At least 140 tutors drawn from 13 Teacher Training Colleges have completed a six-day training in the new curriculum for teachers.The first ever national TTC instructor training that took place at Save Teacher Training College in Huye district, aims at building competence for instructors especially in math and language teaching methods.The training that concluded this week was jointly facilitated by Kigali Institute of Education (KIE), Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) and TTC instructors as part of the USAID-funded Literacy, Language, and Learning (L3) Initiative. “In order to effectively transition into a primary school teacher, it is imperative that quality teaching practices are modeled,” VSO volunteer Pam Connell said yesterday.Connell who is supporting the implementation of the new curriculum at Save TTC is among other officials who have been assigned in the various TTC’s to ensure that they easily adopt the new curriculum. In addition to developing a new curriculum, there are also new and revised courses in TTC’s this academic year; and officials say skills acquired will help them to teach these courses.Audio-visual education Connell said that skills acquired in the training will enable tutors to teach teachers who will later suit the teaching standard L3 recently developed.With help of the recording studio of Rwanda Education Board (REB), L3 came up with an initiative of recording audio-visual educational materials as one of the measures to contribute towards quality education.Dieudonne Nduhirahe, an English instructor at TTC Gacuba II in Gisenyi, says the methods to be used in teaching does not only make it easy to understand but also interesting to students.“Use of the voices gestures and physical expressions makes it easier for students to learn,” he said.In one activity, instructors used chalk to draw number lines, which can help students to see and compare fractions, on the floor of the classroom. Linda Wilson one of VSO volunteer and math training facilitator urged that the teaching method easily enables students to make the connections between objects, words, symbols, and diagrams that they need to develop a good understanding of mathematics.
