The Bhutanese Leading the way.
For a while now teachers have not been happy with the bell curve resulting from the assessment or moderation of the Individual Work Plan (IWP) whereby a few have to be placed in the Partly Meeting Expectations (PME) category.
Teachers felt particularly aggrieved with the PME in the bell curve and felt it is not fair nor does not capture their ground realities.
The Ministry of Education and Skills Development (MoESD) and the Royal Civil Service Commission have finally been able to agree to some changes on the matter.
The first thing is that ECCDS, Extended Classrooms (ECRs) and certain schools that have less than 10 teachers will not be included in the moderation exercise for the bell curve.
There are 166 such ECCDs, ECRs and schools with less than 10 teachers.
Another change is that for schools with a 20% percent or more shortage of teachers then they will also not come under moderation exercise and bell curve as long as they meet the minimal performance requirements.
Here the MoESD will have to convince the RCSC why these schools should not be moderated.
Earlier moderation exercise was done at the Dzongkhag level and moderation for primary and high schools were done together, but now it will be done at the national level and the moderation for primary schools and high schools will be done separately.
An important change which is also part of the larger change in the civil service is that the Key Performance Indicators to measure performance will not only be at the school level but also at the principal and teachers individual level.
This means using the Performance Dashboard tool of the RCSC the individual performance of teachers can be tracked.
An official in the MoESD said the ministry discussed the matter with teachers and they are happy with the changes.
The Prime Minister Dasho Tshering Tobgay said, “Teachers have no problem with IWP. They do their lesson planning anyway. They are very hardworking and very systematic and they have been trained and retrained. IWP is something they are doing anyway. The problem they have is with the moderation exercise where a certain number of people under the Bell Curve are put in in Needs Improvement (now renamed Partly Meeting Expectations).”
The PM said he joins all the teachers in questioning this logic for the simple reason that it is not possible statistically to apply a bell curve to a very small group in each school.
