The Lagos State Universal Basic Education Board (LASUBEB), has embarked on sensitizing some members of the public to the cluster model, that is expected to be adopted by teachers for optimal teaching and learning.
The Executive Chairman, Lagos SUBEB, Mr. Wahab Alawiye-King, said that the cluster model system was adopted in order to provide effective training relevant to global practices for teachers while explaining that the board has been using the cascade model in the past.
The Lagos SUBEB boss was speaking in a program with the theme ‘ Advocacy and Sensitisation to UBEC Cluster School Model’ also had in attendance members of Nigeria Union of Teachers, Parents’ Forum, NGOs, tradition and religious leaders.
He said: “ The cluster system is more elaborate in the sense that you are able to capture the challenges of each teacher and the headteacher will get information directly from the teacher. It is more of a participatory approach where everybody is involved at the same time rather than a teacher to get the information and cascade it downward. In the cluster approach, everybody is trained together and they take it to their school. The essence is to make them more productive. A clustering system will be able to identify the problems of the school, the idea is just to develop teachers professionally. You can have the best of infrastructure if your teachers are not trained if they are not in tune with reality, there’s no way you can achieve that goal. The idea is to continue to train our teachers to have efficient service delivery.”
In a related development, a board member, Basic Education Quality Assurance, Lagos State, Mr. Dayo Isreal, gave a further explanation, “ What the cluster model does is to bring schools in the same environment and same challenges together; they pair-review each other, they pair-monitor, assess and equip each other. They meet regularly, the teachers, our NGO’s our officials and they identify what issues are, and we at the state level intervene appropriately.”
