Two-days consultative meeting to develop curriculum for teacher’s training on reading skills and strategies.

Save the Children in collaboration with the Department of Curriculum Research & Development, Ministry of Education, conducted a two-day consultative meeting on June 14-15 at Namsey Choeling Resort, Paro, to develop curriculum for teacher’s training on reading skills and strategies.

The workshop is a part of the Bhutan Children’s Book Initiative, a collaborative project between Save the Children – Bhutan Country Office and Ministry of Education launched in early 2014 to enhance effective learning through improving early grade reading.

Participants at the consultative workshop were from Education Monitoring Support Services Division, District Education Officers, lecturers from Teacher’s Training College in Paro, and select teachers and principals from some primary schools in Thimphu.

The workshop was conducted by Senior Education Advisor Joseph Nhan-O'Reilly, the SCUK TA for BCBI.

“Exposure to books and practice on reading is fundamental to this project,” said Joseph to the participants.

The workshop was designed to be hands-on where the participants actually went through the entire process of training and provided relevant feedback on what component of the training was most appropriate and those that would require further fine-tuning. Broadly, the session covered on topics such as thinking about reading, classroom environment, managing books collection, and using books in the classrooms.

The training curriculum will be used to train primary school teachers and ECCD facilitators later on reading skills and strategies.

Teachers’ Training on reading skills and strategies is a major component of the BCBI project. The other components are provision of high quality age and context appropriate books for children and the provision of bookshelves for books storage. The project is being implemented in two districts – Thimphu and Zhemgang.