NGSA Booster programme brings “a tutor in every home”

…similar lessons being created for CXC students

The Education Ministry’s Booster programme for students writing the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) brings a virtual tutor in every home, providing practice and lessons to help them succeed.
The programme, scheduled to start on Monday, was officially launched on Friday at the National Centre for Educational Resource Development (NCERD).
There will be airings and rebroadcasts on the Guyana Learning Channel and supported by other mediums, such as Youtube, other forms of social media and cable networks.

On weekdays, the lessons will be aired from 10:30h to 15:30h, with rebroadcasts from 17:00h to 19:00h, and on weekends. The topics will be released beforehand so parents can plan ahead on the areas of importance for their children. Televisions and solar panels have been procured for areas that cannot access these signals.
Director of NCERD, Quenita Walrond-Lewis indicated that local teachers who are experts in curriculum delivery are presenting this information to the students. This initiative forms part of Government’s drive to ensure continuous learning as classrooms remain closed.
“We are embarking upon an innovative, continued response to COVID-19 and student support in this virulent time. We are not giving up on our students. In fact, we’re accelerating the ways in which we try to support our students and their devoted, dedicated teachers…This forum will allow us to bring essentially a tutor into every home. You will find that the teachers are our teachers. They are Guyanese teachers. They are teachers who are experts in our curriculum content and they are expert deliverers of sound education,” Walrond-Lewis shared.
Head of the Learning Channel, Aniesha Mohamed also outlined that a plethora of resources was plugged into this project in order to increase knowledge retention and engagement with students.
“This programme dedicates a pool of resources for children sitting the exam to participate in. The objective was to find a way to make the lessons engaging as we possibly can’t replicate the classroom style of teaching via television. We took all of that into consideration and set out to select some of the best locally trained teachers, qualified video editors and a technical team to put together lessons that are not only beautifully presented and edited but engaging,” the GLC Head insisted.

Learning must continue
Education Minister Priya Manickchand lamented that it has been a difficult process in delivering education without a classroom setting, but learning must continue.
The Minister underscored, “In the first five months of that quitting of normalcy, nothing happened and nobody complained because people felt, including me, what more could these people do. Everything was turned on top of its head. But we came into Government and we realised that this COVID is going nowhere.”
She added, “Everybody said COVID is not going anywhere for now so we had a choice…We came up. We rose up and we responded. We responded robustly, not with one thing or another; not for boys and not girls; not for Georgetown people but forgetting the hinterland people. We responded across this country.”
Presently, the Ministry is also working to create a similar booster programme for students writing the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations.
When asked about a possible reopening of school for Grade Six students, she noted that the Health Ministry has to give a green light before this can happen. However, Manickchand cautioned that with the increasing number of cases every day, it is a risk for students and teachers.
“We’d like to go to the class but the reality is if we allow our students to go back into the classroom, we are immediately putting 15,000 children on the road who are using transportation…and about 1000 teachers back into the classroom because we won’t be able to sit in the same numbers in the class. We would have to split up,” she emphasised.