Teachers' Development Programme

Our education system requires constant demand for active teaching and learning in the classroom. Focusing on this aspect, AKU-EB has developed its own teachers' training programme to familiarise teachers with the structure of AKU-EB syllabi and examination procedures.

Nature of Training:

School Orientation Workshops
Teachers from affiliated schools are given orientation about AKU-EB procedures through a full day workshop to support them in planning and teaching for AKU-EB's qualifications. Once introduced to the goals and objectives of AKU-EB, teachers are thoroughly familiarised with the structure of the syllabi. Some of the areas within the syllabus structure that the workshop focuses on are: the importance and meaning of Specific Learning Objectives (SLOs), the use of command words as direction to students, the scheme of assessment, and the allocation of marks. Participants are also exposed to other learning support materials such as assessment units and past exam papers to get a better grasp of the pattern and quality of resources available for both teaching and learning.

Material Development Workshops
Teachers require support in making the adjustment from a teacher-centered to a learner-centered classroom. For that reason, AKU-EB brings together key teachers from affiliated schools to develop classroom learning materials, namely Assessment Units (AU), in subject workshops. These workshops are facilitated by both foreign and local facilitators and the AKU-EB team. The material developed focuses on areas of weakness in the current textbooks and gives students and teachers a model of the kind of thinking that should be encouraged in the new examination system.

Item Writing Workshops
These workshops assist teachers in constructing techniques of developing and writing questions and items within the parameters set by AKU-EB. Teachers are guided on the techniques of writing quality Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs), Constructed Response Questions (CRQ's) and Extended Response Questions (ERQ's), along with question specific mark schemes. They are provided feedback on the items and questions they produce. Most participants go on to produce quality items throughout the year.

Developing Assessment Skills through e-Marking
e-marking is the process of checking examination papers electronically. By scanning all Constructed Response papers and preparing them to appear on terminals, AKU-EB’s
e-marking system makes student assessment possible for markers electronically. Under the supervision of a senior marker, five markers are responsible for assigning marks for a response with the help of a pull-down marking scheme and checking hints. Senior markers review the responses on a random basis and then give feedback to the individual markers for quality assurance.

The markers are mainly teachers from AKU-EB affiliated schools and colleges. When they return to their workplace, they use the marking pattern and approaches to improve the quality of learning and assessment in their own classrooms.

Read in Urdu