It is the birthright of every child to ve access to a competent, caring, and a qualified teacher.
The above may be achieved by restructuring: increasing teachers’ knowledge to meet the demands they face and toward redesigning schools to support high-qualified teaching and learning.
Teachers’ salaries in Pakistan lag significantly behind those of other professions. This produces chronic shortages of qualified teachers in fields like mathematics and science and the continual hiring of large numbers of teachers who are unprepared for their jobs.
We should ve no more tolerance for incompetence in the classroom. Children are compelled to attend school. The State supposedly guarantees them equal protection under the law, and a sound education. In the face of these obligations, students ve a right to competent, caring teachres who work in schools organized for success.
The State should aim to ensure that all schools ve teachers with the knowledge and skills they need to enable all children to learn. If a caring, qualified teacher for every child is the most important ingredient in education reform, then it should no longer be the factor most frequently overlooked.
The State should provide a coherent, high quality curriculum across the grades; and designed to support teachers’ collective work and learning.
A more complex, knowledge-based, and multicultural society creates new expectations for teaching. To help diverse learners master more challenging content, teachers must go far beyond dispensing information, giving a test, and giving a grade. They must themselves knnow their subject areas deeply, and they must understand how students think, if they are to create experiences that acutally work to produce learning. Developing the kind of teaching that is needed will require much greater clarity about what students need to learn in order to succeed in the world that awaits them and what teachers need to know and do in order to help students learn it. Standards that reflect these imperatives for student learning and for teaching are largely absent in our nation today.
The State may consider introducing some form of a teaching license for testing.
Unequal resources and inadequate investments in teacher recruitment are major problems. Other industrialized countries fund their schools equally and make sure there are qualified teachers for all of them by underwriting teacher preparation and salaries. However, teachers sometimes in Pakistan may go into substantial debt to become prepared for a field which pays less than any other occupation requiring a degree.
There is no real system for recruiting, preparing, and developing Pakistan’s teachers. Major problems include:
Inadequate Teacher Education
Haphazard Hiring & Induction
Lack of Professional Development & Rewards for Knowledge & Skill
Schools Structured for Failure
It should be Pakistan’s Goal to ve
All Children to be taught by teachers who ve the knowledge, skills, and commitment to teach children well.
All teacher education programs meet professional standards, or they will be closed.
All teachers should ve access to high-quality professional development, and should ve regularly scheduled time for collegial work and planning.
Both teachers and principals should be hired and retained based on their ability to meet professional standards of practice.
Teachers’ salaries should be based on their knowledge and skills.
High quality teaching should be the central investment of schools.
What it takes to be an effective teacher: subject-matter expertise coupled with an understanding of how children learn and develop; skill in using a range of teaching strategies and technologies; sensitivity and effectiveness in working with students from diverse backgrounds; the ability to work well with parents and other teachers; and assessment expertise capable of discerning how well children are doing, what they are learning, and what needs to be done net to move them along.
Filed under: Alaiwah Notes Tagged: | Competent Teachers, Education in Pakistan, School Teaching
