Welcome to the Inclusive Education Toolkit!

This toolkit supports the training of teachers in inclusive education. It is designed for instructors and trainers, who are training teachers or are working with other trainers and teachers in training institutions, schools, classes, NGOs, or any other organisation.

You can use it for initial training and to support the continuing professional development of teachers, mentors, educational inspectors, educational advisors, principals, and other specialists and workers in education.

Teachers can also use it, working on their own or in teams.

How can I use this toolkit?

If you are a trainer, you can select and integrate appropriate sections, case studies or activities into training courses or programmes. You may also duplicate and distribute relevant sections.

If you are a teacher, you can look for sections, case studies or activities that will help you to resolve a challenge you have encountered in your classroom.

Why use the TESSA toolkit for teacher training in inclusive education?

As trainers and supervisors, it is your responsibility to educate and train teachers who will ensure that the universal rights of children as described in the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child are respected.

State Parties recognise the right of the child to education (…) without discrimination of any kind, irrespective of the child’s or his or her parent’s or legal guardian’s race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national, ethnic or social origin, property, disability, birth or other status. (UNICEF, 1990 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] )

Welcoming all children ‘without discrimination’ means that in a classroom there will be, for example, children with physical or sensory disabilities, gifted children, children with learning difficulties, girls, boys, children from minority ethnic groups, and the teaching will need to cater for all children’s individual development as well as the fulfilment of their potential

Our main objective

To introduce the inclusive pedagogy that is at the heart of TESSA to educators, educational supervisors, teachers (in training) and the teachers’ schools, and to facilitate the planning, use and evaluation of inclusive teaching practices through the use of active pedagogy.

Aims of the TESSA Inclusive Education Toolkit

  1. Enable users to explore and understand the meaning of ‘inclusive education’.
  2. Serve as a guide to enable all pupils in the class to be full members of the class, to respect each other, to learn, and to fulfil their potential.
  3. Offer strategies to allow for inclusive teaching and provide support to all learners, including those with disabilities.
  4. Provide a set of teacher training tools that are published under Creative Commons Licenses and can be adapted and used in different environments and contexts.

How does this toolkit work?

This toolkit provides resources that you will be able to use to build teachers’ ability:

  • to think about ways they can facilitate the inclusion of all children in learning, in the classroom, in the school and in the community.
  • to include all children in the learning process so that they can grow and to achieve their full potential.
  • to incorporate the strategies illustrated in the TESSA educational materials (based on the premises of active, inclusive and participatory pedagogy) into their teaching practice.

This toolkit is not intended to be a module or a procedural document. It is not a book that you read and work through from cover to cover. It is a collection of tools to refer to where certain challenges occur in the process of teaching practice supervision. The tools are shown on the diagram on the entry page of the toolkit and they can be accessed in any order you wish.

The toolkit contains activities that may be conducted individually or in collaboration with other teachers. We encourage you to evaluate your own needs and those of your teachers, and to find in the toolkit components that best meet those needs: do they concern teacher behaviour, the physical environment of the classroom, teaching techniques, the relationship between the school and the community, etc.? Browse through the titles and select the relevant chapters.

The toolkit can also be used as a reference document when organising and running workshops on inclusive education.

Getting Ready

Before consulting the chapters in the Inclusive Education Toolkit, it will be helpful to familiarise yourself with TESSA (Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa) and with the concept of active learning. This is the purpose of the first activity.

Activity 1: Getting to know the TESSA resources and active learning

This activity will allow you to get acquainted with the TESSA resources.

  • Download the chapter ‘About TESSA’ on the Teaching Practice Supervisor’s Toolkit page on the TESSA website.

Read the chapter and do Activities 8 and 9 in the Chapter .

The icons used in this toolkit:

To enable you navigate this toolkit easily, we have used the following pictograms:

Other useful resources

This symbol refers to more detailed and accessible texts on the topic in hand. You do not have to read everything, but the resources are available for you to improve your understanding and your role in inclusive and active learning.

Complementary TESSA resources

This symbol refers to other TESSA resources that complement the on-going work.

Create your own collections of strategies

During your work through the different chapters of the toolkit, you will be asked to collect ideas and strategies that will help you to vary your teaching. Collect them for yourself and share your collections with colleagues if you wish.

Activity based on audio resources

TESSA Inclusive Education Toolkit

1. Different types of schools