Dr Garth Anderson, dean of the Teachers’ Colleges of Jamaica (TCJ), has poured scorn on biting criticisms of teacher-training institutions in recent days which have sought to lay the blame for poor student performance in national placement tests on the quality of teachers being turned out.

In the most recent salvo, university lecturer Oneil Madden charged in a column published in the Jamaica Observer that content covered in the teachers’ colleges is far beneath Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) level. According to Madden, many graduates enter the teaching profession and have no knowledge of the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and CAPE syllabi simply because they were never covered in their methodology courses.

In insisting that there is an evident gap between student teachers’ training and what occurs in the actual classroom, Madden went on to say many teachers are certified and qualified on paper, but are not competent to deliver the curriculum.

According to Madden, this defect “links back to some of their own trainers — lecturers — who themselves are weak in content and methodology”.

“They conduct no form of research; they are not well read; therefore, they cannot give sufficiently to their students. Their university colleagues are way ahead of them because they are more involved in their area of specialisation,” he stated.

But Dr Anderson, who is also the principal of Church Teachers’ College in Mandeville, Manchester, in a sharp rejoinder, defended the teachers’ colleges which fall under the umbrella of the TCJ .

“Clearly the article is not reflecting the full reality of what happens in our colleges, our teacher-training institutions, and I don’t know where he got his evidence for relating to some of the things he has mentioned. I want to start with the revision of college courses through our relationship with The University of the West Indies. The degrees are awarded by The University of the West Indies. Yes, we are going through a process of revision, it is taking some time, but the university has helped us to take some courses through,” Dr Anderson said.

“We are talking about some 400 courses that are to be reviewed, and so that is taking some time, plus manpower, but that in no way suggests that the programme is in any way irrelevant and does not cater to the needs of the system at all levels,” he contended.

Taking aim at the assertions by Madden that educators are not exposed to the curriculum for the primary and secondary schools exit exams Dr Anderson said, “So, for example, in the development of the programmes we incorporated the Ministry of Education, we had to make adjustments to reflect the need of the new PEP (Primary Exit Profile) programme, we did all of that. It was a whole consultative process with the students, faculty, teachers, the Ministry of Education, the curriculum department, and so on. We went through that process to ensure that the college programme was very much aligned with the PEP programme. The same thing happened with CAPE. We offer a first degree to equip persons to teach up to the CAPE level and to say that students don’t know how to teach the syllabus, that’s just erroneous and full of a whole lot of fluff; that is not the case.”

“To make any attack on the capacity of our lecturers is unwarranted, unnecessary, and erroneous, and if you ask me is a slap in the face. Clearly the writer of the article has limited knowledge of what happens in our teacher-training system and we must never forget that teacher education is the foundation of tertiary education in Jamaica and in the West Indies and anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. What’s the evidence you have to prove about the content and competence level of our colleges?” he added.

As to the insistence by Madden that teacher trainers themselves are underqualified, Dr Anderson had this to say: “To teach in the teacher training colleges you must have qualification one step ahead of [those being taught], so everybody has to have a master’s degree and content area, and where you don’t have a content area you are asked to go and do courses in your content area, in some instances, 30 to 80 credits in your content area”.

“Say, for example, you have your first degree in math or geography and you have your master’s in leadership or in teaching and learning and you want to teach math, you have to do some master’s level or doctoral level content courses in the content area,” Dr Anderson explained.

“So the person [who wrote the column] does not really know [and] seems like a bitter person trying to ooze out some venom on the teacher-training programme that clearly is coming out of a bowel of ignorance as to what really takes place in our institutions,” the TCJ head stated.

Going further to defend the quality of teachers being turned out, Dr Anderson noted that Jamaican teachers “have currency across the world”.

“They are coming for our students in fourth year. They are no longer waiting on them to have experience in our system and at the various levels in our system; fourth year they are getting jobs overseas — Dubai, Europe, North America, and even within the Caribbean,” he said.

In the meantime, the veteran educator said some obvious factors that can explain the dip in student performances are being overlooked.

“When you talk about the performance of our students there are several factors, one of them being clearly the teacher factor which is critical, but there are several other factors that will come to bear on student performance. Some of them are within the remit and reach of educators; some are not, such as the resources that we get; what happens at early childhood education, what you get to work with at primary [level], what you get to work with at secondary,” Anderson said.

“Some of our students we are not properly evaluating them to get their learning needs and allow that profile to follow them so that teachers can use that data to properly guide the students and to prepare for them and to properly engage them. So the system currently is haphazard. As it relates to when you get a class of 40 students you don’t always know who you have in front of you,” he told the Observer.

Asked if the PEP system of assessment in some way attempts to address that issue he said, it “is attempting to do that. You do get some information that you get for when students are getting into high school, but you have to look at what happens from early childhood…

“So the PEP students, they do come over to the secondary system with some information, but some of our children have psychological problems; some have deep learning issues that may not necessarily be picked up in the PEP environment. We have to go where we get our students special ed teachers and psychologists to properly evaluate them from pretty early to see what their challenges are, and to see how we can assist them.”

“I am saying all of that not to downplay the import of having a good, highly qualified teacher in the classroom — and we now have them — but we are not going to be deterred or take lightly persons who are spewing out all of these so-called issues they have and most of them have no idea what is happening in our colleges,” Anderson insisted.

“I categorically dismiss much of what has been said in that article about the teacher-training colleges. We have been the backbone of tertiary education in this country and we have contributed significantly to the development of the nation. We constantly look at our curriculum and see how to ensure that we are on the cutting edge of all the developments in teaching and learning, and that is an ongoing process, it is not an event,” he said.

Added Anderson, “Never before are we seeing some of the most qualified students entering our teacher-training institutions. So there is no shortage of students coming in not having the qualifications. We don’t have to scrape those who come to us; [they] come with the requisite matriculation requirements. So my challenge to the author of the article is to provide the evidence to support the assertions and it is reckless and irresponsible to make assertions and not say the evidence.”