Event Highlights: KIX Africa 19 hub workshop on ways to provide teachers with professional development opportunities

27 August 2021
kix a19
Credit: UNESCO

On July 8, 2021, 31 stakeholders from eight Ministries of Education and local education groups in Eastern, Western, and Southern Africa met to discuss good practices and challenges in teacher continuous professional development (TCPD) within competency-based education systems.

National curriculum developers, learning assessment officers, teacher educators, and researchers from Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, Somalia, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe shared their nations’ experiences in providing TCPD. By the end of the workshop, they agreed that school-based transformative TCPD is the most effective, feasible, scalable, and affordable model, if it is high quality.

“With the cascade model in Lesotho, there is a gap because we usually invite one or two teachers with the assumption they will teach other teachers in their schools,” said Bonnqe Taolane, a subject manager at the Examinations Council of Lesotho. “But sometimes it [the cascade model] does not work out as efficiently as we want it to. So think the best model is if we do it at the school level.”

“We then need to start enhancing the school-based teacher professional development, which is going to encourage mentoring and peer coaching amongst the teachers themselves,” said Jacqueline Onyango, an executive committee member from the African Curriculum Association.

KIX Africa 19
Credit: Africa Curriculum Association
 

The dialogue was facilitated by the African Curriculum Association and organized and moderated by the KIX Africa 19 hub lead, UNESCO IICBA. The African Curriculum Association stimulated discussion among the participants with case studies on TCPD, and brought in a curriculum developer from Lesotho to present on Lesotho’s teacher professional development approach and system. The objective of the workshop was to enable the community of practice participants to design more effective TCPD programs for competency-based education at the school and national level.

The second workshop is a part of the recently completed six-part Community of Practice (CoP) on the Foundations of Educational Qualities. To watch the highlights of the workshop, click here. To see the full recording of the workshop, click here.

To find out more about the CoPs sessions, check out summaries for the first, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth workshops.

To learn more about the KIX Africa 19 Hub, follow their activities on Facebook and Twitter and stop by its digital repository.

For questions or comments about this article, please contact kixafrica19hub@gmail.com.

KIX Africa 19
Credit: UNESCO IICBA