Topics & Events

A three-day MUST Workshop with Textbook Developers was conducted by MoE/JICA MUST Project at Adama Executive Hotel from 16 to 18 October 2021, where about 18 mathematics writers, editors, illustrators, and book designers from Hawassa, Bahir Dar, Jimma and Addis Ababa universities participated. MUST stands for Mathematical Understanding for Science and Technology; and the project aims for quality assurance of Ethiopian textbooks and teacher's guides on mathematics.

The purpose of the workshop was to explain the comments given by the MUST project team and revise the draft accordingly, and understand the revision tasks of two stages: review of draft 0 before piloting and review of draft 1 during piloting through monitoring and evaluation. In the initial sessions, MUST project members discussed how to make high quality textbooks and proposed steps to revise the textbooks. Then, typical comments on Grades 9-12 draft 0 textbooks were presented, and writers, illustrators, editors, and designers formed groups by grade level to revise the drafts by incorporating the comments by the project.

The idea of "unitization" was introduced, in which a portion of the textbook content has to be divided in to manageable standardized lessons having activity, definition, example and exercise. This concept will help teachers to teach and students to learn in a unified and structured way. In addition, in each lesson, actual engaged time of students in learning would be ensured, which would contribute to better learning outcomes. Although unitization was accepted as good strategy in teaching and learning, many textbook developers had reservations on whether the drafts can be restructured since it requires time, additional work and hence presents a challenge to the writers to work on it in a short time. However, after exercising the process of unitization, they showed their willingness to continue to work on the revision of the draft textbooks during piloting in selected high schools in this academic year.

MoE will further discuss the framework of monitoring and evaluation of textbook piloting with Hawassa University, Coordinating University of Center of Excellence on Education, working on the development of Ethiopian textbooks and teacher's guides.

Ms. Megumi Hirose, Senior Reporsentative, JICA Ethiopia Office, giving remarks at the opening.

Mathematics textbook developers introducing themselves.

Discussing the editing guideline on cooridnate plane.

Discussing the revision of zero draft by grade.

Discussing the unit teaching plan on polynomial functions.

Unitizing and re-organizing the textbook content based on the prepared unit teaching plan.

Ministry of Education giving their closing remarks.