| Birmingham University has
a long established tradition of training teachers of the visually impaired.
Campus based courses began in the 1960s and in 1983 a Distance Education
programme was developed which grew to replace the campus-based option
in the 1990s. Over one hundred students are currently registered on the
two year Distance Education programme and approximately fifty new students
join the programme each year.
The Distance Education programme as it currently
stands comprises four core modules and an additional dissertation or project
module. Students, who are already experienced teachers in mainstream schools,
are also required to undertake an assessed teaching placement in each
year of the programme and to pass an examination in Grade 2 British braille.
The programme is supported by a network of regional tutors and placement
supervisors and students are required to attend regular regional seminars
and residential training weekends that are held at the University twice
a year. The four core modules are presented mostly in the form of written
units that are sent to the students by post at the start of each semester
and that are assessed through written assignments (for further details
about the present organisation and delivery of the programme, see Arter
et al., 2002). However in response to a number of developments and challenges,
we are currently undertaking a major revision of the Distance Education
programme. Our decision to change the programme was motivated by a number
of factors:
Changing Needs: Children
The needs of children with a visual
impairment in the United Kingdom have become more complex. The proportion
of the population of children with a visual impairment who have additional
disabilities has steadily increased (Keil 2003) and now accounts for more
than half of all children registered with a visual impairment. In the
last ten years there has been a shift in Government policy and resources
towards supporting early intervention and inclusion. Special schools designated
for children with a visual impairment are closing at the rate of almost
one a year and the majority of children with visual impairment who do
attend special schools, attend schools for children with Severe Learning
Difficulties and not schools for children with Visual Impairment.
Changing Needs: Teachers
When the Distance Education training programme
was established, most teachers on the programme came from special schools
for the visually impaired where there were colleagues with expertise and
experience they could draw upon. Now teachers are more likely to be part
of a generic visiting teacher service or to be working in schools for
children with Severe Learning Difficulties (SLD) where they may be the
only specialist in visual impairment . Much of what they will be expected
to do is to solve problems, sometimes in collaboration with other professionals
but often in isolation. The knowledge, understanding and skills that these
teachers require have also changed. For example teachers working with
blind children who have SLD need a good knowledge of tactile codes and
symbol systems other than braille to facilitate the development of communication
and early literacy. The shift towards early intervention means that teachers
are likely to be spending more time working with very young children in
their homes with their parents, and the shift towards inclusion means
they need specific training in advising and consultancy.
Changing Expectations: Policy
The UK Government's policy agenda
is now more firmly focused on evidence-based approaches to teaching and
learning and upon target setting for both children and teachers. The Government's
Teacher Training Agency has laid out a set of "standards" that
define the "knowledge, understanding and skills" required by
specialist teachers of the visually impaired, and in order to be approved,
training courses in visual impairment must provide evidence that their
programmes produce teachers who meet these standards. In response to the
more varied and complex needs of teachers working in this area, we are
currently restructuring our programme for the September 2004 intake. The
restructured programme will make greater use of online resources and will
incorporate a novel method of instruction: Problem Based Learning (PBL).
Since its beginnings in Canada in 1969,
Problem Based Learning (PBL) has become a well established approach to
the training of medical personnel in many countries. The approach was
developed as a response to disillusion with didactic, lecture-based approaches
as a method of imparting knowledge in a field where practice and treatments
were changing rapidly and patient care was becoming steadily more complex.
In the United Kingdom, many undergraduate
training courses for doctors, nurses and physiotherapists are structured
around PBL. Although implementation of PBL varies from institution to
institution, typically students on PBL courses will work together in small
groups to address a true life problem that is drawn from every day practice.
The group will be supported by a facilitator, usually a member of the
teaching staff, whose role is to support rather than direct the students-learning.
In PBL the problem is often presented in the form of a case, e.g. a child
is brought by ambulance to the emergency room of a teaching hospital after
apparently having a seizure at home. Details of the child that are available
to the doctor on duty may be provided to the students, together with the
findings of the doctor's initial examination of the child. The students
are encouraged to consider the problem from several different perspectives
at a range of different levels, for example the students will consider
the possible diseases that may account for the child's seizure, they will
take account of possible contributing factors such as the home environment,
and they will consider a possible range of treatments available. Their
considerations will take account of the resources available and the policies
in place.
The preliminary discussion of the problem
will inevitably generate lines of enquiry that need further investigation
and research. These are defined as the "Learning Issues" that
drive the students? study (Dolmans et al. 1997). As the students progress,
additional information may be "dripped in" by the facilitator
as they work towards the possible solutions of the problem. At the end
of the process the students will feed back their findings to their tutor
and the real life solution to the problem is revealed before they are
introduced to the next case.
Although PBL training has now been adopted
in diverse fields such as architecture, psychology and education, as far
as we know it has not been used in the training of teachers of children
with a visual impairment in the UK. The multi-level analysis that PBL
requires was commended by Aitken, Millar and Nisbet (2000) as a useful
tool for helping to optimise the environment for children with multiple
disability and visual impairment and it was after reading Aitken's article
that we first began to consider whether PBL could be applied to our courses
in Birmingham as part of the general restructuring we were planning.
While we could see the advantages that a
PBL approach affords for training in our area, we also saw a number of
challenges. The application of PBL to Distance Education is still relatively
untried. As we have seen, PBL requires students to work together in small
groups and we felt that this was likely to be far more difficult when
the telephone and the internet were the main methods of communication.
Moreover the role of the online facilitator would need to be carefully
defined and thought through. Access to resources would be more difficult
for distance students than campus based students and the students would
need confidence in dealingwith the technologyinvolved. We therefore approached
our University's Learning Development Unit for a grant to investigate
the area further. Our bid for funding was successful and a pilot study
is now underway involving two groups of six students from different parts
of the country.
The students will be trialling the use of
PBL over a twelve week period in relation to one module of the new programme.
The aim of this module is to enable participants to develop knowledge
and understanding of vision and the human visual processes and the impact
of visual loss on learning and development. We chose the area of visual
processes partly because it had an obvious overlap with the medical field
in which PBL had developed, and also because it was an area of the programme
where knowledge was rapidly developing and where we knew that there was
much information already available through the internet. The area also
seemed to lend itself well to the skills of problem synthesis, hypothesis
generation, critical appraisal of available information, data analysis,
and decision making that we saw as central to the PBL process.
The broad objectives of the current study are:
1. to determine what online materials have been developed to date in this
area and their relevance to the project.
2. to establish through interviews with colleagues who used PBL in the
University's Medical School the key factors in effective practice
3. To plan, develop and trial a pilot set of on-line resources, drawing
upon the principles of PBL
4. To evaluate and refine the materials for inclusion in the restructured
programme of study in visual impairment (to run from September 2004).
5. To disseminate the findings of project through relevant journals, conferences
and research seminars and consider their relevance to other DE programmes
offered within the School of Education.
We expect that by the end of the module
students should be able to meet the standards in this area that have been
defined for teachers of the visually impaired and they should be able
to:
1. define key anatomical structures involved in human visual processing
and explain the function and role of each component;
2. identify a range of common childhood visual conditions in relation
to key anatomical structures and analyse the potential impact of each
condition for learning and development;
3. define the visual and learning needs of a range of children with visual
impairments, including the physical, emotional and social aspects, and
analyse these needs within the context of inclusive education;
4. identify the interrelated nature of the physical, biological and behavioural
mechanisms that must be considered during the process of generating an
intervention plan when supporting children with visual impairments;
5. provide evidence of an effective reasoning process including thes kills
of problem synthesis, hypothesis generation, critical appraisal of available
information, data analysis, and decision-making;
6. demonstrate skills necessary to become selfdirected as a learner, acknowledging
personal educational needs as well as those of group members, and make
effective use of available learning materials, including online resources;
7. provide evidence of effective use of a range of ICT skills when using
assistive technology to develop learning, including contribution to on-line
tutorials/discussion groups, on-line search for key information, completion
of on-line Module Portfolio etc.
Work has begun on the development of cases
for study by the students. With the help of an experienced Head of a Visiting
Teacher Service for the Visually Impaired we have drawn up a range of
short scenarios relating to children with a visual impairment.
For example our first online scenario relates
to a child with cataracts and nystagmus whose family have recently moved
to a new part of the country and who is about to start in her new school.
The cast of main characters includes the Head teacher, the pupil, the
class teacher, the child?s mother and the newly recruited specialist teacher
of the visually impaired who has just started her training. The students
will be able to enter a restricted website to see an onscreen picture
of each of the characters along with recordings of imaginary key telephone
conversations between the main characters, and copies of referral forms
and notes. The students are asked to take on the role of the specialist
teacher and each group is set a number of tasks for completion by the
next week. Communication between students will take place asynchronously
through the internet, supplemented where necessary by phone conversations.
The tasks will vary in complexity. For example in Week Two the students
are asked to identify the challenges that the child might encounter in
relation to particular aspects of her new environment e.g. classroom layout/seating/
lighting; communication /interaction with peers; reading and writing skills;
movement and orientation etc. In Week Three the students have to prepare
for an interview with the child's mother and are given some questions
that it is possible the parent will ask e.g. exactly what is nystagmus
and will it get worse? What is the difference between an optician and
an ophthalmologist? Are there any support groups or voluntary organisations
that the family can turn to? What do these specialists do - LVA specialist,
mobility officer, educational psychologist?
The programme is based upon a WebCT
format and we are liaising with the School of Education Computer Officer
who is an experienced web designer to produce the learning environment.
The potential of the new approach seems great. For example we can incorporate
video clips into the online scenarios, we can create links to websites
and articles in online journals, and we can create an online version of
the classroom that allows the student to rearrange the layout of the furniture
or adjust lighting levels. Moreover because we will be able to record
and capture the progress of each group online we can collect the new resources
that each group unearths and make them available for the benefit of future
students.
We have organised an introductory day for
the programme at the University in which each student is assigned to an
"Activity Group". The students will meet face to face to discuss
what will be expected of them and to familiarise themselves with the technology
and the onscreen environment. They will then be introduced to the first
scenario and begin to address the issues set out in the first week's task.
Future success depends heavily on the development of a clear structure
within each group. We have defined two key roles : "the coordinator"
who will liaise with the tutor and keep the team on task, and "the
summariser" who will summarise the discussion and findings of the
group and present these along with an analysis of the findings to the
tutor at the end of the week. As each week begins a new coordinator and
summariser will be appointed from within the group. Each group will investigate
two scenarios over the twelve week period. The proposed main method of
assessment is a Module Portfolio submitted by each student that provides
evidence that they have met the learning outcomes defined for the module.
Then portfolio will include a reflective discussion which considers the
processes by which knowledge and understanding was acquired through the
PBL activities. Feedback from module tutors will be provided about the
portfolio and about the performance of the individual during both campus
and on-line components.
We hope to have our initial findings
from the pilot study available later this year and we would be interested
to hear from other colleagues who are using this or similar approaches
in their training of specialist teachers.
References:
1. Aitken S, Millar S, Nisbet P (2001). Applying the new medical model:
intervening in the environment of children who are multiply disabled The
British Journal of Visual Impairment 19,2, 74-80.
2. Arter C., McCall S. and McLinden M. (2002). A distance education programme
for teachers of children with visual impairments in the United Kingdom
Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness 95, 9.
3. Dolmans D, Snellen-Balendong H, Wolfhagen I, Van Der Vleuten PM (1997).
Seven principles of effective case design for a problem based curriculum
Medical teacher 19,3 185-189.
4. Keil S (2003). Survey of Educational Provision for Blind and Partially
sighted Children in England Scotland and Wales British Journal of Visual
Impairment 21,3, 93-97.
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