Vice Chairman of Education Committee of Parliament, Dr Prince Hamidu Armah, has disclosed that it is impossible to have concurrent curriculum and textbooks for schools, particularly in the standard based curriculum.
According to him, in all curriculum development and implementation process everywhere across the world, there’s no occasion one would have curriculum developed and textbooks produced since they never happen concurrently. Mr Armah explained that if one should consider the 1987 reforms, it is easier to see the “available evidence that the textbooks came out in 1993”. Citing an example, he indicated that if it comes to the FCUBE reforms undertaken in 1996, it took four years to get textbooks.
In February 2019, President Akufo-Addo announced that a new Standard-Based Curriculum was to be rolled out by government from Kindergarten to Primary 6 by September. The new curriculum which was developed by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment is a shift from the objective-based curriculum to a standards-based curriculum with focus on strengthening the acquisition of the 4Rs- Reading, writing, arithmetic and creativity as foundational skills for life-long learning and national development.
Standard based curriculum
Commenting on the impact of the lack of textbooks on the new curriculum, two years on, the Kwesimitim legislator established the point that by nature of the curriculum development process, it is very impossible to have “concurrent development” of curriculum and textbooks. Mr Armah expressed that this can be done provided there’s a liberal process of textbook development by the private sector.
“This has been a very controversial issue and I know that the ministry is taking steps to addressing it… It is important for us to underscore the need for textbooks in schools to compliment the curriculum implementation. But textbooks in themselves are not adequate and sufficient in fully implementing a curriculum. When we started this standard based curriculum, there were specific expectations we were looking at. The previous curriculum had some deficiencies that we wanted to correct for which reason this standard based curriculum was introduced. The intention is to move away from asking students to recall information to enabling students to demonstrating competencies by the examples that teachers give in class”.
Dr Prince Hamidu Armah
Touching on the common core curriculum, Mr Armah intimated that although it is supposed to be implemented sometime next academic year, his outfit developed the curriculum and added the initial resource materials for subject-specific areas for the learners and the teachers since they had control over the development process.
Mr Armah indicated that the curriculum was produced in 2019 and subsequently published on the website. On June 1st, he revealed that publishers were now required to take the curriculum which is the “sourced document” and use them to develop their textbooks.
Mr Armah revealed that due to the transition of learning, a fundamental “shift” will require that producers of textbooks are taken through some training. He expressed that during his tenure, he engaged in stakeholder consultations to be able to understand the underpinnings and imperatives of the standard based curriculum.
“It took awhile for the publishers to bring the materials, and the process of the approval is such that it is very iterative…”
Dr Prince Hamidu Armah
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