BP Trinidad and To­ba­go (bpTT) and the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) have part­nered to pro­vide pro­fes­sion­al de­vel­op­ment train­ing to 115 teach­ers across To­ba­go. The train­ing, which be­gan on Mon­day is be­ing held at the To­ba­go Hos­pi­tal­i­ty and Tourism In­sti­tute (THTI) fa­cil­i­ties in Blenheim, Mount St George. A re­lease from bpTT said the pro­gramme will run for eight days and com­prise 40 con­tact hours. Teach­ers will en­gage in in­ter­ac­tive ses­sions, cov­er­ing mod­ules in­clud­ing the le­gal re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of every ed­u­ca­tor, cre­ativ­i­ty in the class­room, al­ter­nate dis­ci­pli­nary prac­tices, pro­fes­sion­al­ism and ethics and me­di­a­tion and con­flict res­o­lu­tion. Teach­ers com­plet­ing the manda­to­ry 40 hours will re­ceive a UWI-ac­cred­it­ed Cer­tifi­cate of Pro­fes­sion­al De­vel­op­ment in a grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mo­ny at the end of the work­shop.

En­ti­tled Teach­ing in the 21st Cen­tu­ry, the train­ing caters for teach­ers at all ed­u­ca­tion lev­els and is fa­cil­i­tat­ed by the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies' So­cial Prob­lems Analy­sis and Pol­i­cy De­vel­op­ment (US­PA­PD). The train­ing was launched by Whit­ney Al­fred, THA sec­re­tary of the Di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion, Youth Af­fairs and Sport. "This pro­gramme is de­signed to en­hance the per­for­mance of our hard-work­ing teach­ers and de­liv­er to the evolv­ing needs of our stu­dents," Al­fred said. "We are em­bark­ing on a school re­pair pro­gramme that, come Sep­tem­ber, will pro­vide an up­grad­ed learn­ing en­vi­ron­ment, in­clud­ing the in­clu­sion of in­ter­ac­tive white­board tech­nol­o­gy in all our pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools. And through this train­ing, the stu­dents will re­ceive the added ben­e­fit of im­proved and in­spired teach­ers." Fol­low­ing the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny, the teach­ers di­vid­ed in­to four groups and start­ed their first day of train­ing.