An Educationist, Dr. Mary Ashun has recommended that teachers should be trained to be able to handle Coronavirus-like cases in future.
She also called for a curriculum that focuses more on the well-being of pupils.
Schools across the globe were taken unawares by the coronavirus pandemic.
Most countries were forced to shut down schools, and when they finally decided to re-open schools, they had to train their teachers to handle the pandemic.
In Ghana, the Ghana Education Service (GES), in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic trained about 52,000 teachers to help curb the spread of the virus in schools across the country.
But Dr. Ashun said though this is laudable, a more proactive approach would have been better.
In an interview on the Ed-Tech Monday on the Citi Breakfast Show, she recommended that teacher trainees must be prepared for such occurrences in the future.
“This is not the time to be fixated on curriculum, we can as well look at the well-being of the children. We need to ask ourselves; how are we teaching the children to adapt to situations like this? Because life is going to throw us more of such.”
“This may not be the last pandemic our children will see. One thing I ask myself is, what kind of children am I going to see in September? What kind of adults am I going to place in front of them to teach them? We have all changed in this short period, and we need to be planning ahead of any similar occurrences. We need teacher training programs in preparedness for any of such occurrences in the future as opposed to strictly following the curriculum.”
“What we need to teach the teachers in training colleges is an attitude, towards work, child development in preparedness for such in the future. I believe that teacher trainees may have learnt enough science to teach basic schools by the time they are in colleges, let’s try to raise them with the right attitudes, dispositions, and approaches to adaptability and flexibility. These are the values I want my teachers to have,” she argued.