By Erick Nyayiera
Education experts now want Teachers Service Commission (TSC) to halt the Teachers Professional Development (TPD) program and consider wider consultations especially from the teachers to make it a success.
According to Andiwoh Obondo, an education coordinator at RELI AFRICA, there has been disagreements and debates over professional development of teachers after TSC thought it wise to give teachers opportunity to refresh their skills and competencies.
He says that in best global practice, professional development is a need any employer must ensure their employees are sharpened with new skills and technologies.
“The problem with it is that TSC began the program without consultation with the teachers. Teachers feel they had ideas which ought to have been considered for the program to be stronger than it is. The unions feel that the program needs to be re-designed to make it stronger in terms of their professional development needs which were ignored by TSC,” he stated.
He advises that if possible, the program should stop and be suspended until thorough consultations with stakeholders particularly with the teachers are exploited.
“The other issue is that if you want to develop your staff, global practice dictates that the employer should bear the cost of staff development. TSC should pay the cost of retraining teachers. It is saddening that TSC knows that teachers have spent 4 years in the Universities, others have spent two to three years in other diploma and certificate courses, yet you hear irresponsible statements from TSC that teachers are unskilled when they know that they can’t register any teacher without training,” he sadly noted.
The expert noted that TSC should include in their budget the money for retraining or teacher professional development.
“6,000 shillings per teacher should not be hard to allocate for TSC to develop their staff if that is what they really want instead of over burdening the teachers,” he added.
Andiwoh also faulted TSC for being too rigid and only identifying particular institutions to offer professional development while locking out others.
“We are already disputing the colleges and Universities they have recommended to run the teacher development programs, we have TTCs, and other faculties which have been training teachers, why can’t this program be run by faculties and Teachers’ training colleges which have proven history in education training instead of qualifying specific Universities and colleges with no track record of teachers training?,” he wondered.
“Therefore TSC should re-design the program and consult the teachers, accept bearing the cost of development as the employer and make access to the program accessible and be run by colleges with history of training teachers especially faculties of education in Universities and Diploma colleges instead of picking a few to be advantaged to run the program,” he summed.
