School Heads and TTC Tutors to Be Trained on CBC
The government, in partnership with the Aga Khan university East Africa, has rolled out a program targeting to enhance teachers’ capacity to implement the competency-based curriculum (CBC) in a more desirable way.
Coined the Foundations for Learning, the 5-year programme targets to empower TTC tutors and school heads to understand the new curriculum.
The programme is being spearheaded by the Institute for Educational Development, East Africa and is funded by the Aga Khan Foundation and Canadian government. It will also involve Tanzania and Uganda, who have also embraced CBC.
According to Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development, East Africa Dean, Dr Jane Rarieya, CBC has faced several challenges including the capacity of teachers to implement the curriculum.
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She maintained that the new curriculum is not well understood and teachers have not been adequately trained to implement the curriculum.
The programme will respond to this problem by equipping teachers at the pre-primary and primary institutions to develop their pedagogical skills.
Consequently, it will result to a teacher who is creative, innovative and can think of learning strategies that make learners think critically.
“We are trying to support teachers to better implement the curriculum within their classrooms and at the same time developing heads of schools to be leaders for learning because this is essential for the CBC,” said Dr Rarieya.
Rarieya revealed that Shanzu Teachers College has been picked for the pilot program. They will train tutors who will then be tasked with training teacher trainees.
The Dean said this is targeted toward improving the teacher’s capacity to teach in CBC set up making them highly conversant with active learning approaches in classrooms, understand the curriculum, interpret and implement it.
“One-off workshops will not produce the quality teachers wanted. It has to be sustained. This is where we come in. We provide sustained training until it becomes practice,” said Dr Rarieya.
“We want to produce teachers who are not so reliant on textbooks. The aim of CBC is to develop learners who can think critically, solve problems and are entrepreneurial once they are done with basic education,” she added.
She said they have also partnered with the Kenya Education Management Institute (KEMI) to put together a two-year diploma programme targeting school heads to support learning in schools and also better their understanding of gender inclusion and diversity issues in schools.
“Our mission is to support educational development agenda of the governments we work with in the region. In future, we hope we can get more funding to upscale the programme across the country,” she said.
“We need champion leaders in our schools to promote quality education in our schools. This is a programme that we would later want to expand across the country,” said Mr Wasike.
Dr Rarieya said running concurrently with the programme is an ongoing study that will identify best practices on developing champion teachers, what needs to be revised or improved and also come up with how to scale some of the best practices for the benefit of all.
“The study will in the long run identify how some of the best practices can be sustained or scaled up to have the programme right across schools in Kenya,” she said.
