NGO finds ways to addresses falling standards of education in Upper East
The Centre for Performance Monitoring and Evaluation (CePME), a non-governmental organization which is into education, is complementing the efforts of the Ghana Education Service (GES) to address the fallen standards of education in the Upper East Region.
As part of this, the NGO on Friday organised a workshop on continuous Professional Development for 300 basic school teachers drawn from the Bolgatanga Municipality of the Upper East Region.
Resource persons including examiners and retired educationists took the participants through the revision of the Chief Examiners Report, Lesson Planning, and Challenges among other things.
Speaking at the opening ceremony at Bolgatanga, Professor Richard Isaac Amuah, Executive Director of CePME, said continuous professional training for teachers was paramount as it prepared them to keep pace with the rapid technological advancement to help accelerate the development of the nation.
Professor Isaac Amuah said research had proved that continuous professional development (CPD) of teachers was associated with high teacher productivity and had also helped to raise standards and contributed to staff retention and promotion.
It had also increased the understanding and knowledge of teachers in their subject areas, he said.
Prof. Amuah said: “The catalog of the benefits of CPD could go on and on but it suffices to say that a well planned and delivered CPD has great impact on teacher productivity which in turn impacts on student’s achievement, a requisite for national development.”
He said national development was at the heart of the CePME and believed strongly that this goal could be achieved in part through the provision of quality education, adding that “CePME is well positioned to assist the GES and the Ministry of Education to support district, municipal and metro educational directorates to offer continuous teacher development programmes.
Dr Kenneth Asamoah-Gyimah, Senior Lecturer of the University of Cape Coast and Coordinator of the programme, said since the establishment of the centre in 2004 it had organised teacher professional training programmes in a reasonable number of districts, municipal and metro educational directorates in the country.
Dr Asamoah-Gyimah said it was the plan of CePME to implement a project that would enable her to assist the district, municipal and metro education directorates to establish functioning monitoring and evaluation units which would constantly be supervised by CePME staff.
“The unit will empower the education directorate to collect reliable educational data to support management and other decisions affecting the education endeavour. Local expertise will be built by CePME staff to manage the system”.
Mr Gregory Amoah, Bolgatanga Municipal Director of Education, commended the NGO for its good job and said since the implementation of its programmes it had improved the BECE examination.
He entreated district directorates of education in the region who were not taking part in the programme to forge partnership with CePME to reverse the falling standards of education in the region.
He said the training programme, which focuses on the five core subject areas at the junior school level, was the best since those were the main examinable subjects by the West Africa Examination Council.
In recent times the performance of BECE candidates in the region had been very poor and it is hoped that at the end of the programme, the problem could be addressed.
CePME had also organised a similar programme for teachers in the Bawku Municipal, Bawku West and Garu-Tempane Districts.
The NGO had also been developing reliable end-of- term assessment instruments for the evaluation of basic school pupils achievement at the end of each term.
These instruments are purchased by the district directorates for redistribution to teachers for use. CePME had also been developing mock BECE materials for schools and district directorates of education in the region.
Source: GNA