BY SAMIE WAIKORI
Auki
FOUR primary schools in the southern region of Malaita province recently benefited from Leaders Education Authorities Project (LEAP).
The schools include Tawairoi, Maka, Takaito and Rokera, which had been categorised under the LEAP southern cluster within Malaita province.
School Leadership Mentor (SLM) under LEAP, Mr Austin Aebata (who is responsible for Southern and Central clusters) said his team had recently conducted a LEAP introductory visit to schools, followed by a ‘sense making’ workshop.
He said the workshop gathered teachers and school leaders of the four schools at the southern sub-station of Afio where workshop took the topic of ‘sense making’ for teachers and school improvement growth goal setting for school leaders and head-teachers.
Aebata said during the sense-making workshop, the first day of the two-day workshop, teachers learnt of data gathered by MEHRD on the current level of students’ performances in the country.
He said they also learnt the pattern of teachers’ practices shown in the data to have been connected to students’ performances in terms of learning literacy.
Aebata said it is very important for teachers to understand from the data that the current national trend of students’ performance especially on literacy is going down.
“So the training is purposely to help teachers to draw-up plans that will help improve their student’s learning in terms of literacy,” he said.
Aebata continued that on the second day the workshop was for school leadership teams which comprised of school chairman, head-teacher, deputy and senior.
He said during the workshop the team was trained on school improvement planning, which goes along with the development of growth goal setting for schools.
“The purpose of that is to ensure school leadership team to develop planning to grow a goal setting targeting at practice of improving students’ literacy,” Aebata said.
He said MEHRD and LEAP are partners in the programme as they look at improving the level of student’s literacy in the country.
Aebata said the LEAP is headed by USP, University of Auckland and FFM in link with MEHRD and funded by New Zealands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT).
