3.25 m students suffer for untrained teachers

Industry Desk: Students of class one will be taught following a new curriculum from January 2023. But the teachers still have not received any training in this regard. The errors in the new textbooks have not been corrected as well. Parents are worried about the learning of class one students in this situation.
Officials of the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB), however, say there is nothing to worry about teaching the new curriculum.
According to the data of Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics, there are about 3.25 million class one students in the country.
In the new curriculum, new textbooks have been formulated to implement the class one teaching program in the country from next year. The Ministry of Education had emphasized the training of teachers to teach students in this new curriculum. An error-revision-monitoring plan for textbooks was also planned. But none of this has been implemented yet.
A parent named Md. Ibrahim said, “There is a lot of criticism every year about mistakes in textbooks. New books are being prepared for the new curriculum. If these books are printed without monitoring, mistakes will remain. Besides, it is risky to print the new curriculum textbooks without checking whether it is suitable for teaching or not. ‘
Golam Mostafa, a senior expert in the training department, told, “When the manual is prepared, the training will begin at the end of November. Training will be given through online and offline channels. Core trainers and master trainers will train teachers at district and upazila levels across the country through the Department of Primary Education (DPE). ‘
DPE Training Department Director Uttam Kumar Das told, ‘We have 3 lakh 59 thousand teachers at the government level. It will not be possible to train all the teachers at once. Government primary teachers will receive training step-by-step. Some will be trained online, while others will be trained directly.’
NCTB primary education member AKM Riazul Hasan told that at present it is not possible to revise the textbooks of the first class by piloting and observing them. Merit-based teaching has been going on since 2012 in the primary sector. As a result, there is no need to modify it at present.
New Curriculum Core Committee member Abul Momen told that if the text book is piloted this year and brought under continuous training of teachers, benefits will be reaped from next year.
He said that the teaching method in the new curriculum is completely different from the previous one. Children will learn by doing various activities themselves, the teacher will play a supporting role there. As a result, there is a great need for teacher training. They need to acquire skills to teach.