Rethinking teacher professional development: Going digital on low-cost mobile phones in Bangladesh

Rethinking teacher professional development: Going digital on low-cost phones in Bangladesh

New Methods for New Literacies Annual Conference 8th - 9th July 2011

The University of Sheffield

Christopher Walsh

Mobile phones & international development

Large scale technology-enhanced teacher-professional development on mobile phones in emerging economies, like Bangladesh, is a promising field whose applications are context specific and largely absent from the literature.

Overview

• 'Digital Bangladesh' & 'Vision 2021'
• English in Action (EIA)
• Rethinking teacher professional development...
• Multiliteracies pedagogy at scale? (102,000 teachers and 17 million students)
• Levergaing low-cost mobile phones...the 'trainer in your pocket'
• Transformed practices

A Multiliteracies pedagogy for teacher professional development?

Transformed practice

Situated practice

Explicitly stating student competencies (Listening, Speaking, Writing, Reading) drawing on the Bangladeshi curriculum documents (as well as our own understandings)

Explicit examples/descriptions of students actually engaged in 'new' communicative English practices & teachers engaged in new English language teaching practices where both acquire higher levels of English language proficiency

Critical framing

Overt instruction

“Toolbox” activities where 'what' students are doing

is the focus (group work, role play, using visuals, etc.)

Teach communicative ELT teaching practices/strategies

(monitoring, integrating skills, eliciting, assessment, etc)

that focus on communicative listening, speaking, reading

and writing

A Multiliteracies pedagogy for international development exemplified at scale

Overt instruction & Critical framing

Situated practice

Transfomred practice

Mobile phones & portable

rechargeable speakers

EIA's 'trainer in your pocket'

EIA's Model of work-based teacher professional development for 102,000 teachers and

17 million students

Overt instruction & Critical framing

Transformed practice

Situated practice

Impacts

Teacher using the knowledge already inherent in the pupil (from listening) and providing a basis for adding new information to the old (Overt instruction). Then the teacher helps the students clarify and make sense of what they have learned (Critical framing).

Communicative English teaching and learning

based onthe audio files. The teachers has

developed ways in which the students can

demonstrate how they can design and carry out, in a reflective manner, new practices.

Using audio files on mobile phones to teach

communicative English (teacher as guide)

Indicator 2: Practice

Indicator 4: Impacts on English language competence

(secondary)

Indicator 3: Impacts on English language competence

(primary)

Indicator 1: Reach

• 98% of teachers (primary & secondary) were confident to use the EIA technologies and materials for their professional development, and in their classroom practice.

• “EIA is not like other projects. In other projects we go for training and after the training is finished everything is forgotten when we go back to the school”

Secondary teacher from Khulna