GES gives teachers alternatives to prepare and submit lesson notes

The management of the Ghana Education Service (GES) has given a new directive to address an issue on whether lesson notes should be prepared and submitted by teachers to headteachers in a handwritten or electronic form.

In a statement sighted by Thisterm.com, the Education Service stated that all heads of schools (Basic and Second Cycle) are to accept both handwritten and electronically prepared lesson notes in both printed and email forms.

“Management of the Ghana Education Service (GES) has become aware of some misunderstanding between heads and their teachers in some schools in respect of lesson notes preparations.

Regional Directors are to bring to the attention of District/Municipal/Metropolitan Directors of Education to ensure that all heads of schools (Basic and Second Cycle) accept both handwritten and electronically prepared lesson notes in both printed and email forms,” GES said in the statement.

In a related story, Vice-President of Ghana, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia commending prospective teachers for their enormous contribution to the country’s education sector has said the worst part of the teaching profession is lesson note writing.

In his address at Ghana’s digitization drive under the theme “Transforming an economy through digitization: The Ghana story,” held at Ashesi University, he said it is for this reason the government has provided teachers with laptops.

“We have provided 350,000 teachers with laptops under the “One teacher, One laptop policy.” For teachers, the writing of lesson notes into notebooks apart from being stressful is a time-consuming activity,” Mahamudu stated at the event.

The Vice-President of the Republic added that “with the curriculum materials already installed on the state of the art laptops, the lesson notes can be downloaded onto the laptop to end the burdensome task of writing lesson notes.”

Mr Mahamudu Bawumia also disclosed the Akufo-Addo-led government in due course will distribute tablets loaded with course materials to students in all public Senior High Schools (SHSs) in the country to improve learning outcomes.

“Our next goal is to provide tablets to the Senior High School students and we have started working with publishers of the textbooks to preload all the tablets with required textbooks,” Akufo-Addo’s right-hand man disclosed.

He indicated that the Ministry of Education (MoE) under the auspices of the central government is in consultations with publishers to preload all the tablets with all the required textbooks for students in the public Senior High Schools.