TEACHERS ARE BEING challenged to take advantage of opportunities to develop themselves.
Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation, Senator Harry Husbands stressed this last week, as he addressed the close of a Teaching of Comprehension Workshop, held July 6-10, by the Media Resource Department (MRD).
“Take every opportunity and take advantage of all of them. What you are simply doing is building up a resume, building up a CV that will become important and useful. You may not see the use immediately but by attending these various programmes, you are building up an extensive resume that is going to be important at some point in the future in your professional development. . . . My recommendation to you is that as soon as you get this certificate, add it to your CV,” Senator Husbands urged.
Teachers were further advised that where courses were offered by the Ministry of Education, the MRD or any other credible institution, to take full advantage of those opportunities as they would benefit in the future. Furthermore, the 44 teachers who completed the workshop were called upon to specialise in the area of comprehension.
“I hope that some of you are intending really to make the teaching of Comprehension a specialist area in your school or in your year group . . . . It is one that we can do with some specialists in that area and I see various opportunities available for you,” said Husbands, who explained that comprehension was really at the core of everything teachers did.
“It hinges on everything. We talk about Mathematics but the problem that children have with Mathematics, especially worded problems is comprehension. They don’t read the thing and take the time out,” said the former teacher, acknowledging that comprehension issues were seen in all areas of the curriculum.
Teachers were further reminded that the seminar provided skills to cover a wide range of activities in the curriculum and these could be used to enhance learning as well as their own performance. Moreover, Husbands said it spoke to discipline and could help to address the superficial reading done by some children when tackling comprehension.
“Our task is to make sure, at the beginning, our charges, our students have the discipline and we enforce that discipline to the approach you are using whether whole group or individual reading . . . . Our task is to make sure they use a disciplined and systematic approach in completing the comprehension and the various exercises associated with comprehension – language, new words, meaning and context,” said Senator Husbands. (BGIS)
