Institute launches learning project
Temeke District education officers, headteachers follow proceedings during the launch of an assessment for Learning Project Africa in Dar es Salaam yesterday. PHOTO | ANTHONY SIAME.
What you need to know:
- The three-year project, to be completed in 2019, will explore improvement in learning outcomes in Mathematics in urban schools.
- Speaking on behalf of the minister of Education, Science, Technology and Vocational Training, Prof Joyce Ndalichako, the director of Higher Education, Prof Sylvia Temu, said there were challenges to understand how schoolchildren learnt due to poor communication with their teachers that the research project was sought to identify and rectify where the problems lied to enhance contact with schoolchildren.
Dar es Salaam. The Aga Khan University’s (Aku) Institute for Educational Development, East Africa (IED-EAC), yesterday launched an assessment for Learning Project Africa that seeks to impart new knowledge to teachers of public schools on how to improve integration with pupils as a catalyst towards good performance.
The three-year project, to be completed in 2019, will explore improvement in learning outcomes in Mathematics in urban schools.
Speaking on behalf of the minister of Education, Science, Technology and Vocational Training, Prof Joyce Ndalichako, the director of Higher Education, Prof Sylvia Temu, said there were challenges to understand how schoolchildren learnt due to poor communication with their teachers that the research project was sought to identify and rectify where the problems lied to enhance contact with schoolchildren.
She said the research wanted to give schoolchildren room to fully engage in a learning process by improving their confidence to ask their teachers what they didn’t understand.
“We want schoolchildren to contribute to the entire learning process to enable them to say what they don’t understand and tell their teachers what they think will be a better way of learning rather than having a one-way traffic from just teachers to learners,” said Prof Temu.
The director of the IED-EAC said the project, which was implemented in collaboration with UK-based Oxford University and South Africa’s Cape Town University, sought to explore the importance of assessment and how if done well would improve performance in public primary schools.
The project will be implemented in Temeke Municipal Council. He noted that although a learning environment in the country faced some challenges that all together needed to be dealt with.
For their part, teachers Godfrey Akwesi from Charambe and Tabu Mbilikila from Chemchem primary schools in Temeke Municipal Council hoped that the project would equip them with new skills that would enable them to supervise the classes and lessons they were assigned to teach.
