But, some teachers have expressed concern about this newly reformed curriculum that is supposed to roll out during the upcoming school year. It's been launched, but the modules have not been delivered to schools.
This morning, Minister Zabaneh had to take on questions about this when he made a guest appearance on KREM's Morning show.
Here are his comments on that line of inquiry:
Reporter
"Teachers are saying, listen, we haven't seen this yet, and classes are to start pretty soon."
Dr. Louis Zabaneh, Minister of State/Education
"What has traditionally - it's a transition year. So, it's expected. During this time, the teachers, on their own, would have on their own be working on their lesson plans, unit plans, and all that. So, we took their recommendation, and we've had teams of teachers who have exhibited best practices, etc., who have now been putting together unit plans and the assessments to go with a competency-based curriculum. The lesson plans themselves know that that involves more work. So in this transition year, we will be soliciting lesson plans so that we can take the best ones and put them up as well, so that by the end of the year when we start the next academic year, those will also be up for teachers. So, you have many teachers now who would be used to doing certain things at this time, and they're not doing it because we are working to put these up by the end of this month so that when they start school, they can go there and pull them down. So, what they're doing instead is they're involved with the Teacher Learning Institute, and there we talk about what competency-based education is, introducing them to that. How will it be different from what we've been doing before? How do we assess competency? So, these are no different things that they're doing, which is maybe, you know, a little bit strange for many teachers. And I think that's where maybe some of that is coming from."
