By Elizabeth Owiti, Senior Officer – Assessment and Advocacy

ALiVE Collaborates with Teacher Training Colleges in Kenya

Teacher education is a key pillar in realizing quality education. It ensures that teachers are equipped with the requisite skills, knowledge, and pedagogy to effectively engage learners and facilitate meaningful learning experiences.
Action for Life Skills and Values in East Africa (ALiVE) conducted assessment of life skills and values among adolescents in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zanzibar in 2022. The results revealed that only 5% of adolescents in Kenya are proficient in problem solving. ALiVE embarked on a journey to address this gap. The big question was, how does the teacher education space need to evolve to prepare a teacher to effectively develop life skills and nurture values?

To answer this question within the Kenyan context, Zizi Afrique Foundation through the ALiVE initiative is working in collaboration with Eregi and Machakos Teachers Training Colleges in the space of foundational learning (core competencies, values, literacy, and numeracy). The collaboration is through a learning-by-doing model to explore ways through which teacher education can prepare a teacher with the capacity to connect content and pedagogical approaches for improved foundational learning outcomes. Specifically, Zizi Afrique is supporting the colleges to mainstream core-competences in their day-to-day activities through a whole school approach to unlock the formal, informal, and non-formal opportunities while using accelerated learning approach as a vehicle to achieve this.

The work with teacher educators started by forming a common understanding of the current gaps in foundational leaning, the role of the teacher and how this connects with teacher education. Effective implementation of the Competency Based Education and Training (CBET) require teacher educators who have the core competencies, the pedagogy to mainstream core competencies, skills to develop formative assessments of measuring core competencies and values and to model values in the school environment. This kind of training and environment is likely to produce teachers with the relevant skill set, knowledge and values.

Teacher educators from the two colleges have received training on introduction to life skills and values, to enhance their understanding and facilitate mainstreaming of the core competencies and values. Other trainings will focus on assessment, nurturing and accelerated learning approach. This collaboration aims to impart knowledge, skills, and to shift the mind-sets of the teacher educators and by extension the teacher trainees, to effectively implement competency-based curriculum. The results will be useful in shaping teacher education work in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zanzibar.