Continuing Professional Development Programme for teachers to be enhanced next year

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KUALA LUMPUR: The Continuing Professional Development Programme for teachers will be enhanced beginning next year by focusing on individuals’ needs and school-based training.

Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin said the programme which also involved trainee teachers, would provide the best training for teachers throughout their career.

“They will have the opportunity for attractive career development across a number of career paths, with the achievement based on competency and not the period of service,” he said at the opening of the International Convention on Teacher Training Institute in Teacher Learning and Development, here, yesterday.

Muhyiddin, who is also Education Minister, said the ministry would also focus on efforts to ensure that all teachers would fully use the flexibility given in issues relating to curriculum scheduling, teaching arrangements, pedagogy approach and school-based assessment.

Besides that, he said, peer counselling among teachers to raise their level of excellence and professionalism standard through mentoring, development and sharing would always be encouraged. Muhyiddin said quality teachers would help build a quality education system, hence producing quality human capital.

Therefore, he said, the national education system required a mechanism to ensure the teachers produced were really competent and able to meet the standard set.

He also noted that transforming teaching as a profession of choice was one of the 11 shifts contained in the preliminary report of the National Education Blueprint 2013-2025 which focused on teacher learning and development.

“To implement this, we need to raise the quality of teaching in order to produce excellent teachers. We want to make the teaching profession an attractive profession for school leavers to be keen to join.

“Therefore, the main incentive to encourage excellent students to join the teaching profession is an attractive salary scheme and provision of a modern workplace,” he said.

Muhyiddin said the national education system had gone through planned transformaton a number of times in order to produce teachers with 21st century skills coupled with high-level mental capacity and thinking skill. He said thinking skill and critical thinking coupled with the ability to communicate well and self-confidence should be generated through a holistic learning and teaching approach.

“The approach taken for teaching that is dynamic would create students capable of divergent thinking and exploring truth,” he added. — Bernama