About This Course

The major objectives of science learning are to cultivate scientific temper i.e objectivity, critical thinking, acquisition of skills, and understanding of methods and processes, nurturance of natural curiosity, aesthetic sense, creativity among children. Keeping these in mind, the Department of Education in Science and Mathematics (DESM) at NCERT, New Delhi has developed this online course primarily aimed for teachers teaching science up to class 8. The course will not only enhance teacher's understanding regarding nature and role of science but also about how children learn science and the abilities, skills, attitudes and practices teachers need to develop. It will therefore facilitate in capacity enhancement in a flexible manner to a large number of teachers particularly to those whose access to educational resources or capacity building programmes is limited.

Goals

• Professional development of teachers to become reflective and competent practitioners;
• Fill gaps in teachers’ content knowledge and to give them proficiency a few steps ahead of the elementary level syllabus;
• Enable teachers to understand pedagogical content knowledge and which can be used to improve lesson plans and use alternative resources and multimedia to explain science;
• Enable teachers to learn peer discussing for exploration of a phenomenon, questioning and critical thinking skills;
• Enable teachers to explore and observe natural and social phenomena around us as examples while explaining science;
• Help teachers to get idea about how children construct knowledge, what role do questions play in knowledge construction, etc.
• Demonstrate how the role of a teacher is a facilitator to ask questions, provoke questions, and guide collective analysis;
• Demonstrate how to initiate explorations, individual and group learning activities, analyze experience to arrive at some kind of conclusions, and to do it in such a way that the conclusions are the children’s own and not the teacher’s thrust on them without convincing.

The Target Group

This online course is primarily aimed for teachers who teach Science at the Middle Stage (Classes 6-8). This course is primarily designed for such individuals who are desirous of improving their domain and pedagogic skills required for teaching science at this level. The course will help them in designing their lesson plans and they can refer to the examples and learning materials while explaining concepts in class. They can also demonstrate portions of the course content as it is to their class.

Time allocation

The course consists of 40 modules. On an average, each module can be completed in 6-8 hours. Each module will be opened on every Monday, and it is to be completed in a week. All the modules along with the final exam are to be completed in 40 weeks.

The Syllabus