Teachers challenged to improve methods

TEACHERS were challenged to change the way they teach during Papua New Guinea’s first Festival of Learning Conference in Port Moresby.
“I challenge the way we are learning and teaching in schools, it has rapidly changed the world,” school diocese of Parramatta executive director Gregory Whitby said.
Whitby said the traditional way of meeting the needs of children was to try to improve them with existing things but “we’ve reached a stage where we can’t improve anymore”.
“We are going to improve, change and transform the lives of each children by having the best teacher teach them,” he said.
Whitby said new ways had to be introduced to the learning and teaching processes based on collaboration in learning, cooperation and working with arranged partners and getting teachers in ongoing professional learning in classrooms.
“Also, developing a whole new curriculum that had challenging real life tasks for children to get involved and make learning fun,” he said.
“Ultimately, the only thing we can do to ensure schooling in the future is to teach children how to think, not what to know.”
Koroboro International School principal Peter O’Sullivan said the conference was to give more teachers the opportunity to get professional development in the country with an international context.
“We can’t afford to send people all over the world and sending people all over the world does not make change happen in our education systems,” he said.
O’Sullivan said change should be able to take place in schools when experts come to the country enabling everyone to be able to witness and participate in the professional development where they are all involved in the experience.
“Our goal is to give all our teachers both inside and outside of IEA (International Education Agency) the opportunity to be exposed to some strong key changes in education so they can become change agents.”
O’Sullivan said some of the things that were taught in the schools in PNG was better than some schools around the world.
“We‘re not far behind and in parts we’re advanced,” he said of the festival’s objective.