Maths teachers upgrade skills at IAB

As part of the programme the guests have visited unique workshops and trainings focused on improving the quality of maths education in ungraded village schools. Postgraduate in Teaching and consultant for Nursultan Nazarbayev Educational Foundation Fyodor Vasserman has made a presentation entitled Technologies of Education Quality Management in comprehensive schools Bioinformatics and Synergetics. Several schools of Almaty are operating in a trial mode based on his technology.

An entire complex of issues is being resolved in places where Vasserman’s system has been introduced: firstly, teachers don’t write lesson plans, which are increasingly turning into formal replies, but compose a paper known as the main method of learning activity. With these charts designed for every lesson in exact sciences even students with poor academic records can feel confident navigating the resource. Secondly, the lessons are planned out in a way that every child gets actively involved in the process and not just a handful of students receive excellent marks by learning the material, as it usually happens in schools, but over 60%. Thirdly, the class is not divided into groups according to the levels of skills; this is replaced by groups known as “alpha”, “beta” and “gamma”.  Essentially, a child can move across the groups even in the course of a lesson depending on how they have learned the new material.

Vasserman’s technology also helps teachers to talk out the whole process of resolving tasks as it develops children not just in terms of maths, but also mentally and psychologically. They start speaking better, have better writing literacy, express their thoughts and explain their actions better. Participants of the Programme of Support for Village Schools were both given a formal presentation of the Technology and had an opportunity to see it applied in action in specialist school №48, in which a workshop was organised.

At the Institute of Teaching and Psychology village teachers could see an on-line portal of the Academy of Ungraded Schools of Kazakhstan and learned about the technology of planning maths lessons in ungraded schools. Familiar with these problems, the guests were listening with a lot of interest and gave their feedback straight away. For instance, they said that having multiple-topic lessons was practically impossible because they sometimes had to combine 1^st year and 4^th year students who had completely different perception of information, psychological development and intellectual levels. In general, the teachers were happy to know that they are not alone in experiencing their problems and that this issue was relevant and new technologies were being designed for them.

Rene Descartes once said that “all sciences were so interlinked with each other that it was easier to learn them all at once rather than a particular one in isolation». Maths teacher Alla Fedchenko and teacher of Russian language and literature Lyudmila Khablo decided to prove this in practice. They conducted a workshop for guests entitled Integration of Maths Lessons with other Disciplines as a Condition for Ensuring continuity of Knowledge and Enhancing Motivation for Learning”. As part of this village teachers found parallels between geometry and origami, worked out the arithmetic progression of the iambus and trochaic and even found out links between the golden section and Alexander Pushkin’s poem Arion.

Teachers of ungraded village schools will use the knowledge and skills amassed after spring holidays and will apply it in practice. This is supposed to give an integrated effect to help development in the village and improve students' learning results.

____________________________________________________________________________________* * Programme Universities Support Village Schools was launched by IAB in February 2009. According to the project each of Kazakhstan’s university (so far 136) was offered to take patronage over one of country’s rural districts (so far around 200). IAB has become the patron of North Kazakhstan region’s Aiyrtau district and invites 15 village teachers on a gratuitous basis over autumn and summer holidays to enhance their competences. In November 2013 to mark IAB’s 25^th anniversary as part of this Programme 25 directors of village schools all across Kazakhstan were invited to Almaty. Since its inception 207 people from all regions of the country have done the courses at IAB.