FDE announces special training for teachers
The Federal Directorate of Education (FDE) has announced a series of training workshops for teachers of geography in collaboration with Islamabad Model Postgraduate College (IMPC) H-8.
The training programme comes amidst a severe shortage of teachers, especially subject specialists, in FDE-run schools in the Islamabad Capital Territory.
Sources said that during the checking of papers of the annual examination 2022-23, the FDE had to face difficulty in arranging teachers to mark papers as most schools were struggling to manage classes with the already scarcity of teachers.
According to FDE, the workshop was scheduled to begin on May 2 and will continue till May 24. Around 120 school teachers who teach geography to grades VI-VIII will attend the training workshop in four batches.
The workshop will be held for days for each batch, with around five hours of lectures/hands-on sessions on each day.
Official sources said that the workshop was open to all teachers regardless of their level of experience.
The workshop will be conducted by a team of qualified trainers.
The training session will cover various topics related to geography including lesson planning, effective use of technology in the classroom, student engagement techniques, and assessment strategies.
The workshop aims to equip teachers with the latest teaching techniques, methodologies and tools to enhance their teaching skills and knowledge.
The workshop will also provide an opportunity for teachers to exchange their ideas and experiences with their peers and collaborate to develop new approaches to teaching geography.
The participants will receive certificates upon successful completion of the training.
According to the sources, the FDE has been facing a severe dearth of teachers in schools.
The sources said that deputationist teachers, who have been teaching for the last several years in different Islamabad schools, have not been inducted against the quota allocated for them — due to the stubbornness of some top FDE officials —, and neither new hiring could be made for the last several years, badly affecting the overall performance of government schools.
None of the FDE-run educational institutions — except for one — could make it to the top positions in the secondary school certificate-II annual examinations under the Federal Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (FBISE) in 2022 despite the introduction of the student learning outcomes (SLO) system and the single national curriculum.
Most of the teachers and school heads, who spoke to The Express Tribune requesting anonymity, put the blame squarely on the federal education ministry and the FDE for the poor show stating that the teachers not only lack resource material including audio-visual aids to teach the students, most of them slow-learners, but also they were not imparted training by the FDE and education ministry about the latest pedagogical mode of teaching.
They said that the seriousness of the education ministry could be gauged from the fact that the national single curriculum was launched without taking input from teachers and subsequently thrust upon them (to teach to the students) without conducting training sessions about the new syllabus.
They said that the new curriculum has been designed without considering the aptitude of the students being enrolled in government schools.
Some experts told The Express Tribune that the new curriculum was a “regressive, orthodox and counter-revolutionary syllabus at best.