The Teachers Community of Learning project resulted in a dramatic increase in students’ engagement in the Mathematics classes.
Lohith Krishna was a quiet student of Class 9, BHS High School, not much inclined towards Mathematics. This state of affairs changed when a Mathematics Camp was organized in his school as a part of the Teachers Community of Learning (TCOL) project. Krishna enthusiastically participated in the camp activities and took a lead in the project on computing costs of organizing an excursion for his class, which involved a series of computations and functions. Ms Firdos Ara Khan, his teacher, saw a dramatic increase in Krishna's engagement in the Mathematics class, thanks to this experience. He became quite vocal in the ICT Lab sessions in Mathematics. Krishna also began to encourage his friends to take more interest in the Mathematics classes.
Cognizant Foundation has collaborated with IT for Change, Bengaluru to implement the Teachers Community of Learning (TCOL) project in 47 schools in Bengaluru South 3 Block, Bengaluru, Karnataka. This project is a part of the Foundation's special focus to build teachers' capacity in government and government-aided schools, under its digital and STEM learning initiatives.
TCOL works to strengthen the public education system in Karnataka by building the capacity of teachers and teacher educators to integrate digital methods and resources in education and leverage technology to engage with the mainstream education system on policy and programmatic aspects.
The TCOL project focuses on building ‘Teachers Communities of Learning’ at multiple levels - within the school, across subject teachers, and schools in the block. In this project teachers are taught to use educational ICT tools in Mathematics, Science, Social Science and languages; create local curricular resources and lesson plans and to network with other teachers and engage in peer learning on an online portal. In addition to demonstrating ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) integration at a school level and building communities of practitioners, teaching-learning materials created through TCOL are also published on the Karnataka Open Educational Resources (KOER) repository, in English and Kannada languages, for supporting teachers across Karnataka.
Education, Capacity building in school education, Teacher Community of Learning (TCOL), ICT, Digital Learning, Teachers Capacity Building, Karnataka
