Early childhood coordinators and teachers get more training on pre-numeracy and recording of data |09 September 2021
Yesterday’s session in full swing
As part of the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) National Action Plan 2021-2022, the Education Sector ECCE Technical Team has started a series of working sessions with early childhood coordinators, crèche teachers in charge and all crèche Year 1 teachers, as a follow-up to the virtual meeting held on August 9, 2021.
The first group who attended the sessions yesterday at the Seychelles Institute for Teacher Education (Site) were participants from Zone 2 – Au Cap primary, Anse Royale primary, Anse Boileau primary, Baie Lazare primary, Grand Anse primary, Port Glaud primary and Takamaka primary.
Cyril Pillay, the chairperson of the Education Sector, ECCE technical team, noted that “the aims of the working sessions are: to empower the participants on how to use the action research method in their everyday practices, particularly with regard to pre-numeracy and to develop their skills in recording and analysing data, for the purpose of monitoring the pupils’ attainment and progress in pre-literacy and pre-numeracy. We do not want to put more work on you but rather help and facilitate your work”.
The training were conducted by Catriona Monthy (project co-ordinator for the monitoring structure) and Helene Basset (project co-ordinator for action research).
Mrs Basset noted that the sessions she will be doing are based on action research. “Our previous projects were always based on language and this time we will be focusing on pre-numeracy. This will allow the teachers to discover the issues the children have with pre-mathematics and do the appropriate intervention to remediate the situation,” noted Mrs Basset.
Before this session, there was a virtual meeting preparing the teachers and they were given some work to do which will be discussed during the session. “Mathematics is a problem for many students, but if we discover the small issues when they are still young, it will help them in their learning,” shared Mrs Basset.
Mrs Monthy explained that “this project started two years ago with the national ECCE plan where we started to look into how the teachers are monitoring and recording the progress of a child. This time we are focusing on a specific targeted group and the teachers will just change the way of recording the progress. Instead of marking in a mark book, it will be done digitally. Just at a glance, the future teachers will be able to know where the child is having difficulty. There will also be targeted evaluation where the teachers will be able to help a child make progress during the year”.
Mrs Monthy also noted that there are some teachers who are not familiar with excel programs or even have a computer. She noted that they will work in collaboration with the schools to facilitate their access to computers.
Today, Thursday, the early childhood coordinators, crèche teachers in charge and all crèche Year 1 teachers from Zone 3 will have their training and participants from Zone 4 and Zone 5 will be trained on Tuesday September 14 and Wednesday September 15 respectively.
Text and photos by Vidya Gappy
