Teachers in rush to enrol for professional development training (TPD).
The four institutions chosen to pioneer teacher re-training have received a massive number of inquiries about TPD.
Mount Kenya University has been forced to establish a call centre with 5 attendants to handle the thousands of teachers who have inquired about the new development.
Dr Benson Njoroge, dean of the school of education at the university, told Citizen Digital that over 20,000 teachers had called the institution in the last two days to inquire about when the courses would begin.
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“We are planning to roll out the first training before December and enrollment is ongoing. We seek to start with online learning, due to the prevailing challenges of Covid – 19 pandemic,” he said.
“We have already carried out pilot program with about 100 teachers, whereby all stakeholders including the Teachers Service Commission and the Teachers Unions representatives were observers and they gave us a clean, bill of Health.”
Kenyatta University has also reported massive inquiries from teachers from all over the country wanting to know when the training will begin, as over 300,000 teachers compete for the available slots in the four institutions chosen to pioneer teacher re-training.
Kenyatta University, Mount Kenya University, Riara University, and Kenya Education Management Institute (KEMI) have been identified. A teacher will be free to enroll in the TPD modules at any institution of his or her choosing.
The start date will be December 20, 2021, according to TSC. Teacher Professional Development will keep teachers' knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values up to date and encourage teachers' learning communities.
Teachers have been complaining on the decicions made by TSC of late even as they try to call lawmakers to do something about it. The Law society of Kenya (LSK) Nelson Havi on Friday told teachers to stop bothering him to petition the new TSC directive.
Havi says teachers dug their own graves when they replaced Wilson Sossion as the Secretary-General of the Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT).
"Teachers, you left Wilson Sossion to be fought to exhaustion by the State. KNUT withdrew all cases against the State when you replaced Sossion with a Secretary of ‘your preferred choice’. Please, stop calling me to challenge the directive by TSC that you be trained afresh," Havi tweeted.
The new TPD compels teachers to part with about 6 000 shillings every year for a six-year professional training in order to be issued with a professional teaching certificate apart from what they acquired in university.
The teaching certificate will be renewed after every five years. TSC chief executive officer Nancy Macharia said the aim is to make teaching in the country be run and managed like other professions such as law and engineering.
TSC said it will employ innovative assessment strategies such as reflective journals, portfolios and presentations to carry out the program.
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At the end of each module teachers who are successful will have their teaching certificates renewed after every five years. TSC says teachers who fail to train will have licences revoked.
TSC Chief Executive Officer Nancy Macharia stated on Wednesday that the move is intended to improve Kenyan teachers' professional standards as well as keep them up to date on emerging trends in the education sector.
TPD, she explained, is a life-long learning program divided into six hierarchical competency levels, with each level taking five years to complete. “At the end of each module, successful teachers will have their teaching certificates renewed after every five years,” she said.
Macharia stated that in order to participate in this program, every teacher registered with the commission will be required to identify and register with one of the accredited service providers. She urged teachers to embrace it, claiming that it benefits them in line with its goals.
Mount Kenya University, Kenyatta University, Riara University, and Kenya Education Management Institute have so far been accredited by the commission to carry out the program.
In 2016, the Commission implemented Performance Contracting for Institutional Heads and Teacher Performance Appraisal and Development (TPAD) for teachers, with the goal of strengthening curriculum implementation and accountability in resource utilization to improve learning outcomes.
Teacher unions had previously urged the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) to recall the performance appraisal tools, claiming that the exercise had caused teachers anxiety.
There were also concerns that the tool could be used to target teachers for promotion and unfairly blame them for poor performance. Macharia, on the other hand, stated that the quality of education has improved since the implementation of TPAD.
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