ISLAMABAD: The Federal Directorate of Education (FDE) has partnered with Islamabad Model Postgraduate College (IMPC) H-8 to offer a series of training workshops for geography teachers.
The workshops are being organized to tackle the shortage of teachers, particularly subject specialists, in FDE-run schools in the Islamabad Capital Territory.
FDE officials faced difficulties while checking papers during the annual examination 2022-23 as most schools were struggling to manage classes with the already scarce number of teachers.
The training program is scheduled to begin on May 2 and will continue until May 24. Around 120 school teachers who teach geography to grades VI-VIII will attend the training workshop in four batches. The workshop will be conducted by a team of qualified trainers, and each batch will attend for four days, with around five hours of lectures/hands-on sessions on each day. According to official sources, the workshop is open to all teachers regardless of their level of experience.
The training session will cover various topics related to geography, including lesson planning, effective use of technology in the classroom, student engagement techniques, and assessment strategies. The workshop aims to equip teachers with the latest teaching techniques, methodologies, and tools to enhance their teaching skills and knowledge. It will also provide an opportunity for teachers to exchange ideas and experiences with their peers and collaborate to develop new approaches to teaching geography.
Upon successful completion of the training, the participants will receive certificates. However, sources suggest that the FDE has been facing a severe shortage of teachers in schools. The deputationist teachers, who have been teaching for the last several years in different Islamabad schools, have not been inducted against the quota allocated for them due to the stubbornness of some top FDE officials. Neither could new hiring be made for the last several years, which has severely affected the overall performance of government schools.
Despite the introduction of the student learning outcomes (SLO) system and the single national curriculum, none of the FDE-run educational institutions, except for one, could make it to the top positions in the secondary school certificate-II annual examinations under the Federal Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (FBISE) in 2022. The blame for this poor performance has been put on the federal education ministry and the FDE by most of the teachers and school heads, who spoke to The Private media requesting anonymity.
They stated that the teachers not only lack resource material, including audio-visual aids, to teach the students, most of whom are slow-learners, but they were also not imparted training by the FDE and education ministry about the latest pedagogical mode of teaching. They also mentioned that the national single curriculum was launched without taking input from teachers and subsequently thrust upon them to teach to the students without conducting training sessions about the new syllabus. They claimed that the new curriculum has been designed without considering the aptitude of the students being enrolled in government schools.
(Islambad51-Newsdesk)
