When teachers need to relearn

In the recently published OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, the Philippines ranked dismally low in the assessment of reading, mathematics, and science skills of 15-year-old students compared to peers in 78 other countries.

The Department of Education (DepEd), which oversees basic learning of our youth in both private and public schools from Kindergarten to Grade 12 under the K-to-12 education program, has remarked that this is not surprising given the results of the last National Achievement Test (NAT).

Given to students on their 6th, 10th and 12th academic year, the result of the NAT’s set of standardized examinations over the years revealed declining test scores with already shockingly low ratings. For the school year 2016-2017, Grade 6 students chalked a 40 percent average rating, while Grade 10 students got 44.1 percent average grade.

The scores, if put in the context of today’s internationally acceptable ratings, can even be considered high, which explains why the results of the PISA tests ranked Filipino students at the bottom rung for reading, and near-bottom positions for math and science.

The NAT itself is seen as lacking in the measurement of critical thinking skills needed by students to survive the new realities in the real world. For PISA, for example, the test for reading skills recognizes the emergence of the digital era and smartphones in transforming how secondary level students think.

Whereas, in the past, books provide a more or less accurate source of information, students today are faced with thousands of information from online searches that they have to sift through and digest, and more importantly, to figure out what is right against what is untrue.

Searching for causes

Putting aside the issue of how lacking the NAT is compared to international tests, we need to determine exactly what causes the deterioration in learning abilities.

Among the “problem” areas identified include the K-to-12 curriculum, teacher quality, teacher shortages, lack of classrooms and teaching aids, poor leadership by school principals, and the inability of the DepEd to efficiently supervise public schools which account for 90 percent of the student population enrolment.

Improving the quality of primary and secondary education in the country had not always been at the forefront of DepEd’s priorities in the past.

Severe budget constraints for decades had resulted in shortages of classrooms to accommodate the growing number of students.

This was consequently followed by the lack of teachers and teaching aids. Even salaries of teachers were not able to keep up with the times, which gave rise to complaints of teachers trying to augment their incomes, for example, by selling snacks to their students.

The problem of dropouts also became a major concern in the past, which resulted in the government adopting a poverty alleviation program that is now known as the Pantawid sa Pamilyang Pilipino or 3Ps, where the poorest of the poor families were given monetary support in exchange for keeping their children in school.

As the gaps in classroom and teaching shortages were reduced through more recent infusion of state funds in the education budget, new priorities were identified, specifically that of improving the kind of learning that was being offered.

Focus on quality education

The DepEd declares that it will now focus on improving the quality of education in the primary and secondary levels, while still keeping an eye on the need to respond to the remaining lack of classrooms, facilities, and teachers.

Part of the new initiatives being discussed are the computerization of the DepEd and the transformation of the National Educators’ Academy of the

Philippines (NEAP), which focuses on the professional training and development of its over 800,000 public school teachers.

Changing the way teachers teach will be a major challenge, given the current state of elementary and high school teachers. Not only will they need to keep up with the inquisitiveness of their students who already use digital tools to cull information, they too need to be able to acquire the skills to sift and challenge the content that is found on the internet.

In countries that had committed to transforming their teachers, a deliberate move away from memorization had been prioritized. The method of memory work is based on being able to read information without necessarily understanding what it means.

Introducing new teaching methods will be a challenge to overhauling what our teachers had learned in the past. It will mean relearning through successive seminars, detailed mentoring by trainers versed in the new approach, and a retooling of learning materials. For our already overworked teachers, finding the time to adapt to this new thinking and adopting new teaching methods will be taxing.

Given the way our bureaucracy works, we cannot expect this transformation to reach students within the next few years. Future-proofing our education system is not as easy as it seems, and success is something that will not come easy — or cheap.

We may already be alarmed at how much the government is appropriating for education, seeing how seemingly little has been achieved. But the reality is that we will need to spend much more given the fact that we are way, way behind.

Teachers have to be incentivized to relearn. We need to encourage smarter teachers who will stay, and this means raising their income levels.

Professionalizing the teaching rank is a must, including giving better management skills to principals and school administrators.

It’s going to be a long journey, but something that needs to be done if we want this country to survive.

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