The project ‘Centre of Promoting for Monastic Education
School’ (CPME) promotes
the monastic education system for all monastic schools around the country. It
is run under the auspices of PDO High School in Mandalay.
Myanmar
has about 1.500 Monastic Education Schools (MES) for the education for poor
children. All these schools would like to provide high-quality education to
their students. Therefore, our CPME project upgrades monastic teacher skills
through our teaching methodologies.
Child-centred
approach
The CPME project provides training to teachers working
at other monastic schools. Normally speaking, monastic schools use the ‘teacher-centred
approach’ which is the mainstream system used. CPME training teaches them how
to use the ‘child-centred approach’ (CCE).
Pilot
project
The CPME project is a three-year pilot project. At
this point in time, its first year has been completed. During the first year, we
provided two ten-week training sessions for 40 teachers from ten monastic
schools around the country. During the second year, we will involve 60 teachers
from fifteen monastic schools.
Training
subjects
The teacher training curriculum and modules are
user-friendly and incorporate practical examples, teaching principles and
learning strategies.
The following subjects are part of the training:
- self-awareness;
- child-centred and child-friendly learning;
- children' rights;
- participatory learning;
- critical thinking in reading and writing;
- classroom management and lesson planning;
- practical life-skills (see also the school gardens).
Level
and behaviour change
The project is very effective in changing the level
and life-behaviour of the monastic school teachers. They can then implement the
new teaching methodology, the child-centred approach, at their own schools.
The whole project consists of six activities:
- training for teachers;
- monitoring system by mentors
- support for school library;
- abbot management training;
- abbot exposure trip abroad to learn about the education system and gain knowledge
- to support income generation for the monastic school
In reality, the project is long term plan aimed at
promoting the new education system in all the monastic schools in Myanmar. We would
like to mention that current funding is not sufficient to cover all the
mentioned activities.
