Minister in-charge Education Rakkam A Sangma on Monday informed the Assembly that the school calendar 2025 will be notified in November, this year.
Replying to a call attention moved by opposition VPP legislator from North Shillong Adelbert Nongrum, Sangma said the education department in order to implement activities under National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 instructed schools that on certain days, children may go to schools without the bag and learn and participate on several other curricular activities.
Therefore, a suggestive list of 10 themes for ‘bagless days’ have been given. The schools have been given the liberty to decide on which day they wish to observe these days.
“A consultation and feedback was also invited on the same. The feedback were received on the notified school calendar, that the same should be released in advance so that the school can prepare accordingly. Therefore, school calendar 2025 shall be notified this year in November 2024 itself. That it would be difficult to achieve the minimum school days mandated for UP by certain schools. However, this clause is mandated by the RTE Act. There were several positive feedbacks as well assuring the compliance from those respective schools. Based on these feedback and several other new developments, the school calendar 2025 will be made more comprehensive,” he said.
“Details of the standard operating procedure (SoP) for implementing bagless days will be added to the notification. The strategy and procedure for curating lesson plans and teaching plans will also be added to the subsequent notifications,” he added.
Further, the education minister informed that the department is also encouraging schools to take step to ensure that we gradually move towards formative assessments as suggested by NEP 2020.
He said the education department is serious in adopting formative assessment. Schools have been encouraged to transition to formative assessments. The status of school eduction in Meghalaya needs considerable improvement as revealed by several indicators such as dropout rate, students’ knowledge gap and poor pass percentage performance.
“Some of the main factors attributing towards this scenario are weak foundational learning, limited grasp of concept, low minimum learning levels, untrained teachers, poor teaching practices and assessment strategies,” he said.
Moreover, Sangma said that the child tracking system for learning is being prepared by the education department under the Vidya Samiksha Kendra (VSK), a command control centre to monitor children learning progress and monitoring dropouts, teacher attendance, etc.
“More focus on improving learning outcomes and learning levels of students through ths robust system of online assignments, projects and regular assessment of students performance that is formative, competency-based and tests higher-order skills, such as critical thinking and conceptual clarity,” he said while adding that this will be executed in learning management system through a central monitoring system/component which will also track students’ progress throughout the school years in order to promote their continuous learning and development.
According to him, this is an important initiative towards transforming assessment through formative approaches in line with the goals of NEP, 2020.
+ There are no comments
Add yours