Review university curriculum

EDUCATION

As Uganda embarks on a major transformation with a vision to move from a peasant society to a modern and prosperous country by 2040, Institutions of higher learning become the fulcrum of nurturing and producing students who can cope, adapt, develop, and add value to the ever-emerging and dynamic future that is driven by technological advancements and unlimited creativities around the globe.

Teacher training is a pivotal aspect the education system needs to constantly focus on and carefully consider:

Teachers' salaries represents 80% of the recurrent education budget.
Therefore, if teacher management is handled properly, then about 80% of the education resources are used properly.

The quality education is entirely dependent on the quality of teachers.

Teachers are the implementers of education reforms hence a critical need for their significant participation in reform formulation for effective implementation.

The central question to the National Council for Higher Education (NCHE), whose mandate is to accredit and regulate higher education in Uganda: Do universities really train teachers or just talk to them about teaching?

Teacher trainees seem not to actually be trained but told what teaching is about. Students spend over 85% of their time and energy studying content that is not directly relevant to their intended careers. Even the content taught in their prospective teaching subjects in most cases is not relevant to their classroom teaching.

Uganda needs to urgently review the curricula of university programmes to enable students get more content in areas of their specialisation right from the beginning of their courses, change from block school practice to one-year internship whose weight should be increased to at least 30% from the current approximately 6.6%, inclusively enrich the assessment scope so that host schools can award at least 50% of the total school practice marks and ensure a close relationship between schools and universities in order to enrich the training apparatus to effectively equip teachers with the required professional skills and competencies to allow them to teach effectively.

The writer is an educationist from Bukedea district and a PhD student in Education at IUIU