Education Minister signals halt to automatic teacher promotion

Aug 10, 2010 News

– emphasises importance of professional development

By Sharmain Cornette
Automatic promotions for teachers within the public education system may soon become a thing of the past. This notion was expressed by Minister of Education, Shaik Baksh, yesterday when he addressed a gathering of teachers expected to participate in Continuous Professional Development Courses (CPDC) this week.
The programme is designed to upgrade teachers’ skills to be more responsive to the changing demands of the school system. The exercise will continue until Friday.
The opening session yesterday was held at the National Centre for Educational Resource Development (NCERD) and there were remarks from various officials including President of the Guyana Teachers’ Union, Colin Bynoe, and Minister Baksh who was tasked with delivering the feature address.
In his presentation, the Minister expressed his convictions that “there should be no automatic promotion (of teachers)…By that, I mean right now we have persons serving six or seven years and then they are promoted to Senior Assistant Mistress/Master (SAM).”
But while it is the belief of the Minister that this style of promotion should be discontinued, he assured that mode will not be kicked into motion immediately.
“It should be discontinued, but not now…It will have to be given time over a number of years, perhaps two or three, until we have these professional programmes that we can run. I need to make it clear that we will not discontinue this at this point in time,” the Minister emphasised.
According to him, the promotion of Senior Assistance teachers will continue, but teachers will become eligible once they are able to acquire the relevant credits, hence, only those who are able to accumulate the credits will be promoted.
Baksh also pointed to the fact that several teachers have been promoted to higher levels of operations but had not secured for themselves further professional development; a situation which will also be addressed in a matter of years.
And the area of professional development, according to the Minister, is high on the agenda, not only in Guyana but across the Caribbean.
He related that often it is the case that student teachers leave the Cyril Potter College of Education and enter into the school system and are left there over a lengthy period of time.
The week-long training programme designed for the teachers drawn from various regions will entail sessions relating to personality and social development of the child, such as counselling, application of therapeutic techniques, emotional and behaviour disorder and remediation, as well as communication skills.
In fact, he revealed, many of them can become frustrated. However, with a teachers’ improvement project in place there is likely to be a radical paradigm shift in teacher education in Guyana, the Minister asserted.
An innovative teacher education programme is set to commence in October.
“Already we have had international consultants coming in and working on the redesigning and designing of the programme.
The curriculum innovations require all of these things and they are taking place as I speak…We have the full support of the CPCE teacher educators and those at the University of Guyana. They were fully consulted and agreed to the changes.”
The integral part of the change, according to the Minister, is to ensure that practicum is well supervised. According to him, although supervision is existing in this regard, there is need to develop instruments to better supervise so that effective measures can be made to evaluate the level of teaching.
And teachers, he noted, will have to ensure that they have at least an 80 percent pass rate, adding that “we have benchmarks under this programme whereby 75 percent of the teachers must be able to score 80 percent and over in the practicum.”
But though this development will put evident pressure on the system, it is important to note that once student teachers secure their Associate Degree in education, they will be exposed to a one-year induction process, which will be characterised by strong mentoring sessions.
A mentoring system is currently being developed to mentor young teachers entering the education system, the Minister revealed.

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Education Minister signals halt to automatic teacher promotion

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