KARACHI, March 21: Participants of a forum on Monday stressed the need for an activity-based and student-centred teaching programme at government primary schools in the province.
They said that teachers’ training programmes should be aimed at inculcating the skills ensuring behavioural changes, which would lead to a check in the drop-outs of primary class students as well. Moreover, the heads of schools should be democratic, flexible and decentralized while handling the academic and administrative affairs at their respective schools, they added.
The provincial forum for “professional development” was organized by the Education Sector Reform Assistance (ESRA) Programme, which is working under a USAID grant project of $60 million aimed mainly at developing the capabilities of teachers, school heads and educational managers in the nine districts of Sindh and Balochistan.
Speaking as chief guest at the inaugural session of the moot, the Counsel of the United States in Karachi, Douglas C Rohn, said that teaching methods had been under change for long with the main focus on students.
He said that money in the educational sector needed to be spent wisely..
“Without your input no programme is going to succeed, therefore you must speak up about measures and demands at government and private levels, with the sheer objective to bring changes needed for the improvement of student community”, he said while addressing to the ESRA’s trainers and educational official present on the occasion.
ESRA programme chief Suzanne Olds said that training of about 36,000 teachers in the four districts of Sindh and five districts in Balochistan would be completed by Sep 2006.
She said that the ESRA through its ongoing activities, a more than routine or standard programme, wanted to ensure that professional development of teachers and others remained a success story and sustainable after its completion.
Ms Olds observed that the purpose of the forum on ESRA’s interventions in professional development, involving teachers, heads of schools and educational managers would prove significant in getting feedback mechanism and help making changes on subsequent programmes.
She said that supportive policies and plans at the federal, provincial and district government levels and improvement of facilities in schools were the major factors needed for a change.
Additional Secretary Education Dr Mehboob Ali Shaikh appreciating the ESRA’s programme expressed hopes that more primary school teachers would be trained through other programmes and organizations with the private-public partnership in future.
He noted that efforts should be made to avert any duplication of training programmes so that resources saved could be utilized for training of teachers in other districts and used for improving the infrastructures and teaching in the secondary schools.
Mr Shaikh admitted that the government’s institute for teachers’ education, PITE, alone could not bear the load of training all of the teachers employed at the government institutions, as it lacked the required manpower.
The Director of ESRA professional development wing, Fawad Shams talked about the objectives and strategies of the professional development programme and mentioned that about 10,500 teachers had been trained so far in Sindh, ie in Thatta, Hyderabad, Khairpur and Sukkur. The district forums of ESRA were made functional in November last and it had held two meetings so far, while the national forum of ESRA, after the ongoing provincial forum meeting, would be held in Islamabad soon.
He said that objective of the professional development programme, which was one of the four main components of the USAID project and planned to be completed by Sep 2006, were to establish a sustainable professional development infrastructure, to train 36,000 teachers, heads and administrators, to develop a feedback assessment system for ensuring quality and to identify incentives for professional development.
Participants of the ESRA’s training courses and other related activities said that it was all interesting and encouraging, as behavioural changes had started taking among the government school teachers.
However, they expressed the view that elimination of political influences, flexibility in the working pattern of the educational supervisors and district education officers would help bringing more far reaching benefits to the teachers and the students as well.
They said that the ESRA’s training had also seen changes in the attitude of head masters, who now did not go for an autocratic, rigid or centralized behaviour or working. They also called for the revival and refurbishment of training room or learning resource centres at schools.
