Secondary school principals have been urged to embrace transformative leadership to implement Competency-Based Education (CBE) successfully in senior schools.
Teachers Service Commission(TSC) Elgeyo Marakwet Director Loise Murei said the principals could smoothly achieve this through Competency-Based Learning (CBL).
She said the current Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) in the education system has led to a serious shift in curriculum.
Talking about teacher preparedness for senior schools, Murei said principals will play a vital role in the uptake of CBC by offering visionary leadership and preparing teachers.
Speaking during the Elgeyo Marakwet County Kenya Secondary School Heads Association (KESSHA) Conference in Naivasha, Murei encouraged the principals to conduct Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analyses of their schools and capitalise on their strengths.
The conference theme was ‘Embracing Pathways in Secondary Education,’ and it was meant to prepare teachers for the pilot CBC cohort intake next year.
Murei encouraged the school heads to embrace attitudinal change to make the CBC uptake positive and successful.
“As the Chief Executive Officers of your schools, you should be ready to learn, re-learn and unlearn to move away from the outdated ways of doing things,” she said.
She maintained that principals must understand the concept of CBL, learn and adopt the new ways of the new instruction system, and rally teachers to embrace it.
Murei also underscored the need to identify and nurture the learners’ talents instead of focusing only on academics and marks.
“Understand the new system of marking and grading where learners performance is categorised as Exceeding Expectation, Meeting Expectation, Approaching Expectation or Below Expectation,” she said.
The TSC official added that teachers must ensure parental involvement in learners to identify their strengths and skills.
“Weakness in one area could translate to strengths in others, do SWOT analysis and place the students in positions where they can excel,” she said.
She asked the principals to embrace the infrastructural transformation that captured the spirit of CBE, such as laboratories, Information Communication Technology (ICT), sponsored art, sports, music, and drama.
“Your “schools also need to have skilled teachers of CBE; teacher development is key, and you should expect TSC to do the retooling, teaching, skilling and training,” she said.
Murei advised the principals to develop their teachers in small ways to help them adopt new skills and metamorphize from the old way of doing things.
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She appealed to the principals to identify flag carriers of CBE in their schools across departments so that no one person would run the show.
TSC Regional Director Alex Cheruiyot agreed with Murei’s sentiments, saying that attitude determines productivity.
He added that with the right attitude, one would succeed because nothing was hard to tackle and conquer.
Cheruiyot urged the principals to build confidence in the staff so that they could step up whenever the school head teachers were away.
“Have structures in place to run the schools in your absentia; you do not carry the school on your shoulders as if it is your personal property,” he said.
Cheruiyot taught the principals about the four Cs of 21st-century skills: critical thinking, creativity and innovation, collaboration, and communication.
“Principals should be critical thinkers, question everything within the schools and do not be quick to condemn,” he said.
On creativity and innovation, he urged the principals to be creative and chart their schools’ success strategies.
Cheruiyot observed that KESSHA was a community of principals who could collaborate and leverage each other’s skills through experience sharing and benchmarking.
Regarding communication, Cheruiyot said the mode and language have changed because children speak different languages.
“Communicate with them, learners, and touch base, find out what they want,” he said.
By our reporter
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