A teacher’s perspective on the new curriculum

June 13, was another funny, yet sad, day in my teaching career. Upon arrival at my duty station, I was met with a memo posted by our Director of Studies demanding teachers to produce what he termed “learner profiles.”

Upon taking my seat in the beautiful mud-house staff room decorated with wall calendars dating as far back as 2017, I noticed a friend preparing a document.

It was titled “S2 Learners’ Profile Term 2 2023” and he used a ruler to draw some pretty good lines, plus blue ink to meticulously pen down learner’s names and records of assessment from the term’s activities of integration.

As I observed, I outright felt it wasn’t a learner’s profile but rather a record of assessments. Just when I wanted to point it out, two other colleagues walked in, mumbling about the memo. This led the four of us to discuss what we thought about it. Another argued that we were expected to present learner competencies drawn from our schemes of work and lesson plans. “Simply copy and paste,” he added.

I told them a learner’s profile is a comprehensive picture or description of an individual’s learning characteristics, preferences, strengths, and areas for growth. It provides valuable insights into a learner’s unique traits, abilities, and learning style preferences.But we all agreed that my version of the document needed was difficult to produce for a class size as big as ours (an average of 75 per class). To deliver it, teachers needed lots of time, resources, and training. We concluded by stating that our Director of studies ought to have provided a template of the kind of document that we were expected to produce. 

Whereas many have not had the opportunity to attend any teacher training on the implementation of the new competency-based curriculum, we also observed that those who had attended were equally confused and unsure of what the requested document entailed. 

One of them confessed that even the “experts” who trained them couldn’t satisfactorily answer all their questions. Over the next few weeks, I have had the opportunity to think through Uganda’s process and progress in the implementation of the new lower secondary school curriculum, and I will herein briefly discuss this.

Through the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC), Uganda’s Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) revised and rolled out a new competency-based curriculum to learners in Senior One in January 2020. Nationwide implementation began in Senior One in 2020 and has been subsequently rolled out in S.2 and S.3 over the last three years, with interruptions from Covid-19 and Ebola spread control measures.

The NCDC website details a somewhat clear process for the steps that were followed from the design to the rollout phases. It speaks of 90 national facilitators, 1,600 master trainers, and 20,000 regional trainings for four to five teachers from each school, and the distribution of syllabi books to 6,020 public and private secondary schools. 

Out of these, the same website indicates that only 1,500 (25 percent) schools received Senior One learner’s prototype books, teacher’s guides, and training manuals.
As a result, in its third year of rollout, teachers have been told to use the very books that were discouraged at the programme’s start. The teachers who have chosen to be creative also complain about the costs that come with this creativity. 

“To help my students learn about fractions, I had to buy 89 oranges because the school had no funds. Parents, on the other hand, cannot pay because they have been told not to pay for children in USE schools,” shared a passionate teacher. As teachers struggle with the new curriculum, many of them remain burdened with the burden of having to deal with fast and slow learners without leaving the former bored and the latter dragging. An evaluation or report on how other countries handle this now needs to be tabled.

Nonetheless, Uganda has made the right decision by taking the bold step of overhauling its old education system.  However, for this decision to yield positive long-term results, there is a need to address the current and future gaps. It is important for the Ugandan government and relevant stakeholders to rethink and prioritise planning in the education sector to prevent the kind of confusion that is currently at play.
 
In so doing, Uganda will create a strong foundation for future generations, foster skills development, and contribute to sustainable socio-economic growth and development.

 The author, Mr Denis Moi Kiprotich is a teacher and Fulbright Alumnus. [email protected]