Multi-grade Teaching is one of many strategies that the Govt. of Bhutan has adopted in the delivery of wholesome education to our children in the community. The Ministry of Education, in its attempt to make education more relevant to the children, has adopted a policy in recent years to reach education to the children in the community instead of educating the children far away from their parents. Most communities would have schools with smaller number of students requiring multi-grade teaching. Multi-grade teaching is also essential if Bhutan is to achieve Universal Primary Education in the years to come.

The Colleges of Education have two cohorts of student teachers: 3 year B.Ed programme and 4 year B.Ed programme. In the 4 year B.Ed programme, multi-grade teaching is taught as a module in its own right. However, in the 3 year B.Ed programme, multi-grade teaching is taught as one of the skills in the Teaching Skills module. Since it is taught as one of the skills, it does not receive the in-depth coverage it ought to. When our student teachers graduate from the Colleges of Education, most of them eventually end up teaching in primary and community schools where they have to handle multi-grade classrooms.

Therefore, a strong need was felt for this workshop so that they can get in-depth insights in Multi-grade Teaching. Moreover, this workshop would also give them the opportunity to clarify their doubts when they are here as well as the prospect to practice their newly learnt skills in a micro-teaching scenario. A similar workshop of this kind was conducted in December 2010 and based on the feedback the student-teachers found the workshop to be very useful.

In a nutshell, the main objectives of this workshop is to provide student-teachers with the knowledge of “WHAT, WHY and HOW” of multi-grade teaching along with providing hands on sessions that allow student teachers to translate theory into practice .

The 11 day workshop which was started last year is sustained with financial support from the UNICEF and resourced by experts from the field and lecturers of the college. This workshop is the last of its kind since this is the last cohort of the 3 year B.Ed. Primary student teachers.

The Workshop in Pictures: