Using New Teaching Methods to Improve Student Learning

Trainings empower teachers to try role-playing and other interactive methods to engage students .After attending USAID’s Secondary Education Activity (SEA) workshop for assessment methods, Elizabeta Sekirarska saw many possibilities for practical application in the classroom. The training…“opened up possibilities for me to think about how to make the material simpler so that students can better understand their lessons.”

Elizabeta Sekirarska is a teacher in vocational high school Pero Nakov, located in  Kumanovo, a town in northern Macedonia. As a teacher trainer and someone that constantly looks for innovations in the classroom, Elizabeta Sekirarska knew that the current methods used to teach and grade students were subjective and assessed what students memorized rather than what they truly knew. 

Through the USAID funded training to improve school based assessment, Elizabeta learned how to adapt academic theories to real-life scenarios in order to facilitate student learning. This teaching method promotes problem-solving skills and encourages students to work together and learn from one another. The ultimate goal is to increase students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

By asking students to simulate a scenario where conflict erupts between an employee and lower level manager, Elizabeta not only applied one of the newly-learned formative assessment methods, but successfully combined it with interactive learning methods. “The characteristics of a good manager are learned theoretically but students need to be more engaged in order to learn the material.”  The classroom scenario emphasized what students need to know as future managers in a similar situation.  Students received immediate feedback regarding their performance in the scenario through peer assessment guided by observation and analytical assessment tools.

Elizabeta believes that the workshop initiated “changes (in the classroom that) go in direction of creating basis for more objective student grading.”

USAID has trained 200 teacher trainers to deliver the assessment workshop to 2800 teachers in Macedonian schools.