Solutions for the failed remediation programme in primary schools

Mar 04, 2017 Letters

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Dear Editor,
I refer to my letter of February 27, 2017 under the heading, “the Failing Remediation Programme in Primary Schools.: Below please find recommended solutions. From my understanding, the aim of a Remediation Programme is to provide learning support to pupils who lag far behind their counterparts in school performance. Hence, it is designed to close the gap between what students know and what they are expected to know.
For this Remediation Programme to be effective, students must be removed from their regular classrooms and taught in another setting by professional teachers with specialized training who use planned curricula and appropriate teaching strategies. For best results, remedial classes that teach children the material in the same way they were taught the first time around must be avoided to prevent further student’s frustration (Professor Calkins 2005 and Dr. Siegel 1999). The ministry would not want to stop the automatic promotion of these pupils, thus, they must stream the classes and allow those weak ones to strive under the care of specialists. They are suffering!
These children have short attention span and are easily distracted by other things. They have poor comprehensive power, weak problem-solving skills, and they lack learning motivation and self-confidence. This is simply because in the absence of literacy there is a general lack of reasoning and understanding. It is best to have experienced literacy teachers work at the students’ pace in the morning session (08:30-11:30) instead of burdening them for six hours with concepts from other subjects. Why give them one hour in the afternoon of what they really need when they can be gainfully occupied during this period? (Professor Calkins 2005 and Dr. Siegel 1999).
It is of great importance that the ministry provides the training that teachers need to curb illiteracy. Where are the teachers who majored in Literacy and Special Needs at the Cyril Potter’s College of Education or the University of Guyana? Here is where they are needed. By creating the conditions for the teachers to obtain such training (via seminars, work-shops or internal staff development sessions) they will be encouraging the development of teachers’ capabilities to deliver in the classroom. In turn, this will serve as a motivator to do better on the job and eventually increase the school’s ability to compete with their private counterpart (Porter 1985 and Pfeiffer 1994).
The ministry urgently needs to re-examine the current way in which Head teachers’ performance is measured and implement a better system. Since performance management serves as a strategic tool in an organization, it will link the Head Teachers’ activities with the organization’s mission and goals by identifying results and behaviour needed to achieve the organization’s goals. An effective performance management system will provide information about the strength and weaknesses of all teachers and will best enable the ministry to improve their capabilities (especially Head Teachers) which will help to yield desired performance (Brown 1987, and Martin & Bartol 2001).
The creation of sub-objectives within the three divisions of the school (lower, middle and upper) will foster synergy. These must be linked to the national assessment which is administered at the end of each division. The use of an effective performance management system will strike a balance between the ministry’s strategic objectives and the school’s strategic objectives and prove optimal. Head Teachers in collaboration with the Department of Education can adopt a tailored ‘Balanced Scorecard’ since it is the most widely used framework for balancing objectives.
This tool will provide the teacher with clear guidelines about how their jobs are linked to the overall objectives of the organization, so they can contribute most productively to the achievement of these goals. From this the teachers will be able to stretch these objectives and continue to build on the achievements (White 1986, Winter 2003 and Tan et al 2006).
The functions of the various levels of any organization are indeed salient to the achievement of good performance. It is for this simple reason the ministry should engage in bottom-up management. Too often officials from the ministry run into schools with the preconceived notion that teachers’ complaints demonstrate nothing more than laziness and Head Teachers are always right. Their main focus is on record-keeping; they do not listen to or accept any suggests other than what the policy says.
Due to this, Head Teachers are victimizing members of staff and the children suffer. In essence, if the ‘leaders’ of an organisation are misfits, would they be able to accomplish the strategic mission of the organisation? A system must be developed to allow teachers to render advice; we are in a better position to identify the issues in and around the classrooms since we are the ones at the operational level (Dean et al 1996, Armstrong 2006 and Tricker 2012).
Conclusion
Teachers are being asked to explain why the children failed Mathematics and correspondingly, the ministry has deemed the Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) Programme as a failure. Would the ministry take the next 12 years to realize that the Remediation Programme is also not working? They seem to be happy with the status quo until CXC sets an English Paper that our children cannot cope with and then they will ask the teachers to explain why the children failed English. Why must something terrible happen before our leaders take note? Shouldn’t we extrapolate from past mishaps and try to pre-empt future ones?
Policies and programmes are developed and implemented but rarely are they monitored and properly evaluated. As a consequence, years pass without any correction or adjustment is made to the policies, which is slackness because situations change constantly. This seems to be a common characteristic of most government agencies in Guyana.
Rodwell Simon BSc. MBA
Teacher: Providence Primary School

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