Teachers in rush to register for professional development training

The four institutions which have been have been selected to pioneer the re-training of teachers have reported massive number of enquiries, citizen digital can authoritatively report.

Mount Kenya University, has been forced to set up a call centre with 5 attendants to take care of the thousands of teachers who have been enquiring about the new development.

The university’s dean, school of education Dr. Benson Njoroge told Citizen Digital that the institution has seen over 20,000 teachers call the institution within the last two days, to enquire when the courses will begin.

“We are planning to roll out the first training before December and enrollment is ongoing. We seek to start with online learning, due to the prevailing challenges of Covid – 19 pandemic,” he said.

“We have already carried out pilot program with about 100 teachers, whereby all stakeholders including the Teachers Service Commission and the Teachers Unions representatives were observers and they gave us a clean, bill of Health.”

Kenyatta University has also reported massive enquiries with teachers from far and wide seeking  to understand when the training will kick off, as over 300,000 teachers scramble for the available slots in the 4 institutions selected to pioneer the re-training of the teachers

Kenyatta University, Mount Kenya University, Riara University and Kenya Education Management Institute (KEMI) have been identified to offer the Teacher Professional Development modules. A teacher will be at liberty to choose an institution of his/ her choice where to take the TPD modules.

According to TSC, the starting date will be December, 2021. Teacher Professional Development will continuously update teacher knowledge, skills, attitude and values encourage teachers’ learning communities.

“Many components of the TSC Teacher Professional Development programme will be available to teachers online and will be accessed through mobile phones,” said TSC CEO Dr. Nancy Macharia.

She said TPD is a life-long learning programme organized in six hierarchical competency levels where each level takes five years to complete.

“At the end of each module, successful teachers will have their teaching certificates renewed after every five years,” she said.

Macharia said every teacher registered by the commission will be required to identify and register with one of the accredited service providers, to undertake this programme.

She urged teachers to embrace it, saying it benefits them in line with its objectives.

In 2016, the Commission introduced Performance Contracting for Heads of Institutions and Teacher Performance Appraisal and Development (TPAD) for teachers, with an aim of strengthening curriculum implementation and accountability in the utilization of resources in order to improve learning outcomes.

Teacher unions had earlier on urged the employer to recall the performance appraisal tools, claiming that the exercise had created anxiety among teachers.

There were also concerns that the tool could be used to victimize teachers when seeking promotion and unfairly blame them for poor results.

Macharia however, noted that since the implementation of TPAD, the quality of education had improved.