Punjab Education Foundation

Continuous Professional Development Program (CPDP)

Overview

The poor educational learning outcomes of students have become a matter of great concern for parents, public and private sector managers of education. The deficient human capital in education sector has a major constraining influence on the quest for achievement of excellence in the field of quality education.

In case of educational institutions and quality teachers, the teachers and teachers alone are the agents of change: the real hope for the future of communities and the repositories of knowledge, expertise, traditions and values. The investment in professional development of teachers is therefore the right investment for the formation of human capital and decidedly the most accurate investment in future.

In order to contribute to overcome this limitation and further the aim of PEF to promote quality education by providing financial and technical assistance to low cost private education sector, Continuous Professional Development Program (CPDP) was launched in August 2005.

Four programs are operational under the umbrella of CPDP:

1. Continuous Teachers Development Program (CTDP)
2. School Leadership Development Program (SLDP)
3. Secondary Level Mentoring (SLM)
4. Teaching in Clusters by Subject Specialists (TICSS)

By keeping in view the importance of professional development of teachers, CTDP was launched in August, 2005 for the training of primary school teachers of low cost private sector schools (charging fee less than Rs.400/-) with particular emphasis on PEF partner schools. Major focus of the trainings remained on the content knowledge of different subjects like English, Mathematics and Science. Approximately, 104298 teachers have been trained through 2614 trainings till December, 2010.

TICSS was launched in 2006, with an aim of providing the services of qualified and competent Subject Specialists (SS) to low cost secondary schools in rural and less affluent urban areas.  Each SS provides services at a ‘cluster’ of two schools for duration of one academic year.

It was realized during teachers training program that many teachers were finding it difficult to incorporate newly learnt teaching techniques into their classroom practices. Out of the many associated reasons for this, non-cooperation of the school owners/principals/heads were considered as the main obstacle. Therefore, in February 2007, Punjab Education Foundation took another initiative under the umbrella of CPDP by the name of SLDP, i.e.; “School Leadership Development Program” (SLDP). Approximately, 13585 Principals/ Vice-principals/Head Teachers have been trained through 881 trainings till December, 2010.

Revamping of CPDP

The Punjab Education Foundation (PEF) decided to revamp Continuous Professional Development Program (CPDP) in October, 2010 for the first time in its history. The initiative was taken on the basis of feedback from the partner schools, organizations and teachers, PEF officials and monitors to strengthen the training mechanism that would eventually lead to Improved Quality of Education. In this regard, different brainstorming sessions and study visits of different educational and training institutes were also made.

The revamped Cluster Based Trainings i.e. CTDP and SLDP are conducted based on proper cluster formation. In this regard, a database of teachers and head teachers of PEF partner schools. 

Level-wise trainings comprising three (3) rounds would be conducted. There will be a gap of 6 months after each level. Program-wise levels are as under:-

CTDP
Level 1 Foundation
Level 2 Subject-Based (initial)
Level 3 Subject-Based (Advance)
 SLDP
Level-1 is Foundation
Level-2 is Advance
Level-3 is Need-Based.

Standardized Training Content List has been developed for each level.

Follow-up of each training would now be conducted after two months of the initial training to gauge the impact on the trainees.

Performance Evaluation criteria has been revised. Partner Organizations will be responsible for the performance of trainers. 50% weightage has been given to the trainer’s performance.