Developing Teachers Skills in Thar District Area, Sindh, Pakistan
Lack of quality education in government schools of Pakistan has always remained an issue. In most of the government schools, learning is characterized by intense and unhealthy competitiveness among students, and classroom learning has become synonymous with competition with grades, teacher recognition and praise (B. Dean, 2005). The Thar Desert Area, District Tharparkar, is one of the most disadvantaged and remote areas of Pakistan. Like other government schools in rural areas of Pakistan, most of the primary schools in Thar suffer from lack of quality education. The reasons include teachers' poor academic level, lack of proper professional development opportunities, lack of resources etc. Majority of the government primary schools in Thar have only one teacher, running in one-room edifice (locally called Chaunra). The common teaching strategies in these schools are reading aloud from the textbook and asking students to copy the text from books on slates.
The Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development (AKU-IED), under an agreement with the Save the Children, UK, and Thardeep Rural Development Programme (TRDP), a local NGO of Sindh, entered in a partnership to enhance the quality of education in Tharparkar, Sindh. In order to achieve the goal, AKU-IED designed a tailor-made Certificate in Education: Primary Education Programme (Mentoring Focus). Through this programme, 20 'Master Trainers' were trained. Subsequently, they successfully conducted professional development mentoring programmes at cluster levels for their fellow primary school teachers. More than 350 primary school teachers have been trained in a period of three years. The AKU-IED team has been extensively involved in providing academic support and monitoring activities throughout the programme period.
The regular and continuous monitoring by AKU-IED team to the field sites shows a positive impact of the mentoring programme on quality improvement at two levels: (i) Performance of mentors in the Mentoring Programme, and (ii) Mentees performance at the classroom level. The major positive impact of the mentoring programme has been seen in teachers' punctuality, teachers' planning skills, use of child-centred methodologies and co-operative learning, elimination of corporal punishment, teacher-child relationship, and improved health practices. Besides successes, there have been some challenges also, such as sustainability, lack of continuous and proper monitoring mechanism, poverty, lack of resources etc. The paper will focus on the processes, successes and challenges of the programme.