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Researched by: Obafemi Peter Lawal (Lagos Nigeria)
lawalobafemipeter@gmail.com

SCHOOL RESOURCE CENTRE AS AN ARCHIVE FOR RELEVANT INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS FOR TEACHING CLASSROOM SUBJECTS

No nation can rise above the quality of its education. Over the years, a lot of effort has been made by the stakeholders in education, especially by the government and NGOs to making sure that no child is left behind in receiving formal education in Nigeria, but without much concern towards ensuring quality education, which focuses on the whole child—cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains of learning. 

There are many factors that make a quality education. Apart from the quality of teachers available in a school, the school resource centre can be a powerhouse for storing and retrieving relevant instructional materials that will aid the teachers in quality lesson delivery in the classroom and help to ensure that the behavioural objectives are achieved. Thereby going the long way towards ensuring quality education to the end users.

School Resource Centre is not Library: School resource centre is beyond school library. Apart from the centre containing traditional educational resources such as books, journals, software, audio/visual materials and other web based resources, it could also be a veritable place where relevant instructional materials in all topics of classroom-subjects can be kept and found by the subject teachers. Teaching aids such as realias, improvised materials and other multimedia resources can be made available and accessible in the school resource centre or room. 

Why School Resource Centre? The important roles of instructional materials to ensuring quality lesson delivery cannot be over emphasized. Often time, at the beginning of the school session and during academic term, the teachers are caught struggling to find and provide suitable teaching aids for topics to be taught in the classroom. The shortcut that most of these teachers ended up with is the use of cardboards and markers to make impromptu instructional materials of less quality in lesson delivery. Besides, there are mostly reshuffle and change of subjects’ teachers during the academic year, this sudden and unexpected changes always challenge the new teacher readiness in preparing suitable teaching aids that will help in quality lesson delivery. This is to say that preparing the appropriate instructional materials for quality teaching is not a fire-brigade job that could be provided shabbily without thoughtful planning. Preparing the teaching resources that meet smart objectives of learning is a lifelong process and collaborative efforts of the subject’s teachers. When thoughtfully designed, it can appeal to all kinds of learners in the classroom.

How to Organize School Resource Centre: School Resource Centre can be a whole detached building or a special room in a school. Organizing resource centre in a school takes the form of departmentalization of sections of the place according to teaching subjects in the classroom. Most of these subject-sections can be partitioned and arranged through shelves and or stands for holding and preserving these instructional materials according to all the topics in the scheme of work until when needed at every academic term and lesson delivery. In each subject-shelf, the instructional materials should be neatly positioned and tagged according to the topics that they represent in the particular subject for easy location. The school resource centre can be a pool of knowledge for depositing variety-concepts of teaching aids, including multimedia by different subject’s teachers in a school (both present and outgone staff). Most importantly also, the school resource centre can be equipped with all the necessary facilities that will make it to be a research corner for subject-teachers in preparing effective lesson plans.

Conclusion: The school resource centre can be seen as the powerhouse of teaching. It is a place that could make or mar effective lesson delivery in the classroom. When thoughtfully planned, it can serve as an arsenal for drawing out the weapons that will help arrest the attention of the students to learn more. In the other way round, when resource centre is not given proper consideration in a school, it may turn the classroom into a battle field that will make class management difficult because of the failure of the subject-teacher to arrest the attention of the students through captivating teaching aids, which is the essence of school resource centre.