Assistant teacher course/Book project

Book project
The open-ended book project allows the assistant teachers to develop a training handbook for their own group or groups of assistant teachers in their respective schools.

The participants can compile their own code of conduct, decide the type of governance of the assistant teachers and other details of their grade's own customized assistant teacher effort. The grade is one of the clients here and any undesirable decisions of the participants may be subject to change as soon as the other pupils demand their right to influence the governance. They may have to establish a democracy first. They may have to read the book in order to understand that they might want to change something before that. Assistant teachers should be invited to try not to give any hints in this regard until several month later, so the pupils can work it out by themselves.

School policy may limit the options of the assistant teachers.

Reasonable answers to the questions are:
 * What are the most important content decisions you need to make?


 * Code of conduct, type of governance, training procedures for new assistant teachers, qualification procedure for new assistant teachers.


 * How can you write a book in the remaining time?


 * You don't have to. Writing the book is an open-ended process. You can decide that the book is finished whenever you think it is finished.


 * How will you organize the authoring team?


 * A good idea is to assign topics to teams of two or three people. The teams should aim to avoid important decisions. Gather regularly and make the decisions in the whole group. You can also pass on topics to other teams during a meeting. A meeting should have an agenda and a chairperson, who can allow changes to the agenda. If your book starts to look like a confusing assembly of unrelated texts that is not a problem, somebody can clean it up later.

The handouts may not cover all topics the participants might want to address. A team doesn't need a handout, the handouts only list some ideas to help with the creative process. Teams with or without a handout can start with a mind mapping of their respective topics. The teams should also browse their notes from the course for good ideas.

A chapter "Comments on school policy" can be added as a reminder to the other pupils that they weren't allowed to comment on the content of the book before it became a relevant policy for their own future education.