Teachers at primary and secondary schools are taking classes without getting Teacher’s Guide, the booklet on lesson planning and teaching method for disseminating the new curriculum introduced in January 2013.
About three crore students at those institutions are being deprived of due classroom lesson as the 7.62 lakh teachers are not getting guidance on lesson planning and teaching method, experts said.
The new textbooks introduced in 2013 said that such guides would help the teachers to plan and teach lessons more effectively and communicatively through teaching and learning activities.
Teacher’s guides are also helpful to teachers to improve teaching quality at classroom and the offer step-by-step guidance on the lesson planning and advice on different areas of classroom practice, said curriculum experts of the National Curriculum and Textbook Board.
The board is preparing for floating tender for the printing of the guide for primary level teachers guide, while the guide for secondary level teachers is still being written, said four of the curriculum experts engaged in writing the guide.
Board’s acting chairman Mia Inamul Haque Siddiki said that the guides would be published by the middle of this year. He blamed budget crunch for the delay in publishing the guides.
There are about 3.12 lakh teachers at secondary schools and madrassahs and 4.50 teachers at primary schools and madrassahs.
The new curriculum introduced several new subjects for students from Class I to Class X and brought about major changes in various subjects for them aiming at developing their thinking ability, imaginative capability, inquisitiveness and creativity.
Curriculum specialists and textbook writers said that the teachers were not oriented to the new curriculum and students could not get proper education from them.
Senior curriculum specialist of the board Farhadul Islam said that the guides would help teachers as they were not familiar with new subjects and the content of other subjects that were changed.
According to the new curriculum, students from Class VI to Class X have to take at least three new subjects — Bangladesh and global studies, job and life-oriented studies, and information and communications technology. Two new subjects — career studies, and finance and banking — are compulsory for students of Classes IX and X.
The new optional subjects include ethnic minority languages and culture for Class VI to Class X students and population and development studies, human resource development, human rights and gender studies and tourism and hospitality for Class XI and XII.
The new curriculum brought about changes in the contents of about 75 textbooks. New topics including reproductive health, climate change, HIV/AIDS, autism and right to information were incorporated into the new textbooks.
According to the board, it has a plan to provide all primary and secondary institutions with a set of teacher’s guide covering all textbooks.
Last teacher’s guide was published in 1996.
