THE Minister of Education Dato Seri Setia Dr Awang Haji Zulkarnain bin Haji Hanafi last week announced four mandates for the Ministry of Education (MoE) during a launch event.
The first mandate announced is the implementation of the Teaching for English Literacy and Mathematics Mastery Frameworks. Developed by the Literacy and Numeracy Coaching Programme (LNCP), these frameworks are designed to bring about transformational change in the teaching of literacy and numeracy across Brunei.
The LNCP came about as part of the ministerial efforts towards Brunei Vision 2035 – which is to increase the number of well-educated and highly skilled people by the highest international standard, a press release said.
Effective teaching will enable students to achieve high learning outcomes and in this respect, good quality teaching in literacy and numeracy has the potential to improve students’ attainment. These frameworks are the attempt to clarify the expectations for effective teaching in Brunei in relation to the pedagogical themes of structuring and organising lessons, teaching content dialogically, designing effective learning tasks, and assessing learning continuously.
These four aspects of pedagogy practice are the means through which teachers should teach and students learn the content described in the curriculum. The main focus of lessons should be on securing good learning, so teachers should teach students and enable them to progress.
The frameworks will also help to improve teacher professional development and this is the second mandate: the alignment of the Teacher Professional Development (TPD) Framework with the Teaching for English Literacy and Mathematics and Mastery Frameworks.
This should bring a more strategic approach in creating custom Professional Developments (PDs) and professional development of Literacy Coaches (LCs) and Learning Partners (LPs) in schools by ensuring positive changes to teaching in the form of more reflective method of teaching, enhancing higher order thinking skills and varied approach to inciting a love for learning, critical thinking and greater interaction in the classroom.
While the first two mandates focus on systematic improvement of students’ literacy and numeracy levels and how teachers’ skills can be better enhanced, the remaining two mandates the sharing of relevant data and monitoring of programmes. These were included to improve transparency which will lead to better decision-making in the classroom and directions of programme implementation.
The use of data effectively during the delivery process to track progress or regress is essential to ensure the provision of the right support needed by teachers and students. This is pertinent for a data-driven decision-making process and allow more accurate execution of strategies.
Subsequently, continuous monitoring of the imple-mentation is also necessary in making the programme a success. As for the LNCP, a modular approach is employed to achieve a successful delivery and provide a safe environment to monitor, evaluate and review individual classroom practice, which in turn should contribute to the cultural change in the classroom by embedding transformational change within the Bruneian educational system.
These mandates signify critical areas to further improving the quality of teaching in line with national aspirations.
All stakeholders, especially the MoE, will also continuously review the quality of literacy and numeracy teaching and learning in ensuring the target for Brunei Vision 2035 is reached.
To the children in schools, these mandates will mean that they will have a better qualified teacher whose teaching skills are more engaging and incite interest to greater teacher-student interaction and learning. – Ministry of Education
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