ETTC principal outlines efforts
PRINCIPAL of the Erdiston Teachers’ Training College (ETTC) Dr. Patricia Saul has given the assurance that a concerted effort has been made to ensure that teachers are equipped to identify challenges in students.
Her comment came during the Estimates debate yesterday, as she responded to Member of Parliament for Christ Church West Central Adrian Forde who queried about the established procedure, if any, to deal with students having challenges and the role of the teachers.
In response, Dr. Saul said, “I am pleased to report that our teacher training programmes are all structured to include components on human growth and development which facilitate an understanding of how children grow and how their differences can be detected and also activities that could be used to address those differences. In addition to that, there are courses in differentiated instruction which allows teachers to select different courses to address those needs which are deviating from the norm.”
“Particularly, there are courses in special needs education. So that those persons who might have areas like dyslexia and so on, are identified and strategies put in place to deal with them. However, we recognise that because of the number of students who are presenting [with] these problems, there is a greater need for us to pay attention to this particular aspect of care.”
Dr. Saul explained that the college started a Diagnostic Unit for children who present with certain difficulties especially in the area of literacy. “Not only diagnosing their needs, but also developing strategies which teachers can use to intervene on behalf of these students, so that these deficits are compensated so that these students don’t leave school with those deficits.”
She added that the Diagnostic Centre provides more discreet analysis for those children who might have been presenting with difficulty in school.
“So if you have a child in the school who is at Class 2 and is not reading and you can identify that particular child at the Diagnostic Centre, we can do the investigation to find out exactly where the problem is and then identify, having profiled the child, identify the strategy that can be used to move that child forward. That is what we can do as a college,” the principal said.
The principal conceded that there are some students who have difficulty dealing with conflict. “And so we have started to renew our emphasis on values education so that we are teaching our children how to deal with conflict in a very different way. So these are some of the ways we are trying to address the difficulties which have presented in the education system to ensure that all of our students get to achieve their full potential.”
“All of our training programmes whether it be at the primary of secondary level includes components which allow teachers to be able to recognise differences and difficulties. However, when it comes to specialised intervention, we do not have the skills to do that. That specialised intervention is done by the Ministry of Education through their psychologists and through their social workers.”
“What we can do, we can implement some classroom strategies to help to differentiate the instruction so that those children who have different learning needs and learning styles are accounted for. However when it comes to really specialised care we can only relay that information to the Ministry of Education and the officers there are skilled to do that sort of intervention,” she explained. (JH)