GIS equips teachers with Time Conference

By Kwamina Tandoh, GNA
Accra, Oct. 26, GNA - Ghana International School (GIS) has organised a day's orientation workshop to equip 100 basic school teachers with relevant knowledge and skills in the discharge of their duties.

They were taken through topics including; Strategies in Improving Class Management, Creating and Establishing a Caring and Nurturing Classroom Community, Transform Teaching Incorporating Technology, The Effective Teacher, Self as a Vehicle of Change and Online Classroom.

The maiden workshop, dubbed: 'Transform Inspire Motivate Educate (TIME) Educators' Conference' was on the theme: 'Maintaining Teachers to reduce probable failure,' and was addressed by speakers discussing the various topics for teacher's development.

Speaking to the Ghana News Agency on the sidelines of the TIME Educators' conference in Accra, Dr Mary Ashun, Principal of GIS, said the school was privileged to have resources other schools did not have and was committed to helping other school children and schools get the needed help.

She said the school had embarked on a number of programmes to support other schools including allowing secondary school children around La to have free access to the GIS school laboratory.

Dr Ashun said the School, through its Children Heart Foundation raised of GH₵97,000.00 in 2015 to support four children with heart surgeries.

'If, according to UNESCO, 18 million primary teachers are needed in the next decade to meet Universal Primary Education goals, all stakeholders need to look at designing, developing and maintaining teachers well.

'Initial teacher education, where teachers are 'designed' and somewhat 'developed', cannot provide teachers with the knowledge and skills necessary for a lifetime of teaching and therefore, it behooves all stakeholders to see teacher education as a lifelong task that needs structure and resources for the process of 'maintaining' that 'designed' teacher.'

She added that the skills, abilities and knowledge that teachers must possess tend to overlap, be recursive and interdependent.

'Herein lies the conundrum. For an entity so complex and yet so crucial to a functioning society in the 21st century, education cannot fail. And if teachers are at the forefront of this delivery, teachers cannot be allowed to fail.

'This concept requires today's teacher be re-classified as a physical human asset much akin to physical assets that are daily maintained in the engineering industry through the new but rapidly changing field of engineering maintenance.

'While one can never suggest that teachers be treated as machines are, there is much that can be learned from how physical assets are engineered and maintained in order to suggest a framework for teacher design and maintenance that will result in transforming teaching and learning.' she said.

She also noted that the problem of 21st century education was not with limited access to tertiary institutions but the cost of education.

GNA