And in Tuesday's Cabinet meeting, they discussed the Belize National Curriculum Framework 2022, which is expected to be rolled out in the upcoming weeks. This framework has been developed after months of consultation and aims to create a more focused curriculum for students. Today, the Minister of Education, Francis Fonseca, told us more.
Hon. Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"We are unveil in the next week or two, our new curriculum framework, which is a complete transformation of Belize's education curriculum, for the pre primary, primary and secondary levels of education, moving away from a sort of time based curriculum to a competency based curriculum, more targeted learning outcomes, reducing the amount of learning outcomes, putting together learning lesson plans that can be used by teachers and schools across the country. So a complete, I think again, revolutionary, transformation of our curriculum. We are a small developing nation, we have to be teaching our students what matters, what is relevant to the economic development of Belize, what is relevant to the national development of Belize, and our students need to be learning what is important, what matters to them, what can provide them with the skills, the knowledge, the information, the values, the attitudes they need to be successful productive citizens of this country, that is what the curriculum has to be laser focused on so we can't be all over the place, as we are now, scattered all over the place, we have to be strategically focused and that is the kind of transformation we are doing with the curriculum which as I said will be unveiled over the next two weeks."
And the CEO, Dian Maheia, explained that the teachers will need to undergo some form of training to prepare to teach this new curriculum.
Dian Maheia, CEO, Ministry of Education
"Our August CPD cycle, you know August is traditionally that time for teacher training and our August CPD cycle is heavily geared toward competency-based training and actually we have a year long schedule of competency-based training for teachers at all levels, so that as a teacher you will be exposed to these different methods. You are going to get support in how to do this and for some teachers I think what they'll find is that it comes naturally, because they'd been doing it anyway, maybe they never put the tag on it, but its been happening, but for all teachers. We are going to ensure that at one point or the other in many cases in multiple points they are going to be exposed. The teacher learning institute is a great help in this initiative, because with the TLI we are able to really for the first time since August 2021, we are able to have truly continuous professional development for teachers year round and so we are making full use of that. Actually, this August its a much more full offering than we had last August, because now we have face to face teaching, we have virtual offerings teachers can sign up for such a wide range of topics, but you will get more information on that very soon."
