Over 1,000 Teachers Service Commission (TSC) field officers will be attending a week long workshop in Naivasha starting Tuesday next week to review the progress of a programme that trained teachers on new teaching methods.
Education News has learnt that the TSC officials will be briefed on the workings and progress of the School Based Teacher Support System (SBTSS), a programme that equipped teachers on modern teaching of Science, Mathematics and English (SME).
The training was being overseen by the Centre for Mathematics, Science and Technology Education in Africa (CEMASTEA).
According to a communication sent out to the field officers by the Directorate of Quality Assurance headed by Dr Reuben Nthamburi, all Curriculum Support Officers (CSOs), those supervising regular teachers or their Special Needs Education (SNE) counterparts and all Sub-County Directors (SCDs) from all the 47 counties in the country will be required to attend the event.
TSC has advised the officers that the workshop will be done at the Naivasha Resort, conducted in two groups with the CSOs undergoing the training from Tuesday, April 16 to Thursday, April 18, 2024.
The SCDs will report for the induction session on Thursday, April 18, 2024 and conclude the progrramme on Saturday, April 20, 2024.
The officials have been advised to carry their laptops or tablets in order to ease the training process.
A total of 22,500 teachers have been trained under the SBTSS, with 15,000 primary school teachers and 7,500 from secondary schools in selected 30 counties and 110 sub-counties benefitting from the programme.
The training was aimed at providing professional development training in subject matter as well as pedagogical knowledge on SME subjects through a wide range of blended support systems.
The target participants for the training were three teachers who teach Class Seven and Class Eight Science, Mathematics and English per primary school and five teachers who teach Form One to Form Four Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, Physics and English per school, who were from the sampled secondary schools in SEQIP target sub-counties.
The target teachers also included those from SNE schools. The teachers who attended the training were further required to be selected from schools that had no teacher trained, and where a teacher trained in SBTSS had been transferred, a replacement was required to attend the training.
The mode of training followed the smart cascade model where trainers and facilitators trained teachers through face to face in cluster centres for 5 days, with subject experts and education technologists offering professional support during teacher trainings.
The TSC County Directors on the other hand were required to invite trainers and facilitators, teachers of SME from every sampled public primary school and secondary for the SBTSS training, identify and prepare accessible and convenient training venues (public institutions) for head teachers and principals, and purchase training materials.
The project is offered in partnership with the World Bank to improve student learning and transition from upper primary to secondary education in target areas, which is achieved through the implementation of the Secondary Education Quality Improvement Project (SEQIP), whose aims are to improve student learning and transition from primary to secondary education.
The project beneficiaries are about 600,000 pupils in upper primary and 600,000 students in secondary from 17,500 and 8,500 primary and secondary schools respectively.
SEQIP has components, namely; improving quality of teaching, and improving retention in upper primary and transition from primary to secondary schools, which are implemented by the Ministry of Education (MoE), Teachers Service Commission (TSC) and other agencies.
A previous report conducted independently by TSC in 2021 established that training of teachers both in primary and secondary schools was hampered due to lack of adequate training materials, hence the report recommended that for an SBTSS programme to be successful, TSC in conjunction with CEMASTEA and University of Nairobi must make provision for adequate training materials.
The programme has however faced a challenge of succession planning since some of the teachers trained on SBTSS retired while others transferred without a proper plan for replacement.
There were also unique cases in some areas in the targeted sub-counties where all non-local teachers trained on SBTSS programme had exited or transferred.
Another challenge that faced the programme was poor coordination where sometimes there were too many activities being implemented on the ground both by TSC and MoE, hence making it difficult for the field officers to plan the events appropriately.
SBTSS is a very essential programme in education that enhances pedagogical skills to go in line with the challenges of the 21st century.
The course, whose theme is, “Institutionalized and Regularized Teacher Professional Development for Improved Learning Outcomes”, is intensive and addresses a number of archaic teaching practices that SBTSS was struggling to resolve, which included: Lack of lesson notes, entering classrooms without adequate preparation, limited resources, and, lack of improvisation.
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