71 KG teachers schooled in new early child education curriculum
Seventy-One Kindergarten (KG) teachers from 66 communities in five municipal and district assemblies (MDAs) in Volta and the Oti Regions have been schooled on the new education curriculum on early child education.
The three-day training workshop, organised by Plan International Ghana, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), ended in Ho on Friday had participants taken through topics such as learner centred gender responsive and inclusive teaching approaches, play based learning and material development, KG daily plan and lesson demonstration.
The beneficiary MDAs in the operational areas of Plan International Ghana included Afadzato South District, Hohoe Municipality, and South Tongu District all in the Volta Region, the Guan District and the Jasikan Municipality in the Oti Region.
Speaking during the closing ceremony, the Southern Programme Influencing and Impact Officer, Mr Alfred Dzikunu, explained that the workshop aimed at adequately equipping the teachers with the necessary knowledge and skills that would enable them to deliver effectively on the new curriculum on early childhood education.
Mr Dzikunu said Plan International Ghana recognised education as key to national development, particularly early childhood education to prepare a strong educational foundation for children, therefore the need to educate KG teachers on the new curriculum to enable them to prepare the children effectively for the future.
He announced that his organisation added five early-child education coordinators from the five operational MDAs in addition to the KG teachers who also benefited from the training workshop to enable them to educate other KG teachers on the new curriculum in their respective MDAs.
Again, Mr Dzikunu, therefore, appealed to parents to play their roles effectively by providing the needs of their children in school to complement the efforts of teachers, saying education should be seen as a collaborative effort by stakeholders to achieve success.
The officer in charge of Training and Staff Development at the Volta Regional Directorate of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Mr Alfred Mensah Vidzro, commended Plan International Ghana for the commitment to train KG teachers on the new educational curriculum, and stressed that the workshop would go a long way to enable the beneficiary teachers to deliver.
Moreover, Mr Vidzro recalled that the new educational syllabus was introduced in 2019, and an initial training for teachers was horridly carried out, which made the teachers not to fully understand the new concept on early child education, and since then follow-up refresher training for the KG teachers was not done which had affected the implementation of the new curriculum.
According to him, lack of training and monitoring support for teachers still remained as a problem to addressing the gaps in the implementation of the new curriculum, and called for more refresher training workshops to enable teachers to understand the new curriculum in order to enable them to teach children based on the new curriculum.
A member of the new KG curriculum development, and a lead facilitator at the workshop, Ms Agnes Afua Tetteh, said the new KG curriculum incorporated a play based concept but unfortunately teachers had no skills in play based new curriculum, and teachers continued to depend on the old teaching methods, and hoped that the workshop participants would include play based concept in their teaching activities
