Teacher symposium to focus on solutions to mitigate Covid-19 effects

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The Ministry of Education and Sports wants teachers to come up with practical solutions to mitigate the effects of the covid-19 pandemic at the fourth teacher education symposium.

Education is one of the sectors that were affected by the pandemic with learning institutions closed for almost two years leaving over 15 million learners out of school.

The symposium that starts on today will be a platform for educationists to share the role and experience of teachers in dealing with the impact of covid-19.

Jonathan Kamwana, the Commissioner of Teacher Education Training and Development in the Ministry of Education, says that the symposium will focus on the automatic promotion of learners, the use of ICT, and the abridged curriculum.

He says that it is the role of the teachers to ensure that the learners who were automatically promoted to the next classes have all the competencies required in terms of values, knowledge, language, and skills.

Max Okiror, the Assistant Commissioner of Teacher Development says that after the lockdown, a number of private schools closed down leading to overcrowding in government schools. He says that teachers in such schools need to be supported with practical ways of handling the big number of learners.

According to Kamwana, during the symposium, teachers will be introduced to affordable and reliable ICT systems not excluding innovations of blended learning at the different education levels.

Besides implementing the Ministry of Education guidelines like the automatic promotion of learners, and teaching using the abridged curriculum, schools had to conduct counseling for both the teachers and learners.

Some schools also decided to have remedial and extra learning classes in order to help their learners to catch up with the lost time.

*****

URN