The immediate past Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast, Rev. Prof. Emmanuel Addow-Obeng, has deplored the inability of the colleges of education to train teachers to acquire good teaching skills and high competencies in different subject areas.
He said the state of facilities in some colleges of education since they received accreditation in 2007, did not befit their status as diploma-awarding institutions.
He said after the changeover from certificate-awarding institutions, tutors were still using the same methodology to teach teacher trainees for diploma certificates.
“The teachers have to be trained so that they have a good mastery of the subject content matter, as well as the use of the right pedagogy to teach,” he said.
Professor Addow-Obeng expressed the sentiments at the third congregation of the Holy Child College of Education in Sekondi.
He said some of the trainee teachers, who had to impart knowledge to children in basic schools, were deficient in the use of the English language.
“They make errors in the areas of spelling, punctuation, tenses and their inability to construct a simple sentence,” he said.
Rev Prof. Addow-Obeng gave some examples of spelling mistakes by some of the trainee teachers as: “Elephant is spelt elefant, tyres as tires, bungalows as bangaluws and meanwhile as meanwhy.”
In the area of sentence construction, he said some of the trainees wrote, “I saw a dwarf, which upside himself while walk in the forest. The start it fool classes. The mob beat the robber and lynched him, after lying there for sometime, the robber got up and runaway.”
Such a deficiency in grammar, Prof. Addow-Obeng said, was not good enough for laying a solid foundation for students who would be the future leaders of the country.
Rev. Prof. Addow-Obeng said in view of the number of subjects studied at the colleges and duration of the training, the three-year programme was not enough to produce teachers with good teaching skills and competency.
He said the programme rather produced general teachers, who were jack of all trade but masters of none, saying that “this does not augur well for quality”.
To arrest the situation, Rev. Prof. Addow-Obeng said, there was the need to enhance the quality of staff and the facilities of the collages of education.
The Principal of the school, Mrs Magritte Lamer, commended the students and said the college was committed to producing good quality teachers.
Dr Ishmael Yamson, who chaired the occasion, urged the private sector to contribute towards the provision of educational infrastructure in the country.
No comments:
Post a Comment