CW-Department of Educational Foundations

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Browsing CW-Department of Educational Foundations by Author "Jepketer, Annah"

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    Quality education under threat in teacher training colleges: a case study of Nairobi County, Kenya
    (2015-07) Kombo, Kisilu; Jepketer, Annah
    Quality of education, which manifests itself in many forms, has remained elusive. School administrators, teachers, students, parents and education stakeholders have complained of falling standards. Hence the need for investigation of the state of affairs and the mitigating factors. One of these forms of concern under threat includes teachers’ preparation in training colleges. The questions emerging here were: Why tutors are not able to train competent teacher trainees? Could there be a problem with their teaching methodologies and competencies in their areas of specialization? The purpose of the study was to investigate the strategies for enhancing teacher educator competencies so as to improve the quality of education in teacher training colleges in Nairobi County. Resistance and Change Theory guided the study. The study used case study design. The researcher used 10% as population sample size for education policy makers, teacher educators and teacher- trainees. The target sample was 10 education policy makers, 1 teacher training college, 1 teacher training college principal, 10 teachers and 50 teacher trainees. A simple random sampling technique was employed in the study. Questionnaires were administered to education policy makers, teacher educators, teacher trainees while the college principal was interviewed. Document analyses on key education policies were undertaken. The study findings were: despite of the availability of the qualified teacher educators, teacher competencies remained elusive; traditional teaching methods were in use; monitoring of quality of teaching by quality assurance was low and far between; teacher educators were hardly exposed to professional development and research opportunities for improving their teaching methodologies; insecurity impacted negatively on the teachers level of preparedness; in addition, insecurity affected them psychologically, economically and socially; The conclusion drawn from this result was that education quality in teacher training colleges in Nairobi County was under threat due to waning competencies. Therefore, urgent measures should be put in place in order to reverse the trend. Some of the recommendations were that stakeholders to be pro- active in coming up with workable solutions; stakeholders to be proactive in addressing issues touching on competencies and of quality education in teacher training colleges; in servicing teachers on teaching methodologies; teachers to embrace e-learning; the teachers to be part of the changes; Quality and standards assessment of quality to education should be strengthened and corrective strategies for enhancing teacher competencies in teaching to be enhanced; adequate proactive strategies ought to be developed to effectively address security challenges in teacher training colleges. Key words: Teacher Education, Education Quality, Competences, Threat