MONTEGO BAY, St James – Karen Turner, mission director of the United States Agency for International Development, has lauded the three-year-old Caribbean Centre of Excellence for Teacher Training.

The programme is funded by the USAID, representing a US$5.3 million investment by the Americans.

“I am extremely proud of the progress that has been made by the Caribbean CETT. It has stood out in its performance,” said Turner, addressing more than 20 top primary school teachers from CETT participating countries at the start of a workshop at the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort in Montego Bay on Monday.

“Whenever I travel within the Caribbean region, I hear nothing but great things about this programme. Educators are energetically implementing new skills and, most importantly, students are responding with very positive outcomes,” said the American official.

She argued that as a result of the success of the initiative, national governments and their respective ministries have adopted the progranmme as an important component of their overall education strategy for primary schools.

“The Caribbean CETT is not only getting early results, it is bringing together an effective regional response to deal with the critical issue of addressing reading deficiencies,” she asserted.

CETT is an initiative of US president George W Bush, announced at the 2001 Summit of the Americas, to establish teaching centres of excellence across Latin America and the Caribbean, where educators are trained to teach reading, using best practices.

The idea is to stimulate students within the grade one to three grouping to a higher degree of reading mastery.

The programme’s central components include:

. diagnostic tools to assess student performance;

. materials development focussed on addressing key reading problems;

. teacher training to improve pedagogical skills;

. action research to enhance tools, materials and teacher training and;

. information and communication technology aimed at improving the linkages between participating institutions and disseminating training materials.

At present, there are seven countries – including Jamaica, Belize, Guyana and St Lucia – participating in the CETT, which is managed by the Joint Board of Teacher Education, located on the campus of the University of the West Indies.

Since its implementation, the CETT has surpassed the targets for each of its central components.

Significant accomplishments include the training of 33 reading specialists who in turn trained more than 1,049 class room teachers; establishment of 760 class room libraries; distribution of 380 sets of teaching material for teachers; and the distribution of software to schools to support monitoring of student progress in learning.

“The lessons learned and best practices that you explore this week will be shared throughout the region for other educators to adopt,” Turner said.

The workshop ends tomorrow.

Since Monday, the teachers have been sharing their successes in exemplary reading instruction, saying the programme has helped to improve the level of reading at their respective schools.

“This CETT programme has helped me to discover the strength and weaknesses of the students and that allows me to identify and focus on the weaker ones,” Dawn Flowers, a grade three primary school teacher at the Burrell Boom Methodist School in Belize, told the Observer.

Flowers said, too, that the majority of her students have made strides in their reading skills since the implementation of the initiative.

Beverly Carter, who teaches grades two and three at the Mount Waddy All Age School in Friendship, St Ann, believes that the programme has also helped to improve the reading skills of her students.

“Students are enjoying their classes and all of them are now reading at their level and above because of the programme,” she said.