NAVIGATING THE BARRIERS: TEACHERS' CHALLENGES IN IMPLEMENTING COMPETENCY-BASED EDUCATION

Abstract

This paper explores the issue of teachers struggling to apply Competency-Based Education (CBE) in Pakistan and discusses the issue of its effectiveness. The research design was a quantitative one where a structured questionnaire was utilized to collect the data on 230 teachers, who were given the questionnaire in urban and rural schools and in public and private schools. This research paper sought to examine the perception of teachers towards CBE, major obstacles to its implementation, and also assess the potential of training, institutional support, resource access, and curriculum alignment. The descriptive and inferential statistics were performed by SPSS and included frequency analysis, mean scores, Pearson correlation, and regression analysis. The results show that teachers are fairly aware of CBE, and they hold a positive attitude towards its potential to improve student learning outcomes overall. Nevertheless, its implementation faces a few obstacles that include; poor training opportunities, institutional backing, inappropriate teaching resources, and the mismatch of the current curriculum with CBE principles. Correlation and regression results indicate that all the factors identified play a significant role in the process of CBE implementation with teacher training as the most important predictor, and institutional support and availability of resources as the next most significant predictors. The research also concludes that curriculum rigidity is still one of the biggest challenges towards using competency-based approaches in classrooms. The research finds that though CBE has high potential to enhance the quality of education in Pakistan, its effective implementation needs wholesale changes. These are through strengthening teacher training programs, institutional support, resource allocation, and curriculum and assessment system in line with competency-based principles. The results can be beneficial to policy makers and the teachers aiming at encouraging successful change in education in Pakistan.