Lesotho will not produce competency-based graduates unless teacher training, classroom instruction and assessment are aligned, education lecturers warned this week.
Speaking during a lecture on teacher development, Vice Dean, Research, Engagement and Internationalisation in the Faculty of Education at The University of the Free State Professor Matseliso Mokhele-Makgalwa, said teaching and assessment must function as one system.
Prof. Mokhele-Makgalwa described curriculum as the destination, teaching as the vehicle, and assessment as the tool to verify if learners have arrived.
She said the system is currently disconnected. “If we train teachers through traditional examinations but expect them to deliver competency-based learning (CBC) that is “same medicine, different bottles”. New words, old practices,” she said.
She argued that policy alone cannot change education. Success depends on changing how teachers are taught, how they teach, and how learners are tested.
Meanwhile Professor Dorothy Cynthia Nampota from the Southern Africa Association for Educational Assessment added that many SADC countries have adopted competency-based curricula but still rely on high-stakes national exams.
Prof. Nampota said school-based assessment (SBA) is done in class during teaching and learning to measure skills and outcomes that exams cannot capture.
“Many countries have CBC on paper but test learners using old methods,” Prof Nampota said. “That creates a gap between what students are supposed to learn and what they are actually tested on. SBA is designed to close that gap.”
Both lecturers called on policymakers and teacher trainers to move beyond new vocabulary and ensure real classroom practice changes. Without that, they said, reforms will remain stuck in a hybrid system that delivers neither skills nor exam results.
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