BUDGET CONTRIBUTION 2013 Pt 13 TEACHER TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT Mr. Speaker, there is the issue of teacher training and development. Time would be insufficient for me to go through the amount of training that we have done for teachers, but we pledged in our manifesto, again, teacher training and hear what we said: “We will strengthen quality in...learning by ensuring that teachers are trained, educated and certified at all levels of the system frompre-school up. Our aim is to further professionalise the Teaching Service. …work with the union on professional upgrade and professional standards…” That is in the People’s Partnership manifesto; teacher training and development. It also said: In keeping with the philosophical underpinnings of diversity in teaching and learning, teacher education to support the curriculum for transformation will be strengthened. We will work with higher educational institutions to strengthen teacher quality and relevance in the secondary and primary system. Mr. Speaker, we have moved now to a situation where in our primary schools there are only about 40 teachers now, out of the close to 7,500, who do not have a teacher’s diploma or a bachelor of education degree in our primary schools. That is the amount of work that we have done. We gave more scholarships over the last three years, supported by the Minister of Tertiary Education and Skills Training, so that now all our teachers in the primary schools will have a major degree of certification; either a teacher’s diploma or a Bachelor of Education, and we continue to do more and more. Mr. Speaker, we have embedded ICT into the practice to facilitatestudent-directed learning. The pathway had to be designed for the integration of the United Nations, UNESCO, ICT competency standards for teachers into the curriculum design of all courses in light of its student-centered approach to teaching and learning. Additionally recommendations obtained from the baseline survey of teacher performance, parent and student attitudes and achievements, were also considered in the construction of the teacher ICT professional development plan. For three years we have been training more and more teachers, Mr. Speaker, and this is just a list—about eight pages—of the different modules where we have trained teachers over a period of time. We have trained them in classroom management, critical literacy; assessment strategies, pedagogy; children’s right; developing writing skills; developing reading comprehension skills; data driven instructions; strategies for transforming schools; infusing financial literacy in the classroom; technology education; technical theatre; teaching of geometry; investigative and resource-rich approaches; clinical supervision for heads of departments and secondary schools; hundreds and hundreds of teachers. Here has the figures: digital literacy, 5,198; 1,218 primary and 3,278 secondary and so on. A lot of this was done by the National Energy Skills Centre and also professionals in various aspects; thousands and thousands. Training infusion of information communication technology; training of principals, vice-principals, curriculum officers, et cetera; strategies for working with special-needs children in inclusive environments; data-driven instructions; strategies for transforming schools; anger management; critical incident stress management; mentoring, time management, conflict resolution; development of math skills; solving word problems; and so on. The work speaks for itself; too numerous for me to mention in this short period of time. Thousands of our teachers have been trained over a period of time between 2010—2013, Mr. Speaker
Posted on: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 15:53:13 +0000
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