Secondary school teachers being targeted for CPCE’s distance programme – Vice Principal

Dec 22, 2009 News

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Although the first semester into the recently introduced Distance Education Training Programme for secondary teachers, offered by the Cyril Potter College of Education, has been completed, an evaluation of the innovative initiative is not yet possible.
According to CPCE Vice Principal, Debra Thomas, the process of evaluation will commence at the end of first year of the programme.
The distance programme for secondary level teachers was launched last July and is currently being piloted in Regions Two, Three and in Georgetown. At the moment 112 teachers are enrolled at centres in the various target Regions, Thomas said.
She said that while the same course outlines are offered to students of the pre-service secondary academic programme, the only exception is that only the subject areas of Mathematics, English, Science and Social Studies are offered to those accessing the distance programme.
The subject areas are in fact the four core areas in the distance mode, Thomas asserted. “Students are given their modules and they work on their own. They are also expected to come for tutorials every week…three days a week at some centres and two at others.”
Thus far, Thomas noted, the programme is achieving the major objective of making the CPCE programme available to more teachers, particularly those who are unable to travel to the centres.
“Because some of them could not afford to come to classes we have made this accessible. Now, even student-teachers who are at secondary schools that are further out of bounds and in the past could not access the centres every day, this programme has increase access for them.”
And though the programme is now more accessible to student teachers, there is always the reluctance to read, Thomas noted, even as she stressed that the importance of the initiative is to provide accessibility.
“They can now access the programme and still carry on with their normal work and so they don’t have to come to the College. It is expected that they will find it a little bit more accessible to them in many ways including economically and geographically.”
And once the pilot secondary distance programme is found to be feasible at the end of its evaluation, a full fledged version will be extended to other Regions which will serve to create accessibility to a larger number of teachers into the secondary teachers’ training programme.
“We are piloting now on the coastal centres but it is hoped that soon with some amount of training for tutors we will be able to expand. We have to get the resources in the region so it can be extended later to maybe one or two Hinterland Regions where we have the capacity,” Thomas said.
Meanwhile, it was in recognition of the fact that a significant number of teachers do not have the content to deliver at the level of the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC), particularly in the area of Mathematics, the Education Ministry had sought to develop some special programmes.
Aimed mainly at strengthening the secondary school programmes, Minister of Education, Shaik Baksh, had revealed that through the Institute of Distance and Continuing Education (IDCE) and the Adult Education Association (AEA) a distance programme leading to a certificate in Mathematics will be made available to teachers.
A programme of similar nature will also be made available to teachers in the field of English Language, Baksh disclosed.
In addition, he related that the Ministry will mount distance programmes in the area of Science and Information Technology from January next year. The programmes are essential Baksh said as they are geared at upgrading teachers’ content, adding that methodology is not much of an issue today.
“We found that a lot of teachers don’t have the content to deliver at the level of CSEC…so these programmes will have to be something that is done on an ongoing basis.”
Additionally, Baksh said that the Ministry will facilitate a series of focus workshops commencing during this Christmas holiday. The workshops he said will continue in April and are intended to address the content issues facing teachers of Mathematics and English.
The Minister had spoken of plans of another distance programme which was intended to augment the school system aptly qualified teachers in the areas of Mathematics and English before this year end.
That move, he said, comes as part of the Ministry’s plan to improve the quantity and quality of teachers in the public education system. As such, the training initiative will cater to the training of Science teachers, who are in even shorter supply, the Minister stated.

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