Education Standards Officers Supervision Roles of Curriculum Implementation in Choma District in Zambia: What do Teachers Think?

Abstract

Education Standards Officers in Zambia, alongside their inspection and supervision roles, have a responsibility to give a lead in curriculum implementation by their provision of professional advice to schools. However, despite the Ministry of General Education having these officers who should offer support to teachers in various ways of curriculum implementation by offering guidance, teachers still felt Education Standards officers had a lot of shortcomings in their work of helping them. The purpose of this study was thus to analyse teacher’s perceptions about how Education Standards Officers carry out their work of supervising teachers in curriculum implementation. Researchers used the qualitative approach under the descriptive design. 61 participants comprising of 50 teachers, from public secondary schools in Choma District, 5 head teachers of the sampled schools 4 Education Standards Officers from the Province and 2 Education Standards Officers from the district were purposively sampled for this study. Data was collected from head teachers and Education Standards Officers using interview schedules. From teacher’s data was collected using focus group discussion schedules. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. The findings revealed that some Education Standards officers were still in the old school of inspectors who concentrated on finding faults on teachers. ESOs especially at the district level lacked Subject content (SCK), Pedagogical content (PCK) and Curriculum content (CCK) knowledge when supervising teachers due to lack of subject specialisation by Education Standards Officers at that level. During their visits, ESOs did not announce their intended visits to schools which made teachers to panic whenever Education Standards Officers visited the school for teacher observations. Some Education Standards Officers concentrated on the procedures that teachers were to follow when teaching than the actual content that was to be delivered to the learners which reduced supervision to following rules than handling every situation the way it was supposed to be on the ground. One of the main recommendations that researchers made was that Education Standards Officers needed up skilling in their duties so that they have the required skills, knowledge and right attitudes for their responsibilities. It was also recommended that there was a need to increase the positions of ESOs so as to cater for all subject’s specialisation for effective supervision of the curriculum.