Georgetown :Even as efforts are made by the Ministry of Education to restructure its approach to primary education assessments, Chief Education Officer (CEO), Olato Sam, has expressed concern about the extent to which educators have allowed the education system to be transformed to such an extent that it now seems exam-driven. According to the CEO, “I am troubled by the fact that I hear that parents feel that their children don’t have a chance of success in this system unless they drag them to lessons as early as Grade Two, and that bothers me…”
“Children should be playing and having fun and enjoying their lives, climbing trees, scooting and falling down, scraping themselves and running around and enjoying their afternoons,” Sam stressed as he addressed the teachers who attended a meeting of the South Georgetown Branch of the Guyana Teachers Union recently. He further asserted that “children in Grade Two should not be dragged off to lessons for any conceivable reason because what we have noticed is that our children are seeing education now as a burden.”
Lessons at this stage, according to Sam, simply serves to deprive children of that fun element that is so important to keep them engaged in the processes, “and what pains me more is the fact that some of the people conducting these lessons in Grade Two are our own teachers and that is troubling because we do not have an examination in Grade Two… and it is even sad that some of our teachers perceive the Grade Two Assessment as an examination,” the CEO lamented.
He explained that the Grade Two Assessment was never conceived of as an examination, as in the pure sense of examinations, but rather it is a diagnostic assessment in the truest sense of the word. “Taking children to lesson to prepare for a diagnostic is like brushing a child’s teeth with steel wool before he goes to the dentist…it makes no sense!” He further expounded that an assessment is one that is intended to ascertain what areas students are doing well as well as those areas in which they are struggling so that teachers’ could be better informed when planning for Grades Three and Four. “Anybody who is telling parents to send their children to lessons to prepare for the Grade Two diagnostic is robbing people of their hard-earned money…they are duping, fooling and even misguiding the individuals of this society,” the CEO categorically warned.
However, he noted that in the case where a child is struggling, perhaps in the literacy dimension, “I can understand if you want the child to master it…but that is not the nature of those lessons…they are not targeting the specific weaknesses of those children because I am seeing the same weaknesses in the Grade Three and Four…and that should worry every single one of us.”
Restructuring measures, according to Sam will not be limited to the primary level as efforts have been made to restructure the nursery timetable an initiative which will be piloted at about 22 selected Nursery Schools across the country during the next school term. This move, according to Sam, is intended to address a number of concerns that have been raised by teachers within the system that the existing timetable is a bit too full. Teachers according to him have claimed that “they don’t get to do some of the things that they would like to do because of time constraints so we have structured that and we will be getting that information really soon. Once we have piloted it in those schools and we are sure that all kinks have been worked out we will share that with you.”
According to Sam the Ministry has also sought to beef up the documents related to the Shared Reading and the Language Experience and all of the processes at the Nursery Level. This, he said, is aimed at ensuring that all Early Child Educators can have documents at hand to spell out, in great detail, exactly what should happen throughout the entire school week and what is the Ministry’s concept of how it should be delivered to each child. “We have just begun the process of procuring a whole range of workbooks and worksheets and we want to flood the early childhood level nursery classes with as much support materials as we possibly can because we firmly believe that if our children can move into Grade One better prepared then we can fulfill our new mandate which is to ensure that every child can read by the end of Grade Two and the only way that will happen is if we ensure that they emerge from the Pre-Primary age with a solid foundation.” As such, he noted that resources will be placed at that level to ensure that this expectation is realized. This however, will be coupled with further sensitization of early Childhood Educators as to what those expectations are. “…We can do this, it is not just a pipe-dream or something that is unattainable, and I am not talking about five years from now…What I am saying is if we put the required strategies in place and we continue to work with educators we can see that happen in the short term; other institutions right here in this country are doing it consistently and there is evidence that we would have missed a lot of opportunities to implement this much sooner; but better late than never.”
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