Teacher Education Symposium Magazine

Abstract

The TIET department at the Ministry of Education and Sports is responsible for training of teachers for all levels of Uganda's education system. It is indeed a great pleasure for me, as Commissioner responsible, to welcome all stakeholders to this first ever Teacher Education Symposium on the theme "Striving for efficiency and effectiveness in teacher education" The purpose of this symposium is to reflect on teacher education development, performance and accountability. At this symposium, we call upon stakeholders to examine education provision along a continuum that involves the learner, the teacher, the teacher educator, and the educator of the teacher educator. We need to recognize the environment and unique position each of these players occupies in the quest for quality education. At this symposium we take note that the ultimate purpose of education is to enable learning to take place. We examine the current status of teacher education in Uganda. Ideally, the educators of teacher educators must be highly qualified experts of teacher education to be able to pass on the unique skills of teaching a teacher to the teacher educators. Similarly a teacher educator must possess the unique skills to train a teacher, and the teacher must acquire the unique skills to teach a learner. Learners may transition to be teachers, then acquire additional skills and experience to transition to teacher educators and eventually become experts to acquire the status of educators of teacher educators. So, at this symposium we ask: what is our situation? Do we have the ideal human resource for teacher education? Do we have the ideal environment for teacher education? If not, where is the gap and what can we do? I thank the Minister of Education and Sports, the State Ministers for Education, the PS/ ES, and all colleagues at both the Ministry headquarters and the field for the selfless continuous concern and support to teacher tutor instructor education and training. I thank the development partners who have walked with us in the struggle to improve the quality of teachers through improved teacher education. We are indeed blessed to have all of you who believe that without proper teacher education and qualified quality teachers we can do very little to improve learning outcomes of our education system. We must therefore put teacher issues on a critical path and strive for efficiency and effectiveness in teacher education. The struggle continues.