UNESCO Lessons for Iraq Teacher Education

Within the framework of the UNESCO Iraq Office project "Training of Trainers in Teacher Education for Sustained Quality Education", the lessons were prepared in an instructional design template for Iraqi science teacher education. The project aims at improving the quality of teacher education in Iraq through strengthening the capacities of colleges of science and education in four Iraqi universities. These are draft lessons that have been created--to be tested during use. The list of lessons is ongoing--more are constantly in the process of being created.

The audience for these lessons is science-teacher educators/trainers. These lessons are to be used in the context of training science teachers. The users of the lessons are the teacher trainers. A major goal of the lessons is to create a synthesis of science knowledge with pedagogical knowledge. Many of the lessons available outside of this project are one or the other—pure science lessons or pure pedagogy lessons. An attempt has been made in this project to create a synthesis of the two knowledge forms—science and pedagogy.

Fortunately, science is a subject that enables pedagogy, for example,

  • empirical science is real and concrete—enabling students to use their five senses to learn, especially in their everyday environment and in the laboratory

  • theoretical science uses models and analogies—something that teachers and students can use to assist learning by making the abstract concrete

  • science has ways of learning—evidence-based and reason-based learning complement and test each other, in a real way

  • science has ways of knowing—empirical and theoretical parallel processes that complement each other, scientifically and pedagogically

  • science is a team effort—complemented in pedagogy as collaborative learning, inside and outside the laboratory

  • science is inquiry—complemented in pedagogy by inquiry-based learning, inside and outside the laboratory

  • science is problem based—complemented in pedagogy by problem-based learning

  • science is question based—promoting student-centred learning; e.g., question-and-answer and discussion-oriented instructional strategies

  • science is research based—promoting the testing of hypotheses by students (about science) and teachers (about pedagogy)

  • science is attitude based—promoting such predispositions in the classroom as perseverance, open-mindedness, honesty, and suspended judgment

Science is about how we know and pedagogy is about how we learn. When teaching and learning science, the teachers and the learners need to come to appreciate the strong connection between science and pedagogy. For example, Jean Piaget’s classification of learners as concrete and abstract is very similar to philosophers classification of science as empirical and theoretical.

Introduction to UNESCO Iraq Lesson