By Olimatou Coker
Ding-Ding Yiriwa Federation, a local partner of ChildFund has on Tuesday commenced two days training for 20 teachers from 10 different schools within their intervention areas at its office in Janbanjelly.
The 20 teachers are drawn from 10 different schools with 2 representatives selected from each school.
The overall objective of the training is to help better the performance of the enrolled children or sponsored children improve in schools.
The training also aimed at the operationalisation of teacher’s competencies and teaching, framework and providing capacity building training for teachers.
Aliue Mendy, the Federation Manager of Ding-Ding Yiriwa Federation, said the aim of this pedagogy training is to help the teachers in schools where they are intervening to upgrade their skills in teaching. “We want the teachers to actually have the best skills in teaching that can motivate the children to attend those sessions and be interested in those subject matters”.
He added that each school has brought in 2 participants and they are doing it in 10 schools. These are schools across Kombo North and South.
He said Ding-Ding Yiriwa Federation is a community-based organisation operating in Kombo north and south in affiliation with ChildFund the Gambia. The federation has enrolled over 4,500 school going children within Kombo South \ Kombo North. Ding- Ding Yiriwa aims at protecting the children and youths against all forms of abuse. The main objective of the federation is to ensure children age 0-5 years are health and secured, 6-14 years are educated and 14 years above have quality relevant skill acquisition.
“My expectation after the 2 days training of these teachers is to ensure that the teachers are well equipped with the necessary skills to deliver their sessions in their various classes. The overall objective will be to see that the performance of our enrolled children or our sponsored children improve in order to motivate the sponsor more”.
Mendy said that nobody would be interested in sponsoring a child whose performance is not improving “because that is definitely discouraging. We could also see from the recent years the drop in our sponsor and we want to attribute to the fact that the results of sponsored children are always very poor. And then we know the only solution is to work with the parents and the teachers to improve the situation”.
Mendy also advised the parents to be interested in their children’s education and control their children and motivate them to provide conducive study areas in their various schools. “The parents need to take up their responsibility. And teachers to be very serious and ensure that the right syllabus is provided to the children. The right teaching aids and materials are also provided for the teachers to deliver their sessions properly in as much as the teacher is experienced highly qualified whatsoever. If the facilities for the teacher to deliver his or her lesson to children is not available, unfortunately, what we expect from the teachers will not come and definitely the children will not have what they actually want.”
Mansour Saine, a trainer, said education is a collective responsibility and everyone has a role to play. “I will do my best to equip the teachers with skills and knowledge in order to boost effective and efficient teaching and learning in our schools”.
Lamin Ceesay, Finance Controller at Ding-Ding Yiriwa Federation, urged the participants to take the training seriously, adding that grass root education is the foundation stone for any child.
