Ministry of Education Launches “More” Campaign
This morning at the Itz’at Steam Academy in Belize City, stakeholders in the education sector gathered for the rollout of a new campaign that has been put together by the Ministry of Education. It’s called More and it encourages everyone in the classroom to do more. It also urges principals and other heads of departments within the ministry to go above and beyond the call of duty to help students excel in academics. News Five’s Isani Cayetano was on hand for the launch and has the following story.
Isani Cayetano, Reporting
Stimulating teachers and students to go above and beyond in their professional and academic pursuits, by being more creative and innovative, is an objective of the Ministry of Education. To spark that enthusiasm, schools are being challenged to employ novel teaching strategies to develop core competencies.
Francis Fonseca
Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
“As a people and as an education community, we very often get, I find, too comfortable with the status quo. We seem to have created and accepted our own limitations. You know, in Belize, we hear it all the time, you know, we raise hell about some new topic on social media or in the media each week but do very little to effect meaningful change. So the question that I posed to my team at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Technology was, “What can we do from our corner, from our space, in our beautiful Belize? How can the Ministry of Education be more and do more for our education community?”
Taking up that challenge, various departments within the ministry came together to devise a plan of action that would get stakeholders at all levels of education excited about doing more.
Christie Almeida
Christie Almeida, Special Education Program Coordinator, MoECST
“We knew the minister had issued a challenge and we were really thinking hard about, you know, how do we make this happen and make it impact because we’ve had, we’ve seen campaigns before, posters and such and it doesn’t make much of a difference.So education or telling people something will not make the behavior happen, we have to take a different step in order to make them decide to act, act, and keep up that behavior. And that is the challenge, how do we make that happen? So when we came back from it, we looked at it and said, alright, how are we going to make this happen using some of the same strategies from the training involving all the ministry units.”
That brainstorming session gave birth to a campaign that the ministry has dubbed More. It’s the impetus for everyone involved in education to be more involved, more inclusive, more healthy, more digital, more creative and more innovative.
Dian Maheia
Dian Maheia, C.E.O., Ministry of Education
“So, what is this thing? We know we need to be more. We sat with the minister and we said these are all the programs that we’re running and he said, as he does so well, “What are the important things?” And we recognized that we knew what they were and we just had to, we just had to sit and we said, “You’re right, it’s important. What are the important programs that we’re running?” Nothing new, we were already investing so much energy in the curriculum reform work, we’ve been investing so much energy in the National Healthy Start Feeding Program work. We’re investing so much energy in digital literacy efforts and campaign.”
And all those efforts would be synergized into an organized series of actions intended to achieve a specific goal, motivating all participants in education to do more.
Christie Almeida
“We interviewed everyone, we had one-on-one sit downs, we got feedback from them, we even questioned some teachers and some principals. So we used all the feedback to develop this program to make sure we have measurable change, collecting data and that it’s all positive. This isn’t about forcing more work on a hardworking teacher or on a principal, but just about encouraging them to highlight stuff they are already doing and maybe giving them ideas on what else they can do.”
Isani Cayetano for News Five.
