TESS-India celebrates 3 million views!

Dr Lina Adinolfi, English Language Lecturer from the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics, has celebrated 3 million views of the authentic classroom video clips she developed as part of the TESS-India project.

Led by The Open University in collaboration with UKAid, the British Council, and Save the Children, TESS-India (Teacher Education through School-based Support in India) is a mass-scale, multi-award-winning OER-based (Open Educational Resources) teacher development programme. It aims to support a shift from traditional teacher-directed classroom approaches, with their emphasis on transmitting facts, to the more the child-centred and inclusive exploratory learning envisaged in the Government of India’s educational reform strategy.

The programme centres on a suite of freely combinable sets of teacher development units embracing ten core principles of classroom practice (Involving all children, Talk for learning, Planning lessons etc) as applied to Language and Literacy at primary level, and English, Maths and Science at both primary and secondary level. These units are accompanied by 55 short commentary-enhanced videos which show state-school teachers beginning to apply these practices in their normal classrooms, rather than depicting rehearsed ‘model’ lessons in less familiar contexts. All the materials are available in English, Hindi and four other Indian languages.

While videos have long been a standard feature of teacher education programmes in the Global North, it is only since the relatively recent availability of smartphones that they have become accessible in India. With over 3 million individual and group viewings since the launch of the programme in 2015, the popularity of the videos has exceeded all expectations, with teachers describing them as transformative, by enabling them to ‘see the theory in action’ and making them realise that ‘I can do that too’.

According to one teacher educator, ‘the techniques seen in the videos have influenced my thinking and led to a lot of change in me. They have changed the way I had previously thought classrooms should be and I looked at them differently. I also realised that I needed to change a lot as a teacher educator.’

Together with Freda Wolfenden, Programme Director and Professor of Education and International Development from the School of Education, Childhood, Youth and Sport, Lina is currently writing up a study of the impact of video viewing on teacher learning in India.

Watch a sample clip from the TESS-India YouTube channel, with English commentary.

Main image: Provided by Dr Adinolfi