Learning Curve Issue 2 | Teaching Learning Materials and Aids

Teaching Learning Materials (TLMs) and Aids, which form the focus of this issue of Learning Curve, an indispensable part of a teacher’s bag of tricks, is a generic term that describes any material that supports and buttresses teachers’ efforts in getting a class of diverse capabilities to understand the basics of any learning. They have to fulfil some basic requirements: simplify concepts, provide the chance of practice, increase interest and motivation, help to explain complexities, concretise abstractions, enrich the course — though, of course, a single TLM may not meet all the above criteria. Thus, they are various kinds of TLMs, starting with the humble, but ever-present, blackboard (which has come in for much adverse criticism) and going all the way up to ​‘smart classrooms’, with all the advanced technology they entail. TLMs have the added value of aiding the memory — when children see how a concept/​rule of language/​experiment works, it is more likely to stay in the active memory than just learning the same thing by heart. This issue presents a wide variety of opinions and experiences with TLMs and Aids.