About This Resource

Please stay safe! Use these COOL resources for TE and continue with your professional education during this COVID-19 pandemic lockdown period. You can use the URL www.tissx.tiss.edu or the TISSx android app.

What do the resources offer?

• The Connected Open Online Learning (COOL) resources are meant to enable student teachers and teacher educators to stay connected to their learning and engage with concepts and practices for active and inclusive teaching and learning.
• They are mapped onto the B.Ed Curriculum Framework of NCTE. (See the table below). Please note that these resources consist of some of the key topics put together as a resource and do not cover the entire course comprehensively.
• These resources provide an overview of key topics from each course based on current research and practices. They are not exhaustive. It is essential to follow up with rigorous readings and school-based practices that are integral and necessary for teacher preparation. The resources provide scaffolding for some readings and suggestions for tasks to strengthen practice.

The resources in Reading and Reflecting on Texts aim to develop critical understanding of what is involved in reading, writing and reflecting. These resources are meant for prospective teachers and interested candidates who want to understand what is involved in reading and writing and how they can use these skills to be reflective individuals and also be able to educate their students. The thrust is on understanding the micro skills involved in reading and writing. As is in the NCTE curriculum, there are five topical areas in this resource.
We begin with an introduction to what is reading and reflection and see how literacy is not the mere recognition of letters, but an act of decoding and interpreting complexities in ideas presented.
The second unit focuses on what is involved in the act of reading and how reading is not a singular process, but has multiple modes and strategies and involves various skillsets mapped to the purposes of reading and the types of texts.
The third unit, Let Us Read, expands on Unit 2 and focuses on the various strategies involved in reading different types of texts.
Unit 4 moves on to discussing writing as a recursive process and details how one needs be aware of one’s audience, one’s purpose, one’s medium and so on when writing. It builds on the concepts introduced in the earlier units.
The final unit, Let Us Write, aims to build one’s writing skills and understand the strategies involved in improving one’s writing.
These resources aim to provide a fairly comprehensive view of what is involved in reading and writing and provide strategies to build one’s reading and writing skills. It is hoped that the learner will further be able to disseminate these strategies among his/her learners as well. We focus on reading and writing as meaning-making activities that need deep reflection and call upon one’s metacognition.

We hope you will find these resources useful. We also invite you to enroll in our online modular certificate courses when they are announced on tissx.tiss.edu.

Please send us your feedback (use this link)

NCTE curriculum and OERs mapping

TISS offers modular courses under the Post-Graduate Certificate for Reflective Teaching with ICT (RTICT), which have been offered by TISS to over 2000 teachers. This program will be useful for teachers and B.Ed students. The courses were developed as a part of the Connected Learning Initiative (clix.tiss.edu) an initiative seeded by the Tata Trusts and led by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, USA; Winner of the King Hamad Prize for Excellence in the Use of ICTs in Education (2018). CLIx OER (https://clixoer.tiss.edu) has several modules, simulations, and tools relating to school science, mathematics and English learning.

Another program offered at TISS, Mumbai, the Post Graduate Certificate in Contemporary Education Perspectives and Research (PGC-CEPR) is aimed at providing continuous professional development to faculty of teacher education institutions, M.Ed students, NGO personnel involved in teacher education, education administrators and policymakers.

TISS-COOL is supported by Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and grants from the Tata Trusts and Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya National Mission for Teachers and Teaching.

Resource Team

Anusha Ramanathan

Surbhi Nagpal

Resource Card image Credit

Pixabay: Book in a Landscape