bureau report
PESHAWAR
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Elementary and Secondary Education Department (E&SED) has launched School Quality Management Initiative (SQMI) – a series of trainings to improve field-level monitoring and assistance for improvement of primary level of education in the province.
SQMI will play a vital role to improve the quality of school inspections and standardize teaching and learning process in all schools of KP. The SQMI provides the basis of school ranking to E&SED and technically empowered the ASDEOs to provide immediate feedback to teachers and head teachers for improvement in quality of teaching and learning and school management.
After training of all ASDEOs at PITE, they started SQMI visits from February 2018 and nearly 8,000 schools were visited. In these visits teaching practices were observed, students were assessed, school management were observed and on spot feedback to teacher and head teachers were provided. E&SED is determined and expected that the with this new initiative brought the real change in quality of teaching and learning. E&SED is increasing the posts of ASDEOs, so that all primary schools of the province will be regularly visited on regular basis.
Through SQMI, the ASDEOs are capable to observe teacher competencies based on national professional standards for teachers. Each ASDEO observe a class of 35 minutes using android based application on his/her tablet PC provided by E&SED. Android based application for SQMI works independently on offline mode and after connecting with Wifi the data transmits to main server placed at E&SED.
To maintain the quality of SQMI visits, every ASDEO are responsible to visit 10 schools in a month and 40 schools in cycle, the same 40 schools will be visited in second cycle. So every school will be visited twice in a year and the results of SQMI visits are compiled at main server. E&SED linked all allied departments with the server, so the data driven decision making system will be followed. Provincial Institute for Teachers Education (PITE) is linked to observe the lack of teacher competencies, so that the training plan will be developed for improving the professional skills, DCTE is linked to see the student assessment results and develop strategy to improve.
