One thing that's been repeatedly demonstrated on the PSE, is that Belize's schoolchildren are not learning how to read the English language as well as they should. That's why all eyes in teaching circles are on 6 primary schools that are taking part in a pilot project which has teachers trying new methods to teach young children to be better readers. It is led by the Caribbean Center of Excellence for Teacher Training which has developed a pupil centered method of instruction. Today, Minister of Education, Francis Fonseca, toured a couple of the piloted schools in Belize City to get a sense of what is taking place.
Alfonso Noble Reporting,
9 months into the Caribbean Center for Excellence for Teacher’s Training pilot project Minister of Education Francis Fonseca visited 2 of the 6 schools that are being piloted. His first stop was All Saints School where after playing teacher for a few minutes.
[Hon. Francis Fonseca Reading: You could not find a nicer fish but Big Al was also very very scary. Very scary you see him? Very scary]
Fonseca said that the program is working.
Hon. Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
“I’ve been to All-Saints many times over the last two years and in fact I’ve read with the kids here before. This morning I had an opportunity to read with them again and to ask them questions about that we had read. And even in that short six months that they have been participating in the program I’ve seen tremendous improvement.”
Rosalyn Bradley, Reading Specialist CCET Project
“We’ve seen marked improvement in the student’s ability to read especially in terms of their motivation to read. A lot of the students now are choosing to pick up books on their own and when we see students doing that we know that we are doing something right; something is really working.”
But while it is always easy to judge performance at a glance, that’s not the same things as measuring the performance of the children that are participating. That measure comes from tests that were administered in June. Bradley says that preliminary findings show marked improvements.
Rosalyn Bradley,
“We did a pre-test when we started out and in June of the last school year we tested the students. I had an opportunity to look at those results, we have not finished, but we’ve seen some great improvement in some of the classes in terms of the students’ ability to read in terms of their comprehension and in terms of their writing skills.”
“I went to Trinidad where we looked at the data and we were looking at various classrooms to see well if this class performed better than another class in another school. We look at the teacher motivation and those kinds of factors that we think would also impact on the students performance. But to give you in terms of exact figures it’s hard to say that at this point. We should have that hard data within the next week or so.”
And while Bradley and Fonseca agree that there is improvement in the way students are reading, there is concern that other schools which could benefit from the program are being left out. To that Bradley says that while the CCETT program is at a pilot phase with limited implementation, indirectly, other schools are already receiving benefits.
Rosalyn Bradley,
“We are also working with the teachers in training so they are actually getting some of the methodology and so on so that when they go into their schools they already have that background in terms of what to do and how to teach reading. And then we have to start small and we want to really set up the model and see what is working and what kind of training and resources the teachers need. The idea once we get that is to extend to other schools.”
Hon. Francis Fonseca,
“We have to start somewhere and that's the idea. We started with these six school but obviously we have to see whether or not the program works and that is the objective of a pilot: to examine the weaknesses of the program, to examine the strengths of the program, and then to improve on the weaknesses and to make them better. So that is the whole objective of the pilot and because it is working we are definitely committed to expanding the program nationally.”
But for now it’s only 6 schools that are being piloted and if we were to judge by the impact it’s had so far, we can expect reading excellence from those students participating in the pilot. The challenge now will be to keep that high standard when the program rolls out nationwide.
The pilot project will run up until 2006 and will focus on students in Infant 2, Standard 1 and standard 2 in the selected 6 schools.