Teachers at the various levels of education have been tasked to learn how to upgrade themselves to enable them train the up-and-coming youth to catch up with the new system of education.
Mr. William Boakye Baafi, Executive Director of BB Edu Consult and Suppliers, made the call at a two-day sensitisation workshop for teachers in both private and public schools in the Oforikrom Municipality in the Ashanti Region.
The workshop was to update the teachers on the framework of Professional Development Teachers of Ghana, and the importance of the teacher’s Licensure Examination and its renewal through the National Teachers Council (NTC).
The participating teachers were taken through Teacher Standard Organisation, under which they were briefed on professional values, knowledge and practices, as to their relationship with the community they were working in, and authorities under who they were working to help them to demonstrate that they were professionals and to be accepted as such.
Mr. Boakye Baafi disclosed that teachers needed to be trained to enable them understand the system by service providers of the Ministry of Education at the regional level, which providers includes Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), Concerned Teachers Association, and Colleges of Education, as well as Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) like the BB Edu Consult and Suppliers.
Mr. Boakye Baafi indicated that the workshop would help build up the points of every participating to be awarded with accumulated eight points out of the 60 for which one needed to accumulate from every workshop and orientation programmes he/she had to undertake to enable them accumulate before the renewal of the license within three years.
This, he stressed, would not affect their monthly salaries, because it was being funded through the Teacher Annual Professional Development allowances.
According to him, teaching, as a profession, was taking a different dimension, which was through Information Communication Technology (ICT), and for that matter, whatever they were teaching today was based on ICT, hence the need for teachers to be smart and learn to update themselves.
