and the author‘s conclusion.
 Be short - Be approximately 1/3 the length of the original selection.
 Be written "in students own words".

A summary should not:

 Include your opinion.
 Be what you think the author should have said.
 Be copied (plagiarized) material or a series of quotes from the selection.

Why to learn summary writing skills?

Writing a summary is an important skill that students will use throughout their academic
careers. In addition, summarizing improves reading skills as students pick out the
main ideas of a reading; it also helps with vocabulary skills as students paraphrase a
reading, altering the vocabulary and grammar as they do so. In addition, critical
thinking skills are improved as students decide on the main ideas of the reading to
include in the summary. Finally, writing and editing skills are improved as students
draft and edit the summary. Students can also work with peers throughout the writing
and revision process, so it also helps with cooperative learning. Therefore, many
benefits exist to teaching summarizing skills.

Objectives of Summary writing

By the end of the lesson, students will be able to:
 Identify important and less important details of a text when creating a summary
 Review the most important points of the text.
 Better grasp the original text, and the result shows the reader that they
understand it as well.
 Prepare an objective outline of the whole piece of writing.
 Identify the main idea and avoid trivia, detail and opinion by restating in their own
words the main points of the essay / book.

Page 58 of 123
  Demonstrate their understanding of reading material to their teachers or
professors.
 Paraphrase the important information found in a reading selection.
 Give the reader, in an about 1/3 of the original length of a lesson/chapter.
 Restate only the main points of a text without giving examples or details, such as
dates, numbers or statistics.
 Give a reader a condensed and objective account of the main ideas and features
of a text.
 Develop the ability of gaining the knowledge, which allows them to better analyze
and critique the original.
 Comprehend, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information; think critically.
 Provide basic questions about the original text such as "Who did what, where,
and when?", or "What is the main idea of the text?", "What are the main
supporting points?", "What are the major pieces of evidence?‖

Essentials of Summary Writing / Success Criteria:

 Use the present tense.
 Use your own wording. Occasionally, however, a phrase in the original may be
especially striking or interesting. In that case, you may use the author‘s exact
words if you put quotations marks around them.
 Never repeat more than 3 consecutive words from the original without putting
quotations marks around them.
 Mention the source, the author, and the main idea at the beginning of the
summary. Here are possible ways to include the source and the main idea:
o In his article entitled ―The Dangers of Cramming,‖ Keith Ablow informs
us /states/claims/shows us that…
o In ―The Dangers of Cramming,‖ Keith Ablow
indicates/discusses/explores the problems…
o The article ―The Dangers of Cramming‖ by Keith Ablow examines the
negative effects…..
o Cramming, according to Keith Ablow in his article ―The Dangers of
Cramming,‖ can do more harm than good.
 Periodically remind the reader that you are summarizing someone else‘s ideas.
You can use a phrase like the following:
o According to the author…
o The author goes on to say…
o The article further states that…
o Elbow (author‘s last name) also reports…
o (other useful verbs: suggest, claim, argue, add, explain, conclude, etc.)

Page 59 of 123
Instructional Strategies – How to teach?

Teaching Method - I
1. First, read the selection (short story, essay, passage, and article) several times to
make sure you understand it.
2. Second, answer questions about the selection, such as:
• What is the topic?
• What is the author saying about the topic? This answer will give you the main
idea of the selection.
• What are some of the explanations, examples, or proof that support the main
idea?
• What is the author‘s conclusion?
3. Third, the first sentence should include the following information:
• Title of the selection
• Author‘s name, if this information is available
• Main idea of the selection
4. Four, compare your summary with the original selection. Have you included all
the necessary information:
 Main idea
 Supporting details
 Conclusion
Have you added your opinion? Remember A summary is of the author‘s ideas
NOT Yours.

Teaching Method - II
Like any other skill, the ability to summarize improves with practice. Here are a few
strategies to get the students started. They represent possible steps in the process of
writing a summary.
Step 1 - Read the article carefully
 Try to get a sense of the article‘s main ideas and structure—a sense of what the
author covers and the order in which the ideas are presented.
Step 2 - Reread the article
 Divide the article into sections or stages of thought.
 Label each section or stage of thought on the article itself and/or to underline key
ideas and terms.
Step 3 - Write one-sentence summaries
 Write a one-sentence summary for each section or stage of thought on a
separate sheet of paper or in the margin.

Page 60 of 123
  Use your own words—don‘t lift whole sentences or even whole phrases from the
original.
Step 4 - Check your summary against the original article
 Make whatever adjustments are necessary for accuracy and completeness.

Teaching Method - III

1. Start from reading a short selection (short story, essay, passage, and article).
It should be short enough that students can read it in the first period/ class.
2. Have students underline the main ideas as they read. Take this opportunity
to talk to the students about the importance of marking text as a study skill. They
can use this marked text as an outline to review later for quizzes.
3. Once students have their texts marked up, open the discussion of
summaries. Discuss what it is. Offer a vivid example of its importance: for
example, ―How interesting is the story? Very interesting. If teacher asked you tell
her about the story, would you tell that it is interesting only? Of course not! What
would you do?‖ This gets students focused on the notion of summarizing as
something they actually do in their everyday lives.
4. Provide an example. The teacher may share an example of summary of
something students have recently read—not the reading they are working on in
this lesson—as a model of a summary.
5. Discuss the ideas. At this point, discuss the ideas students underlined in their
readings. Call on students to share the main ideas they underlined and write
them on the board.
6. Focus on 5 main ideas. As a class, decide on the top five main ideas for the
summary.
7. 7
Work on ordering the sentences and connecting them with transition
words. Since the main ideas are drawn from different sections of the text and
different from each other, it is important to connect them. This is a good time to
teach some transition words of time or of addition.
8. Paraphrase the sentences. An important concept related to summarizing
is changing the summary significantly from the original. Model changing
the grammar and vocabulary of the sentences, and have the student help with
this as much as they can. This is a good way to help expand their vocabularies.
The teacher can refer back to the sample summary at this point as needed:
“Would you use the exact words as the story when describing it to your
friend? Or would you use different words that mean about the same
thing?”
9. Teach the language of summaries. Teach students some of the formulaic
language of academic writing, such as the phrase ―According to (the author), ―
to lead into the main idea and the summary.

Page 61 of 123
 10. Finalize. Put any needed final touches on the summary, such as an overarching
idea to lead with. Also teach concluding sentences that restate the main idea.
11. Give out another short reading selection. Have students work on reading and
marking the selection and then writing their summaries by themselves this
time or in pairs.
12. It might be helpful at this point to instruct students to first do the reading and
marking, and then close the reading, and without referring to it, tell their peers
what it was about. The peer can take notes on the retelling, and then they can
compare it to the original, making adjustments, such as adding missed main
points or deleting details.
13. Summary writing isn‟t easy and isn‟t a skill that comes naturally.
However, it is a skill worth the time and effort, as students will use it throughout
their academic careers and the benefits it provides in reading, writing, and critical
thinking skills.

Application – Daily Life Activities: Summarization includes recognizing the main

ideas of a passage and being able to retell those ideas in a few sentences. Although, it
is one of the hardest skills to teach students but by developing interesting and student-
friendly activities, we help them to learn this skill easily.

Activity – I
(Summary Writing Class – A Case Study)
 Today we are going to read a text and learn how to create a summary of what we
have read. When you create a summary you find the meaningful and
important parts of what you read and put them together to make a shorter
text than the original. Summaries can help up tell a friend the information in a
quick way. It also helps with comprehension.
 Remember how we talked about reading silently. When reading silently
remember, your lips will not be moving and there will not be sound coming out of
your mouth. Let me show you by reading the first sentence of this paragraph on
the board aloud and then silently (Have the paragraph already written). Read
aloud ―When I woke up this morning it was snowing outside.‖ Then read it
silently. Now as I read the whole paragraph aloud, I want you to follow along with
me reading silently like you just practiced. “When I woke up this morning it
was snowing outside. I put on my snow coat. The coat is blue. It put
mittens on too. I will stay warm!”
 Now let‘s go through and highlight some important things in this paragraph. What
is the most important thing in this paragraph? That‘s right, it is snowing and so
they put on a snow coat. Snow is an important word so I am going to underline it.
The rest of the sentence is not as important so I am going to cross it out. We can

Page 62 of 123
 also underline the colour of the coat and the word mittens because they are
important. The rest of the sentences are not important. Finally, staying warm is
important so I will underline that and cross out the rest. Now I have all of the
important parts underlined. I can easily remember the paragraph‘s main idea, so
let‘s take the underlined part and make a summary. Let students help you come
up with a summary of the paragraph using the underlined parts and omitting the
unimportant parts. (Example: I put on my snow coat and mittens to stay warm
because it was snowing.)
 When we summarize text there are three rules that can help us. We used them a
minute ago when we summarized the paragraph on the board. (Write on the
board as you say them). They are:
1) Get rid of any unnecessary or repeated information
2) Pick out the most important items or events
3) Write a statement that covers everything the author is trying to say about the
topic.
 Let‘s practice the first paragraph all together. It says ―The National Park
Service's Jean Lafitte National Historic Park and Preserve's Visitor Center in New
Orleans was broiling at about a hundred degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees
Celsius), and moisture in the air made it seem even hotter for emergency
workers cleaning up there after Hurricane Katrina.‖ I want each of you to
underline the important parts and cross out the unnecessary parts. (Hopefully,
they will underline, New Orleans, hot, cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina.) Now I
want you to take the important information you have complied and write a
sentence summary. (For example, The National Park Services of New Orleans
cleaned up in the heat after Hurricane Katrina).
 Now that I have shown you how to summarize and we have done some simple
practice it is your turn to summarize on your own. This is an article from National
Geographic for Kids about rescuing important parts of history from the damage
from Hurricane Katrina. As you are silently reading this article use your three
summarizing rules to help you comprehend the text. You can also use your
pencil to underline the important information and a colour pencil to cross out
unnecessary information.

Activity - II
Start out using a graphic organizer in the shape of a 5x5 grid. The first row of the grid
will contain the words of the following phrase: Somebody / Wanted / But / So / Then.
Students will fill in the second row of the grid with corresponding details. If we use the
story of "Little Red Riding Hood", it would look like this.
Somebody Wanted But So Then
Little Red Riding Went to see her A big, bad wolf She screamed in A woodsman

Page 63 of 123
Hood grandmother. tried to trick her. fright. came to save
her.
If we take the information from the graphic organizer and put it in summary format, it
looks like this: Little Red Riding Hood wanted to go see her grandmother, but a big,
bad wolf tried to trick her. So she screamed in fright and a woodsman came to
save her. This strategy works well in whole class instruction as well as small group
instruction.

Activity - III
1. Discuss the importance of summarization in daily life.
2. Help students to distinguish between main ideas and supporting details. How can
you teach students how to determine the main ideas, and what's important and
what's not?
a. Teachers can use cues such as the 5 W's in summarization of the
passages. Being able to pick out the "who, what, when, where, and why"
details of a passage can help some students get on the right track to
building strong summaries
b. Students can also use mind maps to help them organize passage or
paragraph summaries.

Assessment
 Written work – self practice by using newspapers, magazines, story books etc

Page 64 of 123
 TEACHING CHARACTER SKETCH

What are Characters?

―Characters are men in action.‖ They reveal their personalities through their actions.
Literal meaning - The combination of qualities distinguishing an individual person.

What do you mean by sketch?

• a quick rough drawing
• a brief descriptive piece of writing
• a brief outline of personality

What is character sketch?

Character sketch is a brief descriptive writing that highlights the character traits of an
individual.

Objectives
Students will be able to
 Read, recall and reproduce the text in their own words
 Discuss, debate and draw the given character sketch

How to Draw a Character Sketch

Features are as under:
• Personality – appearance
• Behaviour – manners
• Character traits

Character Sketch Format

• Topic Sentence: (Introduction)
• Appearance:
• Behaviour :
• Trait :
• Example (s):
• Trait 2:
• Example (s):
• Trait 3:
• Example (s):
• Concluding Sentence:

Page 65 of 123
 WEB - DIAGRAM

Appearance Character Behaviour

Trait # 1 Trait # 2 Trait # 3

Supporting Supporting Supporting

Detail Detail Detail

Page 66 of 123
 FORMAT OF A LETTER (FORMAT NO. 01)

01. HEADING (ADDRESS/DATE)

02. SALUTATION

03. CONTENTS (IN THE FORM OF PARAGRAPHS)

FORMAT OF A LETTER (FORMAT NO. 02)

04. CLOSING SENTENCES/PARAGRAPH

05. SUBSCRIPTION 01. HEADING (ADDRESS/DATE)

06. NAME/SIGNATURES

02. SALUTATION

03. CONTENTS (IN THE FORM OF PARAGRAPHS)

04. CLOSING SENTENCES/PARAGRAPH

05. SUBSCRIPTION

06. NAME/SIGNATURES

Page 67 of 123
 FORMAT OF AN APPLICATION

01. HEADING

02. SALUTATION

03. CONTENTS (IN THE FORM OF PARAGRAPHS)

04. THANKING SENTENCE/CLOSING SENTENCE

05. SUBSCRIPTION

07. DATE 06. NAME/CLASS

Page 68 of 123
 TEACHING MATHEMATICS

What is mathematics?
Mathematics provides a powerful universal language and intellectual toolkit for
abstraction, generalization and synthesis. It is the language of science and technology.
It enables us to probe the natural universe and to develop new technologies that have
helped us control and master our environment, and change societal expectations and
standards of living. Mathematical skills are highly valued and sought after. Mathematical
training disciplines the mind, develops logical and critical reasoning.

Definition - Google Dictionary

 (Mathematics) (functioning as singular) a group of related sciences, including
algebra, geometry, and calculus, concerned with the study of number, quantity,
shape, and space and their interrelationships by using a specialized notation
 (Mathematics) (functioning as singular or plural) mathematical operations and
processes involved in the solution of a problem or study of some scientific field
 The abstract science of number, quantity, and space.
 Its synonyms are maths & math.

Definition - Oxford Dictionary

 The abstract science of number, quantity, and space, either as abstract concepts
( pure mathematics), or as applied to other disciplines such as physics and
engineering ( applied mathematics)

As per Merriam-Webster definition

Mathematics is
 The science of numbers and their operations, interrelations, combinations,
generalizations, and abstractions and of space configurations and their structure,
measurement, transformations, and generalizations
 The science of structure, order, and relation that has evolved from counting,
measuring, and describing the shapes of objects. It deals with logical reasoning
and quantitative calculation.
 Since the 17th century, it has been an indispensable adjunct to the physical
sciences and technology, to the extent that it is considered the underlying
language of science.
 Among the principal branches of mathematics are algebra, analysis, arithmetic,
combinatory, Euclidean and non Euclidean geometries, game theory, number
theory, numerical analysis, optimization, probability, set theory, statistics,
topology and trigonometry.

Page 69 of 123
Importance of Teaching Mathematics
An information and technology-based society requires individuals, who are able to think
critically about complex issues, analyse and adapt to new situations, solve problems of
various kinds and communicate their thinking effectively. The study of mathematics
equips students with knowledge, skills and habit of mind that are essential for
successful and rewarding participation in such a society. The more the technology is
developed the greater the level of mathematical skill is required.

Mathematical structures, operations and processes provide students with a framework

and tools for reasoning, justifying conclusions and expressing ideas clearly. As students
identify relationships between mathematical concepts and everyday situations and
make connections between extend and apply their knowledge.

Development of Essential Skills through Teaching Mathematics

The key outcome of mathematics education is the development of the ability to apply
certain of the essential skills described in The National Curriculum For Mathematics –
Ministry of Education Pakistan
 Communication skills
 Numeracy skills
 Information skills
 Problem-solving skills
 Social and co-operative skills
 Work and study skills

Role of a Teacher In Mathematics Teaching

Research indicates that teachers who have a good background in Mathematics also
add richness to their lessons, involve students extensively in mathematical dialogue and
capitalize on students‘ questions / discussions to weave/extend mathematical
relationships. They do not list only the definitions and step-by-step procedures for
students to memorize without understanding their meaning and function.

Teachers need to assume a new role if students are to construct their own
mathematical understanding. Rather than just pouring mathematical knowledge into
students‘ heads, teachers must create a stimulating environment that encourages
mathematical learning through increasing interactivity.
Teaching in a Mathematics classroom requires listening to the students, understanding
their level of thinking, setting a task and analyzing outcomes of the task in order to
understand how students construct meanings – this is contrary to a traditional way of
teaching. The teachers‘ role shifts from dispensing information to planning investigative
tasks, managing a cooperative learning environment and supporting students‘ creativity

Page 70 of 123
in developing rational understanding of the concepts. This improved teaching practice
should include the following aspects of a teacher‘s role. The teacher should be:
 A planner of practical tasks for the students to consolidate and organise their
informal knowledge.
 An organizer of the establishment of mathematical tasks in the classroom so that
the students can work in a social setting and develop rational understanding.
 An encourager, who asks questions, supports and develops students‘ mathematical
thinking and communication.
 A negotiator helping students to discuss various meanings/solutions of a
concept/question and to achieve a common agreement.
 A mediator supporting the establishment of an environment where students express
opinions and experiences in the classroom equally.

Thus, a teacher‘s primary responsibilities are to assist learners‘ cognitive reconstruction

and conceptual re-organization through providing them the opportunities for interaction
in mathematical tasks that encourage discussion and negotiation of ideas to help them
to develop conceptual understanding.
General Aims Of Teaching Mathematics
It aims to:
 Help students to develop a belief in the value of mathematics and its usefulness
to them, to nurture confidence in their own mathematical ability, to foster a sense
of personal achievement, and to encourage a continuing and creative interest in
mathematics;
 Develop in students the skills, concepts, understandings, and attitudes which will
enable them to cope confidently with the mathematics of everyday life;
 Help students to develop a variety of approaches to solving problems involving
mathematics, and to develop the ability to think and reason logically;
 Help students to achieve the mathematical and statistical literacy needed in a
society which is technologically oriented and information rich;
 Provide students with the mathematical tools, skills, understandings, and
attitudes they will require in the world of work;
 Provide a foundation for those students who may continue studies in
mathematics or other learning areas where mathematical concepts are central;
 Help to foster and develop mathematical talent.

Behavioural Objectives of Teaching Mathematics

By employing mathematical approaches, students will be able to:
 Develop flexibility and creativity in applying mathematical ideas and techniques
to unfamiliar problems arising in everyday life, and develop the ability to reflect
critically on the methods they have chosen;

Page 71 of 123
  Become effective participants in problem-solving teams, learning to express
ideas, and to listen and respond to the ideas of others;
 Develop the skills of presentation and critical appraisal of a mathematical
argument or calculation, use mathematics to explore and conjecture, and learn
from mistakes as well as successes;
 Develop the characteristics of logical and systematic thinking, and apply these in
mathematical and other contexts, including other subjects of the curriculum;
 Develop the skills and confidence to use their own language, and the language of
Mathematics, to express mathematical ideas;
 Develop the knowledge and skills to interpret written presentations of
mathematics.

Teaching Resources
Mathematics teaching resources typically consists of the following products:

 Number Catchers  Tape Measures  Thermometers

 Number Scrabble  Meter Rods  Pitchers/Bottles
 Block Balance  Rulers  Beakers
 Wooden  Coins  Mirrors
 Geo Shapes  Paper Money  Base Ten Blocks
 Clock Faces  Pattern Blocks  Activity Books
 Geo boards  Attribute Blocks  Answer Case
 Cubes  Fraction Circles  Real Objects
 Number Cubes  Fraction Squares  Library Books

Instructional Strategies
The cultural and practical significance of mathematics in our society contrasts strikingly
with the way children experience mathematics in school. Mathematics teaching, it
appears, succeeds in promoting abilities related to systematical and critical thinking, to
problem solving, and to formulating rational arguments only for a minority of students.

Students learn things in many different ways. They do not always learn best by sitting
and listening to the teacher. Students particularly of the primary level can learn by
presentation and explanation by the teacher, consolidation and practice, games,
practical work, problems and puzzles and investigating Mathematics.
The mathematical processes identified in this curriculum statement are the expression
of these essential skills in mathematical contexts. This curriculum statement, therefore,
suggests approaches to teaching, learning, and assessment, which will give students
the maximum possible opportunity to develop the essential skills.

Page 72 of 123
 1. Teaching Approaches - Mathematics
2. Activities

TEACHING APPROACHES - MATHEMATICS

Oral Maths / Mental Maths to be included in all approaches / methods

• If you are doing it every day then 5-10 mins in the beginning of every period can
be allocated for mental Maths
• However if you are doing it once in a week then one of the double periods can be
allocated for Mental Maths
• Mental math, irrelevant of its applications, is an excellent way to stimulate a
child‘s mind.
• Not only does it generally stimulate their mind, but it also helps them get a better
"number sense‖.
• In other words, child becomes more familiar with how numbers interact--this is
very important, because as you know, math is something that builds on itself.
• If children don't have a good grasp on how numbers interact, then more
complicated math will seem like more of a challenge.
• Children have an amazing ability to learn, but their vast brain potential is not
always nurtured to the fullest extent.
• With the proper guidance and tools, children as young as 4 or 5 are capable of
mastering mathematical skills and calculating ability that will yield benefits that
last a lifetime.
• Mental math's is to be done aloud by the teacher.
• Students never see the lines printed anywhere (on paper or on board).
• They only HEAR the problems.
• Your mental problems can be as difficult, or as easy, as you deem appropriate
for your group of students.
• Be sure to make the problems easy enough so that the students can feel
successful on the majority of the problems.
• If you are working on a particular topic, you may wish to include one or two
questions relating to your topic: "the triangles on the board show which method
of proving triangles congruent?―
• A "round" of Mental Math takes approximately 8 to 10 minutes, including grading.

Method – I
• Make pair / small group as their study group
• In each group
– A Math Leader
– Mix ability group

Page 73 of 123
 • First, explain in front of class.
• Then leaders have to repeat explanation for each members to their group
• Teacher will sit with each pair / group, guide the students about their mistakes
during the lesson, and make them fix it.
• With this method, students seem enthusiastic to learn math.

Method – II (Investigating Mathematics)

Teachers may set students a challenge, matched to their ability, which leads them to
discover and practice some new Mathematics for themselves. The key point about
investigations is that students are encouraged to make their own decisions about:
 Where to start
 How to deal with challenges,
 What Mathematics they need to use.
 How they can communicate this Mathematics,
 How to describe what they have discovered.

Method – III (Problem Solving)

A balanced mathematical programme includes concept learning, developing and
maintaining skills, and learning to tackle applications. These should be taught in such a
way that students develop the ability to think mathematically.

Students learn mathematical thinking most effectively through applying concepts and
skills in interesting and realistic contexts which are personally meaningful to them. Thus,
mathematics is best taught by helping students to solve problems drawn from their own
experience.
A problem is a statement or proposition requiring an algebraic, geometric, or other
mathematical solution. A widespread opinion that problem solving should be the central
focus of the curriculum for Mathematics strengthens the fact that ‗learning to solve
problems is the principal reason for studying Mathematics‘.

A problem exists when there is a situation a learner wants to resolve but no solution is
readily apparent. For example: Shahzaib counted 19 cycle-wheels, run by 7 cycle-
riders, going past his house. How many tricycles were there? Working on this problem
offers a good practice in addition, multiplication and division skills. However, the
important goal of this problem is to help students think systematically about possibilities
and record thinking.
The characteristics of good problem-solving techniques include both convergent and
divergent approaches. These include the systematic collection of data or evidence,
experimentation (trial and error followed by improvement), flexibility and creativity, and

Page 74 of 123
reflection — that is, thinking about the process that has been followed and evaluating it
critically.

Teachers can create opportunities for students to develop these characteristics by

encouraging them to practise and learn following simple strategies
 Guessing and checking
 Drawing a diagram
 Making lists
 Looking for patterns
 Classifying
 Substituting
 Re-arranging
 Putting observations into words
 Making predictions
 Developing proofs

Research suggests that a problem solver needs to become better acquired with a
problem and works for a clearer understanding of it before progressing towards a
solution. The path from understanding the problem to devising a plan may sometimes
be long but experience and practice are the best teachers to contrive. The plan gives a
general outline of direction to solve the problem. Having arrived at a result, it is verified
by referring back to the original problem.

Activities – Daily Life Application of Mathematics

Math can often be considered a four-lettered word to some students. When taught;
however, in a fun and meaningful way, math can open doors to rewarding challenges
and real world understandings. All it takes is some creativity while following the below
steps.
1. Know your material. Many people think that just because they remember doing
bits and pieces of math back in the day that they will be able to teach the
concepts to someone else, not true. Math is like a foreign language and must be
mastered before trying to communicate it to someone else.
a. Take the time to review and refresh on each math concept.
b. Learn the vocabulary for the topics and practice using it regularly.
Often times when students do poorly on an exam it is not because they
don‘t know HOW to do the math concepts it is that they do not know what
the question is ASKING them to do. Hence, the importance of vocabulary.
c. Provide the rationale before teaching each math concept; make sure to be
able to explain WHY something is so in math. It is essential for all and
especially for students that are more inquisitive.

Page 75 of 123
2. Look for examples in the real world. Teachers argue that math is useless and
doesn‘t have anything to do with everyday life.
a. Take a drive around city / town and note how many times math is used. A
few examples are as under:
i. How the shapes & sizes are in different natural and man-made
things
ii. How time changes in day & night
iii. How weight & volume are mentioned on different items
iv. How measurements are represented in the form of number on
petrol pumps
v. How the distance is displayed on the mileage boards
vi. The total amount paid or how the amount of time it takes to get to a
destination changes as the speed increases
When a teacher can give the usefulness of mathematics, students become more
engaged. Assign the same task to students before, during and after teaching to
observe the nature as well as surrounding and find out the relationship.
3. Use “Hands-On” activities planned for each unit. Math is abstract is an old
myth. Have students engage with learning by providing kinesthetic (hands-on
learning) activities that get students moving and manipulating math.
a. Use assembly ground to explain the concept of forward and backward
counting. Draw a line on the ground, walk forward and backward, and tell
your students to count, if children call out the wrong digit act as you are
tumbling.
b. Bring a cake, apple or sandwich into class to work on operations with
fractions.
c. Use a classroom-size playground to explain the movement on a number
line of positive and negative integers.
d. Use internet as it is an excellent resource. A few links are as follows:
4. Reinforce, Reinforce, Reinforce. We all learn differently so provide adequate
opportunities for students to practice math. Try presenting the information
verbally, visually, and kinesthetically (hands-on). Then make sure you give your
students the same opportunity to apply the concepts in the same form. Take this
time to monitor your students and provide on-spot guidance, reinforce proper
procedures, provide constructive feedback and correct common mistakes
individually.

5. Test on what is taught. Math success is often contributed to confidence, so

prepare students for what is actually going to be on the test and examination.

Page 76 of 123
 6. Lastly, get excited! Math is a really cool discipline once the time is taken to try
and understand it. Nothing beats the feeling of seeing the light bulb come on over
a student‘s head when they finally ―Get it‖!

Assessment And Evaluation. Assessment is the process of gathering information

using a variety of tools and techniques that reflect how well a student is achieving the
curriculum expectations in a subject. As part of assessment teachers provide students
with descriptive feedback that guides their efforts towards improvement. The quality of
assessment largely determines the quality of evaluation. Evaluation refers to the
process of judgments and decisions based on the interpretation of evidence gathered
through assessment.
Rowntree * (1990) defined assessment as having two purpose: firstly to support and
provide feedback to learners and improve their ongoing learning and secondly TO
REPORT ON WHAT THEY HAD ALREADY ACXHIEVED. In essence the first is
formative assessment and the second is summative assessment. Morgan and O‘ (1999)
believe that assessment is the engine that drivers and shapes learning, rather than an
end of course event that grades and reports on performance.
Assessment and evaluation should be based on curriculum expectation and the
achievement levels outlined in the national curriculum. To ensure that assessment and
evaluation lead to the improvement of student learning, teachers must use specific
assessment and evaluation strategies that:-
 Address both what students learn and how well they learn.
 Are administered over a period of time and designed to provide opportunities
for students to demonstrate full range of their learning.
 Ensure that each student is given clear directions for improvement.
 Promote students‘ ability to assess their own learning.
 Are communicated clearly to students and parents in advance.

Assessment in Mathematics
It should be kept in mind that in mathematics a single type of assessment can frustrate
students, diminish their self-confidence and make them feel anxious about the subject.
In reality the understanding of mathematical concepts encompasses a broad range of
abilities. Examples of various templates to masses different abilities are mentioned
below. Assessment must include by focusing on a student‘s ability to:
 Communicate mathematically.
 Reason and analyze, and to think and act in positive ways.
 Comprehend the key concepts
 Evaluate the effectiveness of using different strategies to address the same
problem.

Page 77 of 123
  Use a variety of strategies to problem solving and to make mathematical
connections.
 Discriminate between relevant and irrelevant attributes of a concept in
selecting examples.
 Integrate and to make sense of mathematical concept and procedure.
 Examine real life situations by reasoning mathematically.

Class Work – Oral and Written work schedule are among the integral parts of
Mathematics classrooms. They help teachers to assess the progress of students and
school management to monitor the teaching of a particular subject.

Mathematics Notebooks
 Notebooks should be a clear depiction of the student‘s own work rather than
having all work copied from the board and checked by the teacher as a formality.
 Follow up of correction work is a must and should be done in the note copies.
 A few teachers require the students to do rough work on a separate sheet and
then copy down the correct answers in the CW notebook, which should be
discouraged. A column for rough work should be made by drawing margin line on
the right side of the page.
 Students should use an interleaf notebook for all Geometry work.

Page 78 of 123
 TEACHING SCIENCE

What is science?
Science involves people investigating the living, physical, material, and technological
components of their environment and making sense of them in logical and creative
ways.

Using systematic and creative processes of investigation, scientists produce a

constantly evolving body of knowledge and make an important contribution to the
decisions, which are shaping our world and the world of future generations.

Importance of Science
Learning in science is fundamental to understanding the world in which we live and
work. It helps people to clarify ideas, to ask questions, to test explanations through
measurement and observation, and to use their findings to establish the worth of an
idea. The science curriculum needs to recognise that science is a universal discipline
and to acknowledge the contribution that different cultural perspectives make to the
development of understanding in science. Effective teaching will enrich the
understanding of all students by providing knowledge about the natural and physical
worlds. Science and technology are major influences in many aspects of our daily lives,
at work, at play, and at home. Our dependence on science and technology demands a
high level of scientific literacy for all and requires a comprehensive science education
for all students, as well as for those who will have careers in science and technology.

General Aims Of Science Education

Students will be able to
 Develop knowledge and a coherent understanding of the living, physical,
material, and technological components of their environment;
 Encourag students to develop skills for investigating the living, physical, material,
and technological components of their environment in scientific ways;
 Provide opportunities for students to develop the attitudes on which scientific
investigation depends;
 Promote science as an activity that is carried out by all people as part of their
everyday life;
 Portray science as both a process and a set of ideas which have been
constructed by people to explain everyday and unfamiliar phenomena;
 Consider the ways in which people have used scientific knowledge and methods
to meet particular needs;
 Understand of the evolving nature of science and technology

Page 79 of 123
  Use scientific knowledge and skills to make decisions about the usefulness and
worth of ideas;
 Explore issues and to make responsible and considered decisions about the use
of science and technology in the environment;
 Identify different ways people influence, and are influenced by, science and
technology
 Nurture scientific talent to ensure a future scientific community;
 Develop students‘ interest in and understanding of the knowledge and processes
of science, which form the basis of many of their future careers.

Skills to be developed
 Communication skills
 Numeracy skills
 Information skills
 Problem-solving skills
 Self-management
 Competitive skills
 Work and study skills
 Social and co-operative skills
 Physical skills
Information skills and problem-solving skills are embedded in scientific investigation

Success Criteria
 Employ variety in teaching methods
 Incorporate possible activities from within and outside the textbooks
 Integrate the lessons to life using examples, colourful pictures, exiting
experiences, natural world, and documentary films etc.
 Utilize library, newspapers, magazines, supplements, handouts and work sheets
as well as other resource materials as and when required
 Arrange field trips/study visits keeping in mind the age and class level of the
students to explore nature and get hands-on practice
 Encourage students to study nature and develop a love of its preservation
 Celebrate special days / social activities i.e. World Earth Day, cleanliness etc
 Provide ample opportunities to your students to get firsthand knowledge and
meaningful learning
 Enable students to write in their own sentences with relevant illustrations
 Develop the appreciation of the subject

Teaching Resources / Science Equipment and Supplies

Page 80 of 123
The use of hands-on activities is an essential learning strategy in all science programs.
Hands-on activities can range from simple demonstrations to complex scientific
investigations or experiments. At any level of activity, in nay learning environment, there
exists a need for specific items of equipment or supplies. Such equipment should be
appropriate to the grade level. Many items can be made how or no cost material or
improvised using everyday items.
1. Print Resources - There could be a number of categories of print materials
available to science teachers and students – teacher reference materials dealing
with science teacher, student textbooks and accompanying teacher resources,
science activity books containing ideas for experiments an/or demonstrations,
science trade books and reference books (e.g., science encyclopedias) and
supplementary books that supplement or complement science textbooks.
2. Non-Print Resources - There are an increasing variety of resources in other
formats such as video, computer software, CD-ROM and videodisk. Computer
software and CD-ROM disks offer simulations and models of real-life situations
that permit the investigation of phenomena that are not available because of
cost, safety, or accessibility.
3. Use of Technology - Computers and related technology offer students a very
important resource for learning the concepts and processes of science through
simulations, graphics, sound, data manipulation, and model building.
The following guidelines are proposed for the implementation of computers and
related technology in the teaching and learning of science:
 Tutorial software should engage students in meaningful interactive dialogue
and creativity employ graphs, sound and simulations to promote acquisition of
facts and skills, develop concept learning and enhance understanding.
 Networking among students and teachers should be encouraged to permit
students to emulate the way scientist work and for teachers, to reduce
teacher isolation.
In order to effectively implement computers and other technology in science
education, teachers should know how to use effectively and efficiently the
hardware, software and techniques described above.

4. Field Trips and Guest Speakers - Investigate activities include a variety of

activities, for example, a quick field trip to the schoolyard or nearby field/park. All
such activities are characterized by active student involvement in attempting to
find answers to questions about the natural and constructed world. In order that
students know the real nature of science, there is a need to acquaint, expose and
fascinate them to the scientific and technological advancement. For achieving
this, visits can be organized to science laboratories, factories, universities and
other related institutions and organizations or guest speakers from these

Page 81 of 123
 departments can be invited to the school in the science educational endeavors
that could make students interested in science (this can be done even once in
their school life).

Instructional Strategies
Teaching strategies should relate to the outcomes of the science curriculum and be
consistent with the teaching role to be adopted. For students to achieve the identified
outcomes of science learning, a variety of learning and teaching roles and strategies will
need to be adopted. The student will be the centre of the learning process. This entails
negotiated, cooperative and interactive learning where the teacher needs to:
1. Work with and take an active role in the students‘ learning
2. Take into account what student already know and understand about science rather
than determining what they do not know; and
3. Ensure that key science concepts and processes are treated in an increasingly
complex way as students‘ progress through the bands of learning.
In the classroom, learning of concepts should be integrated with the learning of
language, and the learning of processes. It should be linked to applications in the
context of human purpose. Science teaching should lay a foundation for future science
studies and help students integrate their science learning with other knowledge and to
use it outside school.

Method – I (Seven E)
1. EXCITE . . . stimulates the learner's curiosity.
a. What the student does
i. Shows interest in the topic by asking questions, such as:
ii. "Why did this happen?"
iii. "What do I already know about this?"
iv. "What can I find out about this?"
b. What the teacher does
i. Creates interest
ii. Generates curiosity
iii. Raises questions
iv. Elicits responses that uncover what the students know or think
about the concept / topic
2. EXPLORE . . . to satisfy curiosity.
a. What the student does
i. Uses inquiry to explore and investigate; to satisfy his/her curiosity
about the chosen concept/topic.
ii. Thinks freely, but within the limits of the activity
iii. Tests predictions and hypotheses

Page 82 of 123
 iv. Forms new predictions and hypotheses
v. Experiments with alternatives and discusses then with others.
vi. Records observations and ideas
vii. Suspends judgments
b. What the teacher does
i. Encourages the students to work together with minimum
supervision.
ii. Observes and listens to the students.
iii. Asks probing questions to redirect the students' investigations when
necessary
iv. Provides time for students to work through problems
v. Acts as a facilitator
3. EXPLAIN . . . the concept and define the terms.
a. What the student does
i. Uses various informational resources, group discussions, and
teacher interaction to derive definitions and explanations of the
chosen concept
ii. Explains possible solutions or answers to others' explanations.
iii. Listens critically to others' explanations
iv. Questions others' explanations
v. Listens to and tries to comprehend explanations the teacher offers.
vi. Refers to previous activities
vii. Uses recorded observations in explanations.
b. What the teacher does
i. Encourages the students to explain concepts and definitions
ii. Asks for justification (evidence) and clarification from students
iii. Formally provides definitions, explanations, and new labels.
iv. Uses students' previous experiences as the basis for explaining
new concepts
4. EXPAND . . . discovering new applications
a. What the student does
i. Applies new labels, definitions, explanations and skills in new, yet
similar situations
ii. Uses previous information to ask questions, propose solutions,
make decisions, and design experiments.
iii. Draws reasonable conclusions from evidence
iv. Records observations and explanations
v. Checks for peer understanding
b. What the teacher does

Page 83 of 123
 i. Expects the students to use formal labels, definitions, and
explanations provided previously
ii. Encourages the students to apply or extend the concepts and skills
in new situations.
iii. Reminds students of the existing evidence and data and asks:
iv. What do you already know?
v. Why do you think . . .
5. EXTEND . . . the concept into other content areas.
a. What the student does
i. Makes connections and sees relationships of the concept/topic in
other content areas.
ii. Forms expanded understanding of original concepts/topics.
iii. Makes connections of concept/topic to real world situations
b. What the teacher does
i. Looks for concepts connecting with other concepts/topics and/or
with other content areas
ii. Asks probing questions to help students see relationships between
concept/topic and other content areas
6. EXCHANGE . . . ideas, lesson plans, or experiences
a. What the student does
i. Shares information about the concept / topic with others
ii. Collaborates by sharing interest with others
b. What the teacher does
i. Shares information about the concept/topic with others
ii. Collaborates by sharing interest and/or activities with others
7. EXAMINE . . . the student's understanding.
a. What the student does
i. Answers open-ended questions by using observations, evidence,
and previously accepted explanations.
ii. Demonstrates an understanding or knowledge of the concept or
skill
iii. Evaluates his or her own progress and knowledge
iv. Uses alternative assessments to demonstrate their understanding
of the concept/topic
b. What the teacher does
i. Observes the students as they apply new concepts and skills
ii. Assesses students' knowledge and/or skills
iii. Looks for evidence that the students have changed their thinking or
behaviors

Page 84 of 123
 iv. Allows students to assess their own learning and group-process
skills
v. Asks open-ended questions like:
vi. Why do you think . . . ?
vii. What evidence do you have?
viii. What do you know about . . . ?
ix. How would you explain . . . ?

Method – II (Inquiry-based Science Learning)

Inquiry/investigation is a process of framing questions, gathering information, analyzing
it and drawing conclusions. An inquiry classroom is one where students take
responsibility for their learning and are required to be active participants, searching for
knowledge, thinking critically and solving problems. There are two main types of inquiry:
knowledge based inquiry and problem based inquiry/investigation. Knowledge
base4d inquiry enables students to use science process skills (detail in Appendix B,) to
gather, organize, analyze, and present their information, which will enhance their
knowledge and understanding of content. Problem based inquiry investigation
encourages learning of social, economic, ethical, and environmental , and other science
and technology related problems.
There are a number of steps involved for conducting an inquiry such as:
 Start with an open-ended question or demonstration (as opposed to beginning
a lesson with definitions and explanations)
 Gather responses and subsequent questions from students with little comment
or direction.
 Involve students to collaborate on designing experiments or methods of
inquiry.
 Ask students to conduct experiments and/or gather data
 Students analyze and interpret the data.
 If time allows, re-evaluate question based on new data and repeat experiment
or collect new data based on revised question.
 Present findings as an oral presentation, a poster presentation, charts tables
graphs or an evaluative write up.
Teaching science as inquiry involves using strategies that ensure:
 Learning is Student-focused - Inquiry shifts ownership of the learning process
from teacher to student, making the process through which students learn
concepts and develop skills as important as the science content. Teacher acts
as a facilitator in the process.
 Teachers ask questions that encourage inquiry and stimulate thinking - To
guide students through inquiry, teacher engages in open ended questions such

Page 85 of 123
 as ―How do you know?‖ and‖ How does your activity data support your
concussions? In order to encourage further probing and discovery.
 Students are engaged in problem solving, constructing meaningful
experiences - Because students act as scientists, engaging in meaningful
problem solving, they can construct meaning out of their experiences. Science
endeavors include hands on exercises as well as critical and logical thinking
activities.
 Students gain a greater understanding of the purpose of learning - Inquiry
lets teachers create a framework where students understand how and why to
ask questions. Students reflect on the lesson and explain why it is important and
gain a greater understanding about the inquiry process and how it relates to
learning.
 Inquiry is a creative learning environment using both group and individual
discovery techniques - Inquiry involves setting short and long term goals and
adapting them to students‘ interests. Within this framework teacher might involve
students in hands-on activities, whole class instruction or group collaboration.
This learning environment allows students the freedom to explore and
investigate while making connections and drawing conclusions.
 Students interact purposefully with each other and the teacher leading to
effective communications - Inquiry teaching encourages students to
collaborate with one another, communicate ideas and thoughts, ask question,
justify answers and seek advice from other.

Method – III (Problem based learning)

Problem based learning (PBL) is the type of classroom organization that supports and
constructivist approach to teaching and learning. Guided by teachers acting as cognitive
coaches, student develop critical thinking problem solving and collaborative skills as
they identify problems, formulate hypotheses, conduct data search perform
experiments, formulate solutions and determine the best fit of solutions to the conditions
of the problem. Problem based learning will enable students to embrace complexity find
relevance and enjoyment in their learning and enhance their capacity for creative and
responsible real world problem solving. Teachers will assume the role of cognitive
coach rather than knowledge holder and disseminator and students will be the active
problem solvers, decision makers and meaning makers rather than passive listeners. To
design a problem based learning experience for the students various sequential steps
are required such as:
 Identify a problem suitable for the students
 Connect the problem with the context of the students world so that it present
real/authentic opportunities.
 Organize the subject matter around the problem, not the discipline.

Page 86 of 123
  Give students responsibility for defining their learning experience and planning to
solve the [problem.
 Encourage collaboration by creating learning teams/groups
 Expect all students to demonstrate the results of their learning through a product
or performance.

Benefits of problem based learning

Problem based learning offers students to develop:
 Motivation
 Relevance and context
 Higher order thinking
 Learning how to learn

Science Technology Society Environment (STSE) in the Classroom

One of the General Curriculum outcome (STSE) states that students will develop an
understanding of the nature of science and technology, their application and
implications and the relationship among science technology society and the
environment.
STSE places the scientific endeavor in the context of a current societal or environmental
situation, question, or problem. The desire to investigate the situation, answer the
question or solve the problem creates in the students a meaningful context in which to
address the skills, concepts and understanding of the course content. The STSE in the
teaching and learning allows the learners to reflect more accurately their understanding
of the science, the nature of technology society and their interrelationship.

Attitudes and Values in the Classroom

Attitudes refer to generalized aspects of behavior that are modeled for students by
examples and reinforced by selective approval y the teachers. Attitudes are not
acquired in the same way as skills and knowledge. However, during the classroom
learning experiences science education will contribute to attitudinal growth when
students are:
 Involved in science investigation and activities that stimulate their interest and
curiosity thus increasing their motivation for learning and encouraging them to
become interested in preparing for potential science related careers of furthering
other science related interests
 Provided with opportunities for development, reinforcement, and extension of
attitudes that support scientific inquiry such as open mindedness and respect
for evidence imitative, perseverance, creativity and inventiveness
 Provided with opportunities to work in groups‘ situations and on real life
problems, Thus developing a sense of interpersonal responsibilities,

Page 87 of 123
 openness to diversity respect for multiple perspectives and an appreciation of
the efforts and contributions of other;
 Involved in activities that encourage responsible action toward living things and
the environment and when students are encouraged to consider issues related to
sustainability from a variety of perspectives
 Encouraged to assess and manage potential dangers and apply safety
procedures, thus developing a positive attitude towards safety.

Class / Home Work

Class and homework is an essential component of the science program as it extends
the opportunity for students to think scientifically and to reflect ideas explored during
class time.
Meaningful and positive independent work experiences can:
 Contribute to personal growth, self – discipline and learning responsibility
 Reinforce the ideas and processes students have learned or developed at school
 Develop students‘ confidence in their ability to work without others‘ help
 Provide opportunities for students to produce and then reflect on what they are
learning and how well they are learning it.

Class / Home Work Setting and Marking

1. Class / Home work needs to be planned by the teacher in advance and written in
the lesson plan. Class / Home work should be given regularly, carefully marked
and returned to the students as soon as possible.
2. The amount of class / home work should be given keeping an average student in
mind.
3. H.W should be the reinforcement of C.W. No new work should be given.
4. Teacher must note the student absent when a certain H.W was give and ensure
that the work is done later by the student.
5. Very untidy or carelessly done class / homework must not be accepted. Provide
on-spot guidance and constructive feedback during class work. Ask the student to
repeat home work.
6. Weekend H.W should be interesting as for as possible.
7. Holiday H.W should be fun to do and which the pupils can complete happily e.g.
Researching, gathering information for a class work /project can also be given for
H.W.
8. Make sure all notebooks must be checked.
9. Assign correction work if required and ensure follow-up of the corrected work.
10. Use guidelines as per FLASH Summer 2012 Ref – QTM - Quality Notebooks

Page 88 of 123
Page 89 of 123
 TEACHING SOCIAL STUDIES
What is Social Studies?
A group of instructional programs that describes the substantive portions of behaviour,
past and present activities, interactions, and organizations of people associated
together for religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other
purposes.

Social Studies with in the School Program

Social studies is the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote
civic competence. It provides coordinated, systematic study drawing upon such
disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law,
philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, sociology, humanities, mathematics,
natural sciences.
It enables students to develop their knowledge and understandings of the diverse and
dynamic nature of society and of how interactions occur among cultures, societies, and
environments. Students develop and apply skills as they investigate society, explore
issues, make decisions, and work cooperatively with others.
The understandings and skills they develop enable them to participate in society as
informed, confident, and responsible citizens.

Importance of Social Studies

The social studies provides a remarkable opportunity to engage students in the
enduring dilemmas embedded in the study of community, family, and society.
Examining these dilemmas makes social studies come alive for students and allows
them to explore the role of responsible citizen. Through this learning, students model
responsible citizenship and are more committed to enhancing the social fabric in which
they live.
The social studies provides a unique forum for acquiring historical perspective,
practicing respectful processes of engagement, and developing a passion for
contributing to the common good of the immediate and larger community

Primary Purpose of Social Studies

The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to
make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally
diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.

Objectives
Students will be able to
• develop knowledge and understandings about human society

Page 90 of 123
 • interact with places and the environment
• compare and contrast the culture and heritage
• identity and the nature and consequences of cultural interaction
• identify rights, roles, and responsibilities of people as they interact within groups;
• develop relationships between people and events, through time, and
interpretations of these relationships;
• allocate and manage of resources while participating in activities and by
developing skills as they use the social studies processes:
• learn about society and to enable them to participate responsibly in society

Social Studies Skills

1. Communication Skills– communicate confidently and competently by listening,
speaking, reading, and writing
2. Numeracy Skills - analyse and respond to information in graphs, tables, charts,
or percentages
3. Information Skills - gather and process information from a range of sources,
information gathering / data analysis
4. Problem Solving Skills - inquire and research, and explore, generate, and
develop ideas, critical thinking skills
5. Physical Skills - learn to use materials efficiently and safely, map analysis
6. Self management and Competitive Skills - manage time, develop constructive
approaches to challenge, change, competition, success and failure
7. Social and Cooperative Skills - take increasing responsibility for their own
learning and work

Social Studies Teaching Resources

Teaching and learning resources provide opportunities for teachers to reinforce,
challenge, and expand the students existing knowledge and skills. A range of Social
studies teaching resources is as under:
Class/School Resources Community Resources Library Resources
 Globe  Community resources,  biographies, literature,
 Models such as historical diaries, newspaper
 Photographs sites, museums, articles, yearbooks, and
 Charts banks, post offices, letters;
 Maps hospitals, shops,  interpretations of the
 Posters farms, and factories past, present, and
 Radio/ Television  The experiences of the possible future
programmes (if students themselves  Internet
any) and of their families,
friends, and

Page 91 of 123
 Neighbours

Forms Of Social Studies Knowledge

1. Facts are:
• What actually happened?
• things that can be shown to be true, to exist, or to have happened
2. Concepts:
• Are the categories we use to cluster information.
• Organize specific information under one label. They are building blocks and Links
between facts and generalizations.
• Rely on facts, but facts are not meaningful except as they relate to concepts and
generalizations
3. Generalizations are:
• Statements about relationships between and among concepts
• True and verifiable for all cases on the basis of the best evidence available
• Organized and summarized information obtained from the analysis of facts

Existing Teaching Methods

• Existing methods of teaching i.e. book reading and explaining method, do not
provide much help in deciding how each of aforementioned elements can be
taught together or even sequentially for optimal student learning.
• Learning is a construction process. Students build understanding, piece by piece
and often in highly individualistic ways. Not all students learn the same way. It is
up to us to help them in the endeavor.
In the face of this ambiguity, starting with following instructional strategies may help
teachers to accomplish their objectives.

Instructional Strategies
 Activating Prior Knowledge. Learning is a process of adding new ideas to old
ideas. Some ways to activate prior knowledge are as under:
• Brainstorming
• KWL

 Teaching Concepts
Step 1: Identify a set of examples and place them in a logical order. Include at
least one example that is a ―best‖ example.
Step 2: Devise materials or oral instructions with a set of cues, directions,
questions, differences in the examples and no examples used.
Step 3: Have students compare all the examples with the best example; provide
feedback to students on their comparisons.

Page 92 of 123
 Step 4: Focus student attention on the best, strongest, most clear example.
What are its attributes and characteristics?
Step 5: Ask students to develop a definition of the concept or state it for them.
Step 6: Place the concept in relation to other student knowledge; try to attach
this new information to existing student knowledge structures.
Step 7: Give students examples and no examples to assess whether students
understand the concept. Ask students to generate additional examples
or apply the concept to new situations.

• Problem solving has a special role in the social studies. It is one of the most
important skills students learn in school. Students use facts, concepts, and
generalizations in the process of finding solutions to problems and reaching
decisions about issues.
• Problem-solving and decision-making processes involve a series of steps a
student follows to some conclusion. It requires students to use facts, concepts,
and generalizations they already know to arrive at a solution or decision.

• IDEAL Approach
• Identify the problem
• Define and represent the problem
• Explore possible strategies
• Act on the strategies
• Look back and evaluate the effects of your activities

• Direct Instruction. Lectures are not all bad, but they are not all good either.
Sometimes it is necessary to present some baseline information, explain a new
skill, model a thinking process, or provide direct instruction to students before
they proceed to struggle with learning on their own.
The typical direct instruction teaching strategy includes six steps:
Step 1: Daily review.
Step 2: Presentation of new material.
Step 3: Guided practice.
Step 4: Provision of feedback.
Step 5: Independent practice.
Step 6: Periodic reviews.
(Ref: Detail guidelines in FLASH Summer 2012 – Trg Manual QTM)

• Visual Strategies. An interactive lecture, well illustrated with pictures, images

and mind maps from authentic sources, is a good teaching strategy. A more
powerful learning tool is student construction and preparation of their own visual

Page 93 of 123
 presentations. Students choose the images and develop the story and narration
based on interpretation of events, data, and information. To conclude, they make
a presentation or produce a visual product.

• Advantages of Visual Strategies

Visual strategies help to:
• Develop a richly visual presentation as well as visual analysis skills.
• Build in student involvement and interactivity as the images are displayed and
analyzed.
• Model image analysis
• Interpret what they see independently

Activities – Daily Life Application of Social Studies

• Community Based Instruction (CBI)
Community based instruction is an old idea with a new name. Teachers have
always used real life situations and settings to enrich their classroom and
curriculum. Today‘s version may be slightly different but it is not new. Types of
CBI
• Experiential "Hands-on" Learning
• Direct experience with the application of knowledge has long been
recognized as a superior teaching method to passive learning modes
such as lectures. Hands-on learning can take place in a laboratory
setting or in the field. This may include community service-based
learning where students perform real projects that serve an actual
(typically local or regional) community need.
• Field Trips
• Direct observation with an interpretative guide provides a means for
analyzing and experiencing built environments.
• Spatial as well as acoustical, thermal, luminous, and hap tic elements
are conveyed through first hand experience in ways that even virtual
reality has been unable to produce.
• It is especially important that the field trip is used as a way to broaden
students' experience by introducing them to unfamiliar settings
• (such as urban for students from rural campuses), cultures, and
technologies.
• Simulations and Role Playing.
Role playing is also known as simulation. Through this process, students
learn roles and responsibilities associated with different aspects of design and
construction fields.

Page 94 of 123
Assessment And Evaluation
Social studies teachers are required to monitor the progress of students in relation to
the achievement of set objectives. Teachers will use their professional judgment when
deciding which achievement objectives will be used as the basis for assessing,
recording, and reporting on students work. They will do this by devising specific learning
outcomes based on the achievement objectives and sets of indicators.

Class & Homework setting and Marking

1. Class & Home work needs to be planned by the teacher in advance and written
in the lesson plan. It should be given regularly, carefully marked and returned to
the students as soon as possible.
2. The amount of C.W & H.W should be given keeping an average student in mind.
3. No new work should be given as H.W. It is the reinforcement of C.W.
4. H.W must be written on the board for the students to copy and write and teachers
should check and initial the student‘s diary
5. Teachers must note the student absent when a certain H.W was given and
ensure that the work is done later by the student.
6. Ask the student to work neatly and in organized manner. Very untidy or
carelessly done work is the result of negligence by the teacher. This aspect can
be improved by providing on spot guidance and constructive feedback.
7. Researching, gathering information for a project can also be given for H.W
8. Weekend H.W should be interesting / challenging as far as possible.
9. Holiday H.W should be fun to do and which the pupils can complete happily.
10. Make sure holiday H.W is checked.

Page 95 of 123
 QUESTIONING SKILLS

It is at home that a child first learns the power of asking questions. One research study
found that four-year olds on average took part in 27 conversations per hour with their
mothers, with each conversation averaging 16 turns. The study showed that when these
children entered school their conversations fell to ten per hour with teachers, each
lasting about eight turns. Teachers initiated most conversations and asked most
questions. This, and other studies, show that apart from speaking less at school than at
home, children get fewer turns, ask fewer questions, make fewer requests of
information, use less elaborated sentences, express a narrower range of meanings, and
use language less often to plan, reflect, discuss or recall past events. There are fewer
'passages of intellectual search1. They are talked at, rather than talked with. This
discontinuity between the culture of home and school can lead to educational
'disadvantage'. The ways in which teachers use language, and in particular use
questions, can have immediate and long-term effects on children's learning.

Why do teachers ask questions?

The common response is that teachers use questions in order to motivate, to test
knowledge, and to promote reflection, analysis or enquiry. Questions are supposed to
offer intellectual challenge, to encourage students to think. That is the theory. In practice
many of the questions teachers use inhibit intellectual activity, and save students from
the effort of having to think. Research shows that most questions teachers use are
closed, factual questions with known right answers, making low levels of cognitive
demand that do not encourage children to persist in their thinking and learning.

Functions Of Questions
 Make children think
 Rouse curiosity and interest
 Focus attention
 Elicit views, feeling and experience
 Stimulate discussion
 Test recall of knowledge
 Check understanding
 Revise Learning
 Diagnose difficulties
 Lead on to new learning

Questions Teachers Ask:

Page 96 of 123
It's difficult to categorize questions into types. The kind of questions we ask would
depend on the object we want to attain. The ultimate objective of questioning in the
classroom should be to maximize learning. We are likely to get a better learning
response from students if we act as follows:
Ask fewer, but better, questions. Aim for quality, rather than quantity.
Seek better answers with fewer questions. We have time to invite more responses, and
to extend thinking time. Withhold the rush to judgment. Work at getting a better
response.
Avoid the trap of a 'yes' or 'no' response. It's better to ask open-ended questions that
genuinely invite children to think. Following are a few examples: What do you think?
How do you know? Why do you think that? Do you have a reason? How can you be
sure? Is this always so? Is there another way/reason/idea? What if? What if not? Where
is there another example of this? What do you think happens next?
Avoid too complex questions like, 'Why is there pollution?' It's more productive to narrow
the focus, to create a context, and to move from known to the unknown.
Avoid too closed or too narrow questions. These are often the 'what-is-the-teacher-
thinking1 type of questions.
Make questions interesting too.

Higher and Lower Levels of Thinking:

Bloom's taxonomy can be set out as follows.
Higher order:
 Evaluation, e.g. 'What do you think about... criteria to assess or judge...?'
 Synthesis, e.g. 'How could we add to, improve, design or solve...?
 Analysis, e.g. 'What is the evidence for...parts or features of...?'
Lower order:
 Application, e.g. 'What other examples are there...?'
 Comprehension, e.g. 'What do we mean by...? Explain...'
 Knowledge, e.g. 'Who... What... Where... When... How...?'

According to Bloom's taxonomy of thinking skills, evaluation, synthesis and analysis

demand more complex and 'higher1 levels of thinking. Questions which ask for
application, comprehension and knowledge demand less complex and thus 'lower'
levels of thinking. One effective questioning strategy is to ask questions that make
increasing cognitive demands on students, to move from simple knowledge/recall
questions, through questions that ask for comprehension/explanation, and application,
then analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Often this will mean moving from the 'What'
and 'How1 descriptive question, to the 'Why' and 'What for?' question that asks for a
more complex response. A good question fits into a pattern that offers progressive and

Page 97 of 123
productive challenge to learning. It offers a model for the sorts of productive question
that students can ask of themselves and of others.

Thinking Time:
When you have asked a question, how long do you wait for an answer? A good answer
is worth waiting for. Also, in questioning, we should learn to value silence. Research has
shown that some teachers, on average, wait only one second for an answer. If an
answer is not forthcoming within a second, teachers tend to interject by repeating or
rephrasing the question, asking another question, or another child. When a pupil
answers, teachers tend to respond within one second, either with praise, or by asking
another question, or with a comment. Rarely, it seems, are students allowed the luxury
of a thoughtful silence. We want to keep the conversational ball rolling, but studies show
that by increasing thinking time, also called 'wait time', the quality of pupils' responses
can be dramatically increased.
How long should we allow for thinking time? Increasing 'wait time' to a few seconds can
result in significant changes, such as:
Pupils giving longer answers
More pupils offering to answer
Pupils willing to ask more questions
Pupils' responses becoming more thoughtful and creative.
Strangely, teachers find it very difficult to sustain a longer waiting time. Old habits die
hard and the 'scatter gun1 approach of quick-fire questions and answers soon
reappears. It is not pupils only who need time to think. There are two elements of
thinking time - after the question and after the answer. The two elements are:
 Thinking time 1: The teacher allows some time encourage longer, more
thoughtful answers from pupils
 Thinking time 2: The teacher models a thinking response, values complexity and
defers judgment.

Strategies to support thinking and talking include pause, prompt and praise.
 Pausing: Pausing means giving time, thinking time, and opportunities or re-
thinking and re-starting an idea. 'Can you explain/Tell us again...?'
 Prompting and probing: Prompting and probing gives verbal encouragement,
for example, by 'reflecting back' to check whether we have understood what the
student has said. Following the pupil's train of thought and encouraging deeper
exploration is sometimes called 'probing'.
o Examples of probing questions include:
 Why do you think that...? How do you know...?
 Can you tell me more about...? Can you show me what you mean?

Page 98 of 123
  What if...? Is it possible that...?
 Sometimes a minimal encouragement will prompt further response
'Hmm', 'Umm', 'Uh huh', Yes?', 'OK', 'I see', 'And'.
o Non-verbal reinforcement includes eye contact (the eyes are the windows
of the soul), facial signals, e.g. smiles, body gestures, (e.g. nodding on
rather than nodding off!), and other signals of approval.
 Praising: Praise gives positive feedback and is specific and personal.
Responses such as: That's an interesting answer', Thanks for the answer1, can
foster general participation by:
o Supporting the hesitant
o Rewarding the risk-takers
o Valuing every genuine contribution
 One way of valuing and encouraging contributions is to put all ideas and!
suggestions on display, perhaps with the child's name next to each! contribution
as a focus for further discussion, writing or research. The) skilful use of
questioning can help turn the classroom into a 'community of enquiry' in which all
are involved.
 There is a danger, even with skilful questioning, of following a pre-set agenda,
and not encouraging student initiative. In adopting a 'teacher role' we can
dominate the talk by asking too many questions and imposing our own meaning.
One way to avoid excessive teacher control is to actively encourage pupil-to-
pupil exchanges. Ways to do this include:
 Withholding judgment. Responding in a non-evaluative fashion, asking others to
respond.
 Cueing alternative responses. There is no one right answer. What are the
alternatives? Who has a different point of view?'
 Inviting students‘ questions. 'Anyone likes to ask Pat a question about what
she/he has said/done?'
 Allowing for students questioning each other. 'Ali, would you ask someone else
what they think what their ideas are?'
 Using 'think-pair-share'. Allowing thinking time, discussing with a partner, then
sharing with the group.
 Those teachers who ask too many questions tend to discourage students from
giving elaborate or thoughtful answers. Those who force on pupils a pattern of
repetitive questions - who?, what?, where?, when?, why? -will face pupils who
ask fewer questions themselves, give short responses, rarely discuss with peers,
volunteer few ideas and show many confusions. What then is to be done? One
answer is to use alternatives to questions.

Encouraging Children to Question:

Page 99 of 123
When someone asked Isidor Rabi, a Nobel Prize winning nuclear physicist, how he
became a physicist he told the story of his mother who, when he came home from
school, did not ask the usual question: So what did you learn today? Instead she asked:'
'Izzy, did you ask a good question today?' Students, who are so efficient questioners at
home, seldom ask questions at school. Why? Perhaps the teachers only ask questions
and that too in a judgmental mode. They should actually be encouraging children to ask
more questions. The ability to question is one of the keys to effective learning, and it
comes with practice. We must value children's questions as much as their answers.
If we want pupils to be active and adventurous thinkers we need to encourage them to
ask questions. As children become older this becomes less easy. Researchers found
that those children, who were asking over 50 percent of questions at home, were asking
under 5 percent of the questions once they got into school. So how can we encourage
pupils to be more active in questioning and seeking after knowledge? Two ways of
trying to establish a climate of enquiry are for teachers to:
Model a questioning mind by thinking aloud and asking good questions.
Value and provide opportunities for students to ask questions

Assessing the ability to question:

A simple way to assess the ability of children to devise questions is to give them a
common object such as a chair or cup and ask them to list as many questions about the
object as they can. Another way is to take a subject of current study and see how many
questions children can create about the topic. A third way is to choose a text, such as a
part of a story or poem and see how good they are at interrogating the text, by asking
them to create questions about it. With practice at creating questions from a variety of
source materials, the fluency and flexibility of their questioning will improve. After a year
in an enquiring classroom, children will often be able to generate twice as many
questions, under test conditions, as they were able to create at the beginning of the
year. Test your questioning power by choosing an everyday object and seeing how
many questions you can create about the object. How many questions do you think it is
possible to generate? (The answer is not known, for the possibilities are theoretically
limitless.)
Given practice in asking questions, they will be able to see more, to think more and
learn more about any object or aspect of life - and should with experience improve the
quality and quantity of their questioning.
The following are some of the kinds of questions that children can create after looking at
an object.

Creating a questioning classroom:

There can be problems in creating an enquiring classroom. The questions of children
can be challenging and unsettling. It will not suit the teachers who think they have all the

Page 100 of 123

answers. It will suit the teacher who is keen to help children to be independent, creative
and curious. It will also help to keep alive children's own curiosity about the world, and
about themselves. In an enquiring classroom I was once asked: 'Mr. Fisher, what are
you going to do when you grow up?' In another I thought I would offer a philosophical
challenge to some nine-year olds. I said: 'How do you know that I am Mr. Fisher?' After
a silence, one child replied thoughtfully: 'How do you know you are Mr. Fisher?'
However, these questions are answered, perhaps there is a clue to creating an
enquiring classroom in the mnemonic - PARTS ARE EQUAL - reportedly used in the
human awareness training of traffic wardens, meaning: People Always Respond to
Someone Activity Encouraging Equality in Questioning and Listening.
Some examples of classroom activities which are designed to create questions for
thinking are set out as following.
 Study questions: Help students identify what is significant in their learning.
Groups should devise questions from their study, writing or textbook, to text
themselves or others.
 Reading review questions: Ask your pupils to help you ask the class questions
about the story they are reading or listening to. Try to get the child to identify
what kind of question it is, e.g. is the question asking for information that is 'on
the lines' (explicit), 'between the lines' (implicit), or 'beyond the lines' of the story?
 Hot seating: A student chooses to be a character from literature, history or
current affairs. The others brainstorm questions to ask the child-in-role.
Encourage open questions.
 Twenty questions (Kasoti): One or more of the students chooses an object,
person or place. The other have 20 questions with which to find out the answer.
Only "Yes" or 'No' answers are allowed. Only three direct guesses are allowed.
Play in groups of six students. Two select the topic and four ask the questions.
 Question and answer: Students devise questions to the given answer, for
example, for younger students a person, place, thing or number; older students
can devise questions for a quotation from poem or play.
 Interview questions: Decide on someone to interview, for example, a visitor, or
a local VIP.; The students then devise, share with each other, evaluate and
prioritise] the best interview questions.
 Keep a questions box, board or book: Collect any interesting or puzzling
questions that arise in the classroom. Create a place to write, store or display
your questions, such as in a box, on a board or in a book. Set aside some time,
such as at the end of the week, to choose and discuss a question. Alternatively
share out the questions for children to work on at home or swap questions with
another class or group.

Page 101 of 123

 Assessment and Evaluation

Assessment is a systematic that measures the outcomes of students‘ learning in terms

of knowledge acquired, understanding developed, and skills gained. It determines their
progression through their learning experiences and enables them to demonstrate that
they have achieved the intended learning outcome. Assessment provides all
stakeholders with information as to how well students, schools and programs are
succeeding and it identifies areas that need improvement. Thus, the focus of
assessment shifts from judgment to continuous improvement.

Evaluation is the process of analyzing, reflecting upon and summarizing assessment

information and making judgments or decisions based upon the information gathered.
Evaluation is effective when it is integrated into the teaching-learning process and
carried out regularly and comprehensively through the use of a variety of assessment
techniques.

Assessment and evaluation are essential components of teaching and learning. Without
effective assessment and evaluation it is not possible to know whether students have
learned, whether teaching has been effective, or how best to address students‘ learning
needs.

Assessing Student Learning

The e Curriculum emphasizes having a classroom environment in which students will be
encouraged to learn processes and knowledge within meaningful contexts. It is
important that assessment strategies reflect this emphasis and are consistent in
approach. An assessment program, which provides regular feedback and is part of the
learning process, is important to both student and teacher. Feedback tells students if
they demonstrate understanding of related concepts and if their actions display
expected performance levels for student centered teaching learning approaches.
Regular feedback inspires confidence in learning and in becoming independent learner.

Therefore, the assessment of student learning must be aligned with curriculum

outcomes.

Incorporating Assessment into the Learning Process

Assessment of student learning must be part of every teaching and learning experience.
Students should learn to evaluate their own learning. Traditional student testing
programs, which rely on final, one-time evaluations, provide data that is of limited use to

Page 102 of 123

students as they construct knowledge. Meaningful assessment, like meaningful
learning, must be authentic and connected to real-life problems.

A constructivist approach to learning and teaching has profound implications for the way
learning is measured. Traditional classroom practice relies heavily on paper and pencil
tests to measure students‘ learning and ability to apply knowledge. Learning is a
process of connecting prior understanding with new learning. Consequently, an
assessment strategy that measures the acquisition of facts and elements cannot serve
a constructivist model.

Linking assessment to instruction – embedding it in the process of learning – is vital for

an effective implementation of the ―student centered approaches and Outcome focused‖
Curriculum. To allow students to construct learning in the classroom through authentic
experiences, assessment must be:

1. Valid, leading to attainment of multi-dimensional subject specific learning;

2. Open-ended, allowing for discussion and revision of new understanding;
3. Tolerant of divergent thinking and promote the notion of no ―one right answer‖;
4. Presented in alternative modes, not just paper and pencil responses to limiting
questions;
5. Designed to promote analysis, comparison, generalization, prediction and
modification;
6. Capable to promoting collaboration and team effort in demonstration of
competence; and
7. Ongoing and cumulative, showing development over time.

Types of Assessment
Assessment serves many important purposes, For example:
 Diagnostic (to plan instruction to fit the student‘s prior knowledge)
 Formative (to improve performance and adapt instruction)
 Summative (to report on final performance)

Purpose of Assessment
1. To guide instruction - Assessments should provide continuous data about
student learning so teachers can identify student needs and plan appropriate
instructional strategies by obtaining feedback on their own practice, finding out
the gaps between teaching (what was taught) and learning (what has been
learned).
2. To inform Progress of students - The purpose of assessment is to provide
information and feedback on students‘ progress to the students and their parents.

Page 103 of 123

3. To provide information on the effectiveness of curriculum - The purpose of
assessment is to provide information on the effectiveness of science curriculum
to all stakeholders in order to improve curricula, teaching standards and students‘
learning environment. Teachers, students and parents, and the community need
information to determine the overall effectiveness of the science program.

Classroom Assessment
The primary purpose of classroom assessment is not only to evaluate and classify
students‘ performance but also to inform of teaching methods and learning environment,
and to monitor student progress in achieving year-end learning outcomes. Therefore,
classroom assessment is used for various purposes:
i. Assessment as learning
ii. Assessment FOR learning
iii. Assessment OF learning

Each of the purpose requires a different role for teachers and different planning (for
details refer Appendix A.) Traditionally, the focus of classroom assessment has been on
assessment of learning (summative assessment). Assessment for learning has been
used only for diagnostic processes and for feedback. In order to enhance science
learning of all students the role of assessment as learning must provide an opportunity
to students whereby they become critical and analysts of their own learning.

Classroom Assessment Strategies

Teachers learn about student progress not only through formal tests, examinations and
projects but also through moment-by-moment observation of students. To assess
students‘ science knowledge, skills, and attitudes, teachers require a variety of tools
and approaches, such as:
 Selected Response
Multiple-choice, true/false, matching, and completion tests, etc.
 Constructed/Created Response
Fill-in-the-blank word (s)/phrase (s), essay (restricted and extended
response), reports, procedures, explanations, short answer sentence(s),
paragraphs(s), label a diagram, and graph/table, etc.
 Performance Assessment
Presentation, illustrations, science lab, demonstration, process skills,
enactment, project, debate, model exhibition, table graph, and portfolios, etc.
 Personal Communication

Page 104 of 123

 Oral questioning, observation, interview, conference, process description, and
checklists, etc.

Students‟ Self-Assessment
Students recognize the relationship between content achievement, skill proficiency , and
assessment opportunities by setting their sights on their own demonstration. They can
do self-assessment if they are provided with the knowledge related checklists as well as
checklists specific to applications and attitudes. Students assume the role of a
researcher and use critical thinking skills as they find facts and make inferences to
reach more and use critical thinking skills as they find facts and make inferences to
reach more conclusions about their learning. They are not receiving information
passively and then simply giving it back to the teacher after memorizing it. Assessment
should allow students to monitor their progress in various scientific skills; initiating and
planning; performing and recording; analyzing and interpreting; communication and
teamwork. The curriculum calls for students to be actively involved in their learning,
using the tools of science and of information processing during classroom/laboratory
activities.

Quality in Assessment
Assessment of learning must change as subject specific instruction moves from a focus
on facts to a focus on in-depth understanding of major concepts and processes.
Whereas the Quality Assessment will have the following major objectives;
 Measurement of what students should know and are able to do according to
the learning outcomes of lesson
 Objective verification of the application of subject specific principles to familiar
and unfamiliar situations
 Alignment with the Learning Outcomes and the Teaching/Learning Strategies.

Therefore, assessment and evaluation of the students‘ learning according to pre-

determined. Standards and Benchmarks will ensure the quality of their academic
achievements.

Construction of Test Items

Written test items (selected response and creative response) should adhere to the
following criteria:
1. Items should be clearly written
2. Each test items should be written on the understanding level of learners.

Page 105 of 123

 Too frequently, these test items measure students‘ gains in recall of factual information.
There are other relevant facts for students to acquire. These are higher levels of
thinking or cognition that students should also develop.
These test items should measure students‘ achievement in:
 Understanding basic concepts and acquired learning
 Evaluating contents in terms of criteria or standards
 Problem solving skills
 Analytical and creative thinking; positive attitudes developed toward student
centered teaching approaches
 Ability to work together will with others
 Relevant concepts and generalizations developed
 The ability to manipulate and utilize equipment

Results from achievement tests may be utilized, along with other data-gathering
techniques, to appraise students‘ progress in the curriculum.

Reporting
Reporting on student learning should focus on the extent to which students have
achieved the curriculum outcomes. Reporting involves communicating the summary and
interpretation of information about students‘ learning to various audiences who require
it. Teachers have a special responsibility to explain accurately what progress students
have made in their learning and to respond to parents and students inquires about
learning.

Narrative reports on progress and achievement can provide information on students‘

learning that letter or number grades alone cannot. Such reports might, for example,
suggest ways in which students can improve their learning and identify ways in which
teachers and parents/guardians/caregivers can best provide support.

Effective communication with parents/guardians/caregivers regarding their children‘s

progress is essential in fostering successful home-school partnerships. The report card
is one means of reporting individual student progress. Other means include the use of
conferences, notes and phone calls etc.

Guiding Principles for Reporting

In order to provide accurate, useful information about the achievement and instructional
needs of students, certain guiding principles for the development and use of
assessment must be followed. For example:
 Assessment strategies should be appropriate and compatible with the purpose
and context of the assessment.

Page 106 of 123

 Students should be provided with sufficient opportunity to demonstrate the
knowledge, skills, attitudes or behaviours being assessed.
 Procedures for judging or scoring student performance should be appropriate
for the assessment strategy used and be consistently applied and monitored.
 Procedures for summarizing and interpreting assessment results should yield
accurate and informative representations of a student‘s performance in relation
to the curriculum outcomes for the reporting period.
 Assessment reports should be clear, accurate and of practical value to the
audience for whom they are intended.

Page 107 of 123

 ASSESSMENT FOR LEARNING

From Formative Assessment to Assessment FOR Learning:

A Path to Success for all

As the mission of schools changes from ranking students to ensuring that all learn to
specified standards, the author argues that the purpose and form of assessments must
change as well.

Society Has Seen fit to redefine the role of its schools. No longer are they to be places
that merely sort and rank students according to their achievement. Now, they are to be
places where all students become competent, where all students meet pre-specified
standards and so are not left behind. With increasing intensity, policy makers are
turning to assessment as the power tool that will compel schools to fulfill this new role. If
we look closely at the union of this redefined mission and the growing reliance on
assessment, we can find a surprising and immensely powerful way to use assessment
in the development of effective schools.

Traditionally, schools have used assessment — the pending final exam, the
unannounced pop quiz, and the threat of low or failing report card grades — to motivate
students. To maximize learning, our teachers believed, maximize anxiety. Assessment

Pressure to get high test scores and good grades, it was believed, would motivate
greater effort and thus more learning.

The recent change in the mission of schools has clouded this traditional view of the
relationship between assessment and motivation. To see how and why, we must
explore our assessment legacy and its motivational intricacies. As you will see, through
that retrospective, we will discover a far more productive way for assessment to help
students succeed.

The Old Mission And Its Legacy

Today‘s adults grew up in schools designed to sort us into the various segments of our
social and economic system. The amount of time available to learn was fixed: one year
per grade.
The amount learned by the end of that time was free to vary: some of us learned a great
deal; some, very little. As we advanced through the grades, those who had learned a
great deal in previous grades continued to build on those foundations. Those who had
failed to master the early prerequisites within the allotted time failed to learn that which

Page 108 of 123

followed. After 12 or 13 years of cumulative treatment of this kind, we were, in effect,
spread along an achievement continuum that was ultimately reflected in each student‘s
rank in class upon graduation.

From the very earliest grades, some students learned a great deal very quickly and
consistently scored high on assessments. The emotional effect of this was to help them
to see themselves as capable learners, and so these students became increasingly
confident in school. That confidence gave them the inner emotional strength to take the
risk of striving for more success because they believed that success was within their
reach. Driven forward by this optimism, these students continued to try hard, and that
effort continued to result in success for them. They became the academic and
emotional winners. Notice that the trigger for their emotional strength and their learning
success was their perception of their success on formal and informal assessments.

But there were other students who didn‘t fare so well. They scored very low on tests,
beginning in the earliest grades. The emotional effect was to cause them to question
their own capabilities as learners. They began to lose confidence, which, in turn,
deprived them of the emotional reserves needed to continue to take risks. Public failure
was embarrassing, and it seemed better not to try and thus to save face. As their
motivation waned, of course, their performance plummeted. These students embarked
on what they believed to be an irreversible slide toward inevitable failure and lost hope.
Once again, the emotional trigger for their decision not to try was their perception of
their performance on assessments.

Consider the reality — indeed, the paradox — of the schools in which we were reared. If
some students worked hard and learned a lot, that was a positive result, and they would
finish high in the rank order. But if some students gave up in hopeless failure, that was
an acceptable result, too, because they would occupy places very low in the rank order.
Their achievement results fed into the implicit mission of schools: the greater the spread
of achievement among students, the more it reinforced the rank order. This is why, if
some students gave up and stopped trying (even dropped out of school), that was
regarded as the student‘s problem, not the teacher‘s or the school‘s.
The school‘s responsibility was to provide the opportunity to learn. If students didn‘t take
advantage of the opportunity, that was fine within the system.

Once again, please notice who is using test results to decide whether to strive for
excellence or give up in hopelessness. The ―data-based decision makers‖ in this
process are not teachers, not school leaders, and not policy makers. Rather, they are
students themselves. Students are deciding whether success is within or beyond reach,
whether the learning is worth the required effort, and so whether to try or not. The

Page 109 of 123

critical emotions underpinning the decision making process include anxiety, fear of
failure, uncertainty, and unwillingness to take risks — all triggered by students‘
perceptions of their own capabilities as reflected in assessment results.

Some students responded to the demands of such environments by working hard and
learning a great deal. Others controlled their anxiety by giving up and not caring. The
result for them? Exactly the opposite of the one society wants. Instead of leaving no
child behind, these practices, in effect, drove down the achievement of at least as many
students as they successfully elevated. And the evidence suggests that the downside
victims are more frequently members of particular socioeconomic and ethnic minorities.

A New Mission And Its Emotional Promise

In recent years, however, society has come to understand the limitations of schools that
merely sort and rank students. We have discovered that students in the bottom one-
third to one-half of the rank order — plus all who drop out before being ranked — fail to
develop the foundational reading, writing, and mathematical proficiencies needed to
survive in, let alone contribute to, an increasingly technically complex and ethnically
diverse culture. So today, in asking schools to leave no child behind, society is asking
that educators raise up the bottom of the rank-order distribution to a specified level of
competence. We call those expectations our ―academic achievement standards.‖ Every
state has them, and, as a matter of public policy, schools are to be held accountable for
making sure that all students meet them.

To be clear, the mission of sorting has not been eliminated from the schooling process.
For the foreseeable future, students will still be ranked at the end of high school.
However, society now dictates that such a celebration of differences in amount learned
must start at a certain minimum level of achievement for all.

The implications of this change in mission for the role of assessment are profound.
Assessment and grading procedures designed to permit only a few students to succeed
(those at the top of the rank-order distribution) must now be revised to permit the
possibility that all students could succeed at some appropriate level. Furthermore,
procedures that permitted (perhaps even encouraged) some students to give up in
hopelessness and to stop trying must now be replaced by others that promote hope and
continuous effort. In short, the entire emotional environment surrounding the prospect of
being evaluated must change, especially for perennial low achievers.

The students‘ mission is no longer merely to beat other students in the achievement
race. At least part of their goal must be to become competent. Teachers must believe

Page 110 of 123

that all students can achieve a certain level of academic success, must bring all
of their students to believe this of themselves, must accommodate the fact that
students learn at different rates by making use of differentiated instruction, and
must guide all students toward the attainment of standards.
“The driving dynamic force for students cannot merely be competition for an artificial
scarcity of success. Because all students can and must succeed in meeting standards,
cooperation and collaboration must come into play. The driving forces must be
confidence, optimism, and persistence — for all, not just for some. All students must
come to believe that they can succeed at learning if they try. They must have
continuous access to evidence of what they believe to be credible academic success,
however small. This new understanding has spawned increased interest in recent years
in formative assessment”.
RICK STIGGINS is the founder of Assessment Training Institute, Inc., Portland, Ore.
The institute website can be accessed at www.assessmentinst.com. ©2005, Richard J.
Stiggins. has served as the great intimidator.

Assessment and course design. Assessment should be seen as an intrinsic part of

the learning process rather than something which is just ‗tacked on‘ at the end in order
to get some marks. It should therefore be seen as a vital part of the initial design of the
course or module. A model of course design can be described in the following three
stages:
Stage 1: Decide on the intended learning outcomes. What should the students be
able to do on completion of the course, and what underpinning knowledge and
understanding will they need in order to do it, that they could not do when they started?
(This obviously begs the questions what have they done before and what prior ability
and knowledge can you expect?) These learning outcomes should each be described in
terms of what the student will be able to do, using behavioral verbs, and described as
specifically as possible. (Verbs like ‗know‘ and ‗understand‘ are not helpful because they
are so general. Ask yourself, ‗What could the student do to show me that they know or
understand?‘). You may find it useful to group your outcomes under the following four
headings: skills (disciplinary), skills (general), values and attitudes, underpinning
knowledge and understanding.
Stage 2: Devise the assessment task(s). If you have written precise learning
outcomes this should be easy because the assessment should be whether or not they
can satisfactorily demonstrate achievement of the outcomes. (including formative
assessment tasks)
Stage 3: enable the students to satisfactorily undertake the assessment task(s).
These stages should be conducted iteratively, thereby informing each stage by the
others and ensuring coherence.
Purposes of assessment

Page 111 of 123

It is easy to become so immersed in the job of teaching that we lose sight of the exact
purpose of a particular element of assessment. There is the possibility that we are not
achieving that purpose, or that we overlook another form of assessment which might be
more appropriate. We actually assess students for quite a range of different reasons –
motivation, creating learning opportunities, to give feedback (both to students and staff),
to grade, and as a quality assurance mechanism (both for internal and external
systems). Assessments are frequently trying to do all these things, to varying degrees.

So why Should we assess Students' Learning?

This question has several answers. Following are some of the most common reasons
for assessment:
 to provide summaries of learning (Summative Evaluation - AOL )
 to provide feed forward specific guidance based on information on learning progress,
(Formative Evaluation - AFL)
 to diagnose specific strengths and weaknesses in an individual's learning,(
Diagnosis- AFL)
 to diagnose specific strengths and weaknesses in teacher‘s own teaching practices
(Diagnosis)
 to modify and adjust teaching according to weaknesses highlighted in assessment
(AFL )
 to develop awareness and skill in students to understand their own strengths and
shortfalls and improve their own learning (AFL )
 and to motivate further learning.(AAL)

Effects of assessment on Learning

A very important reason for assessment of student performance is that it has potentially
positive effects on various aspects of learning and instruction. As Terence Crooks
points out, classroom assessment guides students' "judgment of what is important to
learn, affects their motivation and self-perceptions of competence, structures their
approaches to and timing of personal study (e.g., spaced practice), consolidates
learning, and affects the development of enduring learning strategies and skills. It
appears to be one of the most potent forces influencing education" (1988, p. 467). It
also reflects the quality of instructional methodologies being used by the teachers

Research demonstrates that good practice in assessment for learning can bring about
significant gains in pupil attainment. Before the topic is discussed in depth, it is
important to share the findings of the research which has highlighted the significance of
AFL.

Page 112 of 123

The summary of research below, will help you consider the key factors that improve
learning through assessment and reflect on your current practice with a class of your
choice.

Summary of research „Black Box Findings‟

Highlights of research findings (Inside The Black Box & Beyond The Black Box )
include the following work:
INSIDE THE BLACK BOX: raising standards through classroom assessment

The publication Inside the black box: raising standards through classroom assessment
is an influential pamphlet that summarizes the main findings arising from 250
assessment articles (covering nine years of international research) which were studied
by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam. The document is well known and widely used, and
acts as a touchstone for many professionals in the field of assessment.

Assessment for learning: BEYOND THE BLACK BOX

This publication by the Assessment Reform Group follows up the work of Black and
William and identifies five key factors:
1. providing effective feedback to pupils;
2. actively involving pupils in their own learning;
3. adjusting teaching to take account of the results of assessment;
4. recognizing the profound influence assessment has on the motivation and self-
esteem of pupils, both of which are crucial to learning;
5. considering the need for pupils to be able to assess themselves and to
understand how to improve.

The research also identifies a number of risks with regard to assessment:

1. valuing quantity and presentation rather than the quality of learning;
2. lowering the self-esteem of pupils by over-concentrating on judgments rather
than advice for improvement;
3. demoralizing pupils by comparing them negatively and repeatedly with more
successful learners;
4. giving feedback which serves social and managerial purposes rather than
helping pupils to learn more effectively;
5. working with an insufficient picture of pupils‘ learning needs.

Working inside the black box: assessment for learning in the classroom
Working inside the black box sets out its main findings under four headings:
1. Questioning
o More effort needs to be spent in framing questions that are worth asking.

Page 113 of 123

 o Wait time has to be increased to several seconds to give pupils time to think, and
everyone should be expected to contribute to the discussion.
o Follow-up activities have to provide opportunities to ensure that meaningful
interventions that extend pupils‘ understanding take place.
o The only point of asking questions is to raise issues about which the teacher
needs information, or about which the pupils need to think.
2. Feedback through marking
o Written tasks, alongside oral questioning, should encourage pupils to develop
and show understanding of the key features of the subject they have studied.
o Comments should identify what has been done well and what still needs
improvement, and give guidance on how to make that improvement.
o Opportunities for pupils to follow up comments should be planned as part of the
overall learning process.
o To be effective, feedback should cause thinking to take place.
3. Peer and self-assessment
o The criteria for evaluating any learning achievements must be transparent to
pupils to enable them to have a clear overview, both of the aims of their work and
of what it means to complete it successfully.
o Pupils should be taught the habits and skills of collaboration in peer assessment.
o Pupils should be encouraged to keep in mind the aims of their work and to
assess their own progress to meet these aims as they proceed.
o Peer and self-assessment make unique contributions to the development of
pupils‘ learning – they secure aims that cannot be achieved in any other way.
4. The formative use of summative tests
o Pupils should be engaged in a reflective review of the work they have done to
enable them to plan their revision effectively.
o Pupils should be encouraged to set questions and mark answers to help them,
both to understand the assessment process and to focus further efforts for
improvement.
o Pupils should be encouraged through peer and self-assessment to apply criteria
to help them understand how their work might be improved.
o Summative tests should be, and should be seen to be, a positive part of the
learning process.

The underlying issues identified are:

o learning theory (teachers need to know in advance what sort of feedback will be
useful; they need to understand how their pupils learn);
o subject differences (teachers need to have an understanding of the
fundamental principles of the subject, an understanding of the kinds of difficulty
that pupils might have, and the creativity to think up questions which can

Page 114 of 123

 stimulate productive thinking – such pedagogical content knowledge is essential
in interpreting response);
o motivation and self-esteem (learning is not just a cognitive exercise: it involves
the whole person – learning for learning rather than for rewards or grades);
o a learning environment – principles and plans (teachers need to have
forethought of how to teach in a way which establishes a supportive climate);
o a learning environment – roles and responsibilities (teachers need to help
pupils become active learners who can take increasing responsibility for their
progress).

IMPORTANT DEFINITIONS
There are a number of assessment terms that will appear in any discussion of assessment.
Listed below are common interpretations of some of these terms:
1. Assessment A working definition of assessment which is widely quoted is
― the term ‗assessment‘ refers to all those activities undertaken by teachers, and by their
students in assessing themselves, which provide information to be used as feedback to
modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged.‖
2. Assessment for learning
 comprises two phases—initial or diagnostic assessment and formative assessment
 assessment can be based on a variety of information sources (e.g., portfolios, works
in progress, teacher observation, conversation)
 feedback to the student can be verbal or written
 used to inform instruction
 no grade or score given
 occurs throughout the learning process, from the outset of the course of study to the
time of summative assessment
3. Assessment as learning
 student self-assesses learning and takes responsibility for moving his or her thinking
forward (meta cognition)
 helps to make students independent ,self-directed learners
 occurs throughout the learning process
4. Assessment of learning
 assessment that is accompanied by a number or letter grade (summative)
 compares one student‘s achievement with standards
 results can be communicated to the student and parents
 occurs at the end of the learning unit
5. Evaluation judgment made on the basis of a student‘s performance

Summative Evaluation
The most obvious, reason for assessment is to provide to all interested parties a clear,

Page 115 of 123

meaningful, and useful summary or accounting of how well a student has met the teacher's
objectives. When testing is done for the purpose of assigning a letter or numerical grade, it
is often called summative evaluation since its primary purpose is to sum up how well a
student has performed over time and at a variety of tasks.

Formative Evaluation
Students are assessed to monitor their progress. The main things that teachers want to
know from time to time does whether students are keeping up with the pace of instruction
and are understand all of the material that has been covered so far. For students whose
pace of learning is either slower or faster than average or whose understanding of certain
ideas is faulty, you can introduce supplementary instruction (a workbook or support
program), remedial instruction (which may be computer based if possible), or in-class ability
grouping. Because the purpose of such assessment is to facilitate or form learning and not
to assign a grade, it is usually called formative evaluation.

Diagnostic assessment
 assessment made to determine what a student does and does not know about a
topic
 occurs at the beginning of a unit of study
 used to inform instruction (modify teaching to cover what is not clear to students),
makes up the initial phase of assessment for learning
Formative assessment
 assessment made to determine a student‘s knowledge and skills, including learning
gaps as they progress through a unit of study ---an ongoing process which guides a
teacher to modify her instruction according to gaps identified in learning of students
 used to inform instruction
 occurs during the course of a unit of study
 makes up the subsequent phase of assessment for learning
Summative assessment
 assessment that is made at the end of a unit of study to determine the level of
understanding the student has achieved
 includes a mark or grade against an expected standard

WHAT IS „ASSESSMENT IS FOR LEARNING?‟

Assessment is for Learning provides a framework for assessment, in which evidence of
learning can be gathered and interpreted to best meet the needs of learners, their
parents and teachers, as well as school managers and others with responsibility for
ensuring that education in our schools is as good as it can be.

Page 116 of 123

Initial phase of AFL
The purpose of Assessment is for Learning is to develop a streamlined and coherent
system of assessment to ensure pupils, parents, teachers and other professionals have
the feedback they need about pupils' learning and development needs. AifL is founded
on the evidence of research which emphasizes four big ideas about learning:
There are three main strands of activity that need to be secure for assessment to
operate effectively: assessment FOR learning, assessment AS learning and
assessment OF learning. These three strands shape the AifL Triangle
In distinguishing three different uses of assessment (assessment for, as and of
learning), it is sought to ensure that evidence of learning is gathered and used in
appropriate ways, and that meaningful connections can be made between the
curriculum and learning and teaching required for its effective delivery.

ASSESSMENT AS LEARNING
Using assessment to promote autonomy in learning
Assessment as Learning is about learning how to learn. Learners who have been
involved in assessing themselves and others are more likely to develop the attributes
and the skills they need to become resilient, self-motivating learners, able to keep on
learning as they mature and as the challenges they face in their learning become more
demanding.

ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING
Using assessment to make sound judgments about learning and school
effectiveness
Through Assessment of Learning, sound judgments about learners‘ achievements can
be made. Assessment of Learning also supports assessment for and as learning by
ensuring that standards are understood and shared by teachers, the learners
themselves, their parents and other adults who are either directly engaged in or
supporting the learning process.
Assessment of learning is also used in evaluating the effectiveness of schools and other
establishments (How Good is our School) so that informed improvement may be made
by providing evidence of relative performance across different education authorities and
countries.

ASSESSMENT for LEARNING

Assessment for learning involves using assessment in the classroom to raise pupils‘
achievement. It is based on the idea that pupils will improve most if they understand the
aim of their learning, where they are in relation to this aim and how they can achieve the
aim (or close the gap in their knowledge).

Page 117 of 123

In classrooms where assessment for learning is practiced, students know at the
outset of a unit of study what they are expected to learn.(sharing of objectives) At the
beginning of the unit, the teacher will work with the student to understand what she or
he already knows about the topic(previous knowledge) as well as to identify any gaps or
misconceptions (initial/diagnostic assessment). As the unit progresses, the teacher and
student work together to assess the student‘s knowledge, what she or he needs to learn
to improve and extend this knowledge, and how the student can best get to that point
(formative assessment). Assessment for learning occurs at all stages of the learning
process.
Assessment for learning is the process of using classroom assessment to improve
learning, whereas assessment of learning is the measurement of what pupils can do.
Using assessment to support classroom learning and teaching
Assessment for Learning is about ensuring that assessment is an integral part of day-to-
day learning and teaching. Research has shown that learners learn best when ...
 they understand clearly what they are trying to learn, and what is expected of them
 they are given feedback about the quality of their work and what they can do to
make it better
 they are given advice about how to go about making improvements
 they are fully involved in deciding what needs to be done next, and who can give
them help if they need it.
When teaching is designed to allow learners to focus on these ‗big ideas‘ about
assessment, they can begin to develop a capacity for autonomous learning.
Key characteristics of assessment for learning & teaching strategies

1. Sharing learning objectives with pupils

Teaching strategies
o share learning objectives at the beginning of the lesson and, where appropriate,
during the lesson, in language that pupils can understand
o use these objectives as the basis for questioning and feedback during class
presentations
o evaluate this feedback in relation to achievement of the learning objectives to inform
the next stages of planning
2. Helping pupils to know and recognise the standards they are aiming for
Teaching strategies:
o show pupils work that has met criteria with explanations of why
o give pupils clear success criteria and then relate them to the learning objectives
o model what it should look like, for example exemplify good writing on the board
o ensure that there are clear shared expectations about the presentation of work
o provide displays of pupils‘ work which show work in progress as well as finished
product

Page 118 of 123

 3. Involving pupils in peer and self-assessment
Teaching strategies:
o give pupils clear opportunities to talk about what they have learned and what they
have found difficult, using the learning objectives as a focus
o encourage pupils to work/discuss together, focusing on how to improve
o ask pupils to explain their thinking: ‗How did you get that answer?‘
o give time for pupils to reflect upon their learning
o identify with pupils the next steps in learning
4. Providing feedback that leads pupils to recognizing their next steps and how
to take them
Teaching Strategies:
o value oral as well as written feedback
o ensure feedback is constructive as well as positive, identifying what the pupil has
done well, what needs to be done to improve and how to do it
o identify the next steps for groups and individuals as appropriate
5. Promoting confidence that every pupil can improve
Teaching Strategies :
o identify small steps to enable pupils to see their progress, thus building confidence
and self-esteem
o encourage pupils to explain their thinking and reasoning within a secure classroom
ethos
6. Involving both teacher and pupil in reviewing and reflecting on assessment
information
o reflect with pupils on their work, for example through a storyboard of steps taken
during an investigation
o choose appropriate tasks to provide quality information (with emphasis on process,
not just the correct answer)
o provide time for pupils to reflect on what they have learned and understood, and to
identify where they still have difficulties
o adjust planning, evaluate effectiveness of task, resources, etc. as a result of
assessment

Assessment strategies with new arrivals: some suggestions

Teachers can consider a range of strategies for ensuring that newly arrived pupils
understand the goals they are pursuing and how they can take a full part in assessing
their learning. These include:
 allowing time for pupils to adjust and become familiar with the structure and pace of
lessons
 providing positive and constructive feedback

Page 119 of 123

 considering class groupings carefully to enable pupils to work together collaboratively
and to talk about learning
 providing opportunities for peer feedback
 ensuring learning objectives are explained clearly through visual supports
 providing key visuals and displays that illustrate the process of tasks and the steps to
take
 including opportunities for pupils to build on existing knowledge
 planning opportunities for pupils to prepare and practice the language structures used
for self-evaluation and assessment
 providing opportunities for pupils to use their first-language skills for reflection and
self-assessment.

Ten Principles Of Assessment For Learning

1. Assessment for learning should be part of effective planning of teaching and
learning. A teacher's planning should provide opportunities for both learner and
teacher to obtain and use information about progress towards learning goals. It also
has to be flexible to respond to initial and emerging ideas and skills. Planning should
include a) strategies to ensure that learners understand the goals they are pursuing
and the b) criteria that will be applied in assessing their work. c)How learners will
receive feedback, d) how they will take part in assessing their learning and e)how
they will be helped to make further progress should also be planned.
2. Assessment for learning should focus on how students learn. The process of
learning has to be in the minds of both learner and teacher when assessment is
planned and when the evidence is interpreted. Learners should become be aware of
the 'how' and ‗what ‘ they are their learning .
3. Assessment for learning should be recognized as central to classroom
practice. Much of what teachers and learners do in classrooms can be described as
assessment. That is, tasks and questions prompt learners to demonstrate their
knowledge, understanding and skills. What learners say and do is then observed
and interpreted, and judgments are made about how learning can be improved.
These assessment processes are an essential part of everyday classroom practice
and involve both teachers and learners in reflection, dialogue and decision making.
4. Assessment for learning should be regarded as a key professional skill for
teachers. Teachers require the professional knowledge and skills to: plan for
assessment; observe learning; analyze and interpret evidence of learning; give
feedback to learners and support learners in self-assessment. Teachers should be
supported in developing these skills through initial and continuing professional
development.
5. Assessment for learning should be sensitive and constructive because any
assessment has an emotional impact. Teachers should be aware of the impact

Page 120 of 123

 that comments, marks and grades can have on learners' confidence and enthusiasm
and should be as constructive as possible in the feedback that they give. Comments
that focus on the work rather than the person are more constructive for both learning
and motivation.
6. Assessment for learning should take account of the importance of learner
motivation. Assessment that encourages learning fosters motivation by
emphasizing progress and achievement rather than failure. Comparison with others
who have been more successful is unlikely to motivate learners. It can also lead to
their withdrawing from the learning process in areas where they have been made to
feel they are 'no good'. Motivation can be preserved and enhanced by assessment
methods which protect the learner's autonomy, provide some choice and
constructive feedback, and create opportunity for self-direction.
7. Assessment for learning should promote commitment to learning goals and a
shared understanding of the criteria by which they are assessed. For effective
learning to take place learners need to understand what it is they are trying to
achieve - and want to achieve it. Understanding and commitment follows when
learners have some part in deciding goals and identifying criteria for assessing
progress. Communicating assessment criteria involves discussing them with
learners using terms that they can understand, providing examples of how the
criteria can be met in practice and engaging learners in peer and self-assessment.
8. Learners should receive constructive guidance about how to improve.
Learners need information and guidance in order to plan the next steps in their
learning. Teachers should:
 pinpoint the learner's strengths and advise on how to develop them
 be clear and constructive about any weaknesses and how they might be
addressed
 provide opportunities for learners to improve upon their work.
9. Assessment for learning develops learners' capacity for self-assessment so
that they can become reflective and self-managing. Independent learners have
the ability to seek out and gain new skills, new knowledge and new understandings.
They are able to engage in self-reflection and to identify the next steps in their
learning. Teachers should equip learners with the desire and the capacity to take
charge of their learning through developing the skills of self-assessment.
10. Assessment for learning should recognize the full range of achievements of all
learners. Assessment for learning should be used to enhance all learners'
opportunities to learn in all areas of educational activity. It should enable all learners
to achieve their best and to have their efforts recognized.

Promoting Assessment Literacy

Page 121 of 123

We are all aware that the findings of study done in Great Britain applies in our system
too. The Key findings include the following observations:
 Awareness and understanding of AFL and AOL is not firmly embedded across the
system. Understanding by teachers is not clear in terms of the principles of different
elements of assessment of learning and differentiating between the assessment for,
as and of learning strands in AFL.
 Assessment of learning should result in an increase in the range of assessment
methods used to monitor and record pupils‘ achievements, and help teachers to
become more confident in using different methods to assess pupils‘ learning.
 To do this we need to build a greater awareness of the different uses of assessment
among teachers, school managers and local authority officers.

Conclusion. Assessment for learning is one of the most powerful ways of improving
learning and raising standards. Actively involving all pupils in their own learning,
providing opportunities for pupils to assess themselves and understand how they are
learning and progressing, can boost motivation and confidence.
Sharing learning targets with pupils gives them a sense of being in control of their
learning. They know and recognize the standards for which they should aim. The
specific feedback leads pupils to identify what they should do next in order to improve
their work. The belief that every pupil can improve gives the learners the confidence
they need so much. By reviewing and reflecting on their performance and progress with
teachers they develop skills in peer- and self-assessment making them autonomous self
directed learners for all times to come.
As educationists, if you identify everything happening around you in terms of formative
and summative assessment, you will see how enjoyable and clear things will start
becoming.
Assessment for learning should be part of effective planning of teaching and learning
strategies that address the diverse needs of different groups of learners, and should
acknowledge the barriers to learning that some of them encounter.

Page 122 of 123

References
1. Assessment Reform Group (1999) Assessment for learning: beyond the black box.
University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education. ISBN: 0856030422.
2. Assessment Reform Group (2002) Assessment for Learning: 10 Principles, available
from aaia.org.uk.
3. Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (1998) Inside the black box: raising standards through
classroom assessment. King‘s College, London. ISBN: 1871984688.
4. Black, P., Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B. and Wiliam, D. (2002) Working inside
the black box: assessment for learning in the classroom. King‘s College, London.
ISBN: 1871984394.

Page 123 of 123