Teachers need assistance to overcome challenges of new education curriculum

Mr Alfred Ndago, a former Principal, St John Bosco College of Education (COE) in Navrongo in the Upper East Region, says teachers need assistance to overcome challenges of the new education curriculum to ensure effective teaching and learning.

“The new curriculum is very good for the basic, secondary or technical schools, but the fact that there is not much preparation for the teachers to upgrade quickly to fit into the transitional period needs to be critically looked at,” he said

Speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Bolgatanga, Mr Ndago said the upgrading of training colleges to the tertiary level was laudable, but the teachers needed to be assisted to overcome the challenges of the new system.

He said before the transition, a teacher on study leave could be replaced by a National service person but with the current status of the colleges, a National service person would be out of place to assist in the absence of the teacher.

“Many teachers are now attending courses in the various universities to upgrade in order to fit themselves in the new institutions and that comes with disruption of attention for teaching and learning”, he added.

Mr Moses Bampil Badeabo, a tutor at the Gbewaa College of Education in Pusiga in the Upper East Region, said the upgrade had reduced the exodus of teachers in search for degrees as teacher trainees previously with diploma went almost out of place since the certificate became inadequate and many were leaving to study in the universities for degrees.

He said teachers leaving the classroom with or without study leave created huge teacher absenteeism.
Mr Badeabo said if curriculum implementers applied themselves to how the courses were designed, the objectives, indicators, and outcomes expected, and if teachers did professional work they would bring out the best in the pupils.
He said the component of training using the new curriculum methods of impacting knowledge was one of the best but the implementation of any policy was bound to have challenges and trainers of teacher trainees had the duty to psyche them well to apply to the changes and be committed to them.

He said a successful implementation of the new curricular was expected to build students’ competence, enhance their ability to communicate very well after completion of their basic education and that made it a good shift away from the former British system where everything was based on grammar.

He said the COEs were making all the demands because the work load and project work structure had changed.
Also, classroom infrastructure had reduced and could not accommodate additional intake since four-year groups were still staying with other year groups.

“ There is no policy implementation without challenges and I believe all these will come to pass since we have already seen efforts of government in putting up needed infrastructure in almost all the 46 teacher training colleges and I hope that when they are completed, accommodation issues will be resolved”, he said.