PNG needs to raise standard of teachers

ALLOW me to comment on an article titled, Trainee teachers face expulsion, which appeared in the daily newspapers recently.
The article revealed that 40 students from seven registered teachers colleges were given the marching orders for breaching the trainee teacher recruitment process, where investigations conducted by the human resource development programme and teacher education division identified that the teacher trainees were mostly Grade 10 students with poor grades below the required Grade Point Average (GPA) of 2.5.
This further implies that some of our registered teachers colleges had defied instructions issued in 2000 by the responsible education authority, requesting all principals and board of governing council of respective colleges to enrol only Grade 12 leavers with a specific GPA.
Likewise, the teacher education division of the Education Department should also be held accountable for the depleting quality of education over the years.
Instead of improving the deteriorating standard of education system in this era, the problem had multiplied million times with the uprising of underdeveloped, ill-equipped and substandard teachers colleges mushrooming in all parts of the country with questionable enrollment selection criteria.
Some of these colleges do not produce quality teachers with the poor quality of academic staff, coupled with insufficient learning and teaching materials among others.
The content of teacher training programmes is also coming under fire.
The teacher training is “predominantly generalist, with insufficient content on understanding of curriculum subjects and related teaching skills with too much general educational content of simple basics”.
Programmes often fail to provide students with “pedagogical content knowledge” i.e. the techniques that are specific to teaching individual subjects such as reading or mathematics.
The main root cause factors that attracts many fake certificates and poor Grade 10 dropouts to enrol at the primary school teachers colleges are that the course curriculum or programmes developed and delivered at the teachers colleges are equivalent to the grades 7 or 8 curriculum materials.
A Grade 8 dropout can enter teachers colleges and pass through semester exams.
That is exactly what happened to the 40 students.
They were not terminated for failing semester exams but for using fake or entering colleges with poor Grade 10 GPA’s.
A standard approach to implementing the admission, content and practice reforms outlined above is to set high accreditation standards for institutions that train teachers.
This implies raising admission requirements, establishing a curriculum that imparts the knowledge and skills necessary for effective teaching, and demanding high levels of performance.
Many of the world’s most successful education systems owe at least part of their success to a decision to establish and enforce high content and quality standards for teacher training institutions.
It is a matter of time before our schools are flooded with half-baked teachers that cannot literally perform to expectations in the classroom.

Ken Nandawa
9-Mile, NCD