Daily Times

Quaid-e-Azam Academy for Educational Development (QAED) Punjab faces seemingly daunting challenge of the professional development of all educational personnel in the province. In large part due to its strategy of learning, innovating and working in partnership, QAED is on its course to not only achieve but far exceed its goals, the new additional director general of QAED Ahmad KhawarShahzad believes. We are ready to rethink education, by building an innovative learning paradigm in government schools, he explained.

He was talking to the correspondent after a meeting with the faculty of LUMS’ School of Education. According to him, while implementing the New Deal of the minister for School Education Murad Raas, the Secretary Schools conceived of establishing long-term collaboration with renowned private institutions.

QAED is going to establish partnership with LUMS School of Education. It will help QAED plan, design and implement heterogeneous but need-based programs of the professional development of school teachers and managers. In the first in this series,LUMS School of Education will develop and conduct a course on education, leadership and management for Assistant Education Officers. The two-week course will be piloted in four districts – followed by an inclusive research by the LUMS School of Education for measuring its impact on school management and classroom teaching. The ADG of QAED explained that professional development can only be effective if it is informed by facts and experience and that is why they are going to pilot this course before up-scaling it in all districts.

QAED will also have LUMS School of Education support for the professional development of its staff and for developing a pool of effective trainers. QAED staff will also participate in different events organized by LUMS.

Ahmad KhawarShahzad explained that all training programmes of QAED will be based upon data of students’ learning, available resources and teachers’ capacities. QAED will develop an all-in teacher education management information system, he told. It will put us in a continuous state of learning, often adopting need-based approach to meet the vastly different needs of teachers across the province, he said.

The professional development activities planned by QAED for the next financial year include mentoring of teachers of Grade III on basic literacy and numeracy skills, development of innovative tablet-based teacher support package, facilitate British Council sponsored massive open online courses and face to face trainings of primary teachers. QAED will also have UNICEF support to establish early childhood education classrooms in 10,000 more schools in far flung areas. British council sponsored core skills training programme will be offered to the teachers of elementary classes (VI to VIII). After the promising results in previous year, QAED will build the capacity of 1500 more school to compete for International School Award offered by the British Council, UK.

QAED’s efforts are far from perfect but it has gone a long way to address the quality education issues which public schools face and has become eventual resource for the vast community of teachers.