The Monitoring and Evaluation of the Implementation of the 2002 Basic Education Curriculum: Findings and Recommendations
The Bureau of Secondary Education was tasked by the Department of Education to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the new curriculum in secondary schools of the country.
Accordingly, the Bureau conducted case studies of twenty secondary schools, grouped as follows:
The case studies recognize that the school is a learning community where people continuously plan, observe, review and reflect on what they do in order to achieve shared goals and aspirations.
The first monitoring and evaluation of the BEC implementation was conducted in September 2002, the second in October 2003, and the latest in September 2004.
The findings from the case studies were based primarily on qualitative data. To verify their reliability, the findings were compared with those obtained from quantitative data. No marked difference in both findings was observed.
The following are the themes and patterns of school practices that emerged from the implementation of the BEC.
1. There are gross inconsistencies between means and ends.
School heads, department heads, and teachers fully agree with the BEC that the desired learner/graduate should be functionally literate, a creative and critical thinker, an independent problem solver and a work-oriented lifelong learner who is MakaDiyos, Makabayan, Makatao and Makakalikasan.
However, except in some Science high schools, there are gross inconsistencies between the kind of learner/graduate that the schools desire to produce and the strategies they employ. For example, instruction is still predominantly authoritative and textbook-based; learning is usually recipient and reproductive; supervision is commonly prescriptive and directive; and assessment is focused more on judging rather than improving performance.
Moreover, while teachers believe in the importance of contextualizing or localizing the curriculum, yet many of them derive lessons more from course syllabi, textbooks, and competency lists rather than from the learners’ felt needs. While they believe in the full development of the learners’ potentials, yet lessons that they provide do not adequately address the differing needs and capabilities of the students.
Recommendations:
In schools where the inconsistencies exist, the following actions may be taken:
The school head should organize a committee to identify and describe the curricular, instructional, supervisory, assessment, and managerial practices that do not contribute to the development of the desired learner/graduate. Focus group conversations may be conducted to clarify the school and non-school factors that reinforce the questionable practices and to develop and implement action programs to remove the inconsistencies. There should be a school assurance team to coordinate, monitor, and evaluate the implementation of the action program. The removal of the inconsistencies should be among the primary goals of the school improvement plan and the focus of instructional supervision.
2. Teachers want to know more about integrated teaching.
Across all school types, teachers have a positive attitude toward the integrative, interactive, brain-based approaches endorsed in the BEC. However, teachers do not feel confident to use the approaches because of their limited knowledge to operationalize them in terms of lesson planning; instructional materials development; and subject matter organization, presentation, and evaluation.
Some of the school heads and teachers who returned from the BEC training seriously conducted school-based training. They reproduced and distributed BEC materials and coached teachers how to use them. Some, however, merely echoed what they learned; thus there are still many teachers who do not have enough knowledge about the key concepts and approaches in the BEC.
Teachers do not just need ready-made daily or weekly lesson plans. They want full understanding of integrated teaching, i.e., its basic concepts, underlying assumptions, operational principles and approaches.
Recommendations:
School heads should capitalize and reinforce the positive attitude of the teachers toward the BEC, particularly its instructional approaches. They should increase the teachers’ capability and confidence in using the approaches by providing the competencies they need. A needs assessment managed by teachers themselves should be conducted to identify gaps between actual and expected competencies.
A benchmarking study may be conducted to close the gap. The study can start with internal benchmarking of successful practices by department or year level, and later expand to external benchmarking of successful practices of other schools.
A handbook which explains the nature of integrated teaching, i.e., its underlying assumptions, principles, operational definition of terms, practical methods and approaches and examples of long and short range plans, can help remove discrepancies between process and output. Schools are also encouraged to prepare leaflets and flyers on the integrative approaches.
3. Teachers have limited knowledge of constructivism as a learning theory.
“Learning as a construction process and the learner as a constructor of meaning” is among the basic concepts of the BEC. The concept underlies the integrated approaches endorsed in the BEC. Although the concept was unfamiliar to many teachers, yet its operationalization was observable in some classes in Mathematics, Science, and Araling Panlipunan where problem-solving, inquiry or discovery approaches were being used.
Application of the concept, however, was very limited. School documents like the yearly reports, school development and improvement plans, instructional and remedial programs, lesson plans, course syllabi, and teachers’ reports made little mention of how the concept was being applied to the teaching-learning process.
Recommendations:
The school head should develop a consensual understanding of “constructivist learning” among his teachers. This can be done through focus group conversations (FGC) by year level or by department. The conversations shall be facilitated preferably, by the school head, with division supervisors or nearby university professors as resource persons and consultants. The conversations should be backed up by extensive references on constructivist or integrative learning.
The FGC shall be followed through by activities on the practical application of the theory; i.e., lesson planning, demonstrations, field tests of approaches, team teaching, etc.
The outputs of the FGC can be additional inputs into the school’s BEC Handbook. The Handbook should be revisited regularly to keep it self-correcting and self-renewing.
4. Students are having difficulties using English as learning medium.
School heads and teachers recognize the difficulties that students face in learning English as a language and at the same time using it as a medium of learning. As such they have resorted to various ways of increasing the English proficiency of the students like holding essay contests, English campaigns, public speaking competitions and the like. The problem, however, has remained unabated.
In English medium classes, both teachers and students usually shift to the local language to ensure that they understand each other. The fall-back language is usually Taglish, which students in non-Tagalog provinces are ill at ease.
BEC advocates the development of creative, critical thinkers and problem solvers. Teachers find this difficult to achieve in English medium classes where students have poor oral, aural, reading, and writing skills. In these classes, teachers are prone to resort to simple recall, recognition and leading questions and to minimize questions that demand complex reasoning, explanations, elaborations, analysis, synthesis and evaluation, which students find frustrating and even exasperating.
Recommendations:
Schools should consider developing and testing the effectiveness of the following measures in increasing students’ English proficiency:
Teachers are open to new opportunities and possibilities offered by the BEC to accelerate learning. They are fully aware of the limitations of the traditional expository methods in facilitating the full development of the students’ potentials and are willing to learn how to be more effective facilitators of the integrative learning process.
From the field data, however, emerged several factors that inhibit the teachers from playing the facilitator’s role effectively: namely, students’ English deficiency that hinders critical discussion; overcrowded classes that restrict interactive learning; insufficient supply of textbooks that predisposes teachers to lecture; prescriptive supervision that constricts teacher creativity and initiative; and an examination system that encourages authoritative teaching. Confronted with these constraints teachers tend to fall back on traditional expository modes like lecturing, question-and-answer, dictation exercises, and practice tests.
Recommendations:
Use “best practices” approach by benchmarking classes, which, despite constraints of overcrowding, a foreign learning medium, insufficient textbooks, and supervisory and assessment restrictions, still continue to be facilitative rather than directive or prescriptive in teaching.
6. Promising alternative supervisory approaches are emerging.
Several promising supervisory approaches are emerging. One of these is collaborative supervision whereby groups of two or more teachers help one another to improve their teaching practices as well as discover better ways of teaching. They identify and address common instructional problems, share experiences and resources, and monitor and evaluate their progress.
Another emerging approach is self-directed supervision, which is common among experienced and highly-motivated teachers. In this practice each teacher assumes full responsibility for improving his instructional practices and promoting his professional growth.
In both above-mentioned approaches the school head participates mainly as consultant, adviser, resource linker or provider, reinforcer and facilitator. These supervisory approaches however, are not widespread.
Mentoring is also emerging as an alternative supervisory approach although it is still in a tentative and inchoate state. There are schools, however, that are already talking about putting up a mentors’ pool for the professional and career development of their teachers.
The most common supervisory practice is the conventional type whereby the supervisor observes a class as an expert or authority and makes on-the-spot recommendations which the teacher is expected to implement. Teachers find the practice threatening and disempowering. It stifles initiatives and creativity, lowers self-esteem, and encourages conformity but not commitment. In many cases the school head delegates the supervisory function to department heads, who, teachers claim tend to inspect and evaluate rather than improve performance.
A common but unpopular practice is the laissez faire type, whereby school heads, assuming that teachers know best being major in their subjects, give teachers the freedom to select teaching methods. Many of these school heads do not observe classes.
Recommendations:
With the continuing increase in supervisor-teacher ratio it would not be practical anymore to depend on the traditional supervisory approach to improve teachers’ performance.
The school head should explore the following alternatives:
Supervisors as instructional leaders should not only limit their functions to giving direct instructional assistance, curriculum development, and staff development. Educational impact cannot be produced by teachers working individually but by teachers working collaboratively toward shared goals. Therefore, teachers’ group development for collective action should also be part of the supervisor’s responsibility.
So that teachers would not be slavishly dependent upon foreign ideas and methods, supervisors should help them become knowledge workers by training them in classroom-based action research. This type of research is collaborative, user-friendly, nonstatistical and naturalistic. Public school teachers are using many innovative teaching methods and materials which do not become part of our educational heritage because they are not systematically developed and properly documented. There is a need for supervisors to train teachers how to test their methods as they teach. This is classroom-based action research, a practical technique for developing and confirming best practices.
7. Teachers need more knowledge and skills to operationalize Makabayan as a “Laboratory of Life”.
School heads and teachers find the “laboratory of life” concept of Makabayan novel and quite interesting and have come up with some imaginative schemes to implement the concept. Among these are the 8-2 plan (8 weeks of the grading period for teaching the four learning areas separately and 2 weeks for the integrated culminating activities), the planned or deliberate integration (a weekly lesson plan carries two or three related objectives from the other learning areas) and incidental integration (related content and skills from other disciplines are taken up as they crop up during the development of the lesson).
Teachers, however, find the integration of the four Makabayan learning areas difficult to plan, implement, monitor and evaluate for several reasons: (1) lack of a common vacant period for planning the integration, (2) limited knowledge of the interdisciplinary, interactive methods, and (3) lack of readily available teacher-friendly expert assistance.
Moreover, the anxiety of not being able to cover the units expected for a grading period and the threat of division achievement tests that are text-book based, predispose teachers to separate-subject teaching.
There are also teachers who are lukewarm toward integration because they believe that integrating other subjects would reduce the time to teach the competencies prescribed for their own subject. Since their efficiency is assessed more by their students’ performance in division tests than by how well they have integrated their subject with other subjects, their tendency is to give less attention to integration.
Recommendations:
School heads should conduct consultative or brainstorming sessions with their staff to resolve problems and issues related to the implementation of “Makabayan as laboratory of life.”
The four Makabayan learning areas have to be scheduled in such a way that the teachers will have time to meet and plan integrated lessons.
Schools superintendents should also consider putting up pilot or experimental schools for the teaching of Makabayan to lessen the trial-and-error practices which confuse teachers.
8. Teachers are divided on how to teach values.
Two patterns of thought emerged from the field data. One favors the integration of values education in all the subjects and not teaching it as a separate subject. It recommends that the time allotted to values education in the present curriculum should be used instead to increase the time allotment for TLE and AP.
The other pattern favors the teaching of values education as a separate subject for the reason that effective teaching of values involves going through the valuing process of clarifying, analyzing and choosing in relation to decisions and actions, which cannot be adequately enhanced in the integrated scheme. It is further argued that since values shape and guide important decisions and actions, their development should not be left to chance. Hence, value education should remain a separate subject.
Recommendations:
To help resolve the issue whether values education should remain as a separate subject or as an integral part of the other subjects, two approaches are recommended:
9. Teachers teach to the test, students study to the test.
The use of traditional assessment tools like the multiple-response, simple recall, recognition and application tests is predominant. Rubrics, portfolios, and other forms of authentic assessment are not widely used. Teachers are aware of the limitations of traditional tests and the need for alternative forms to measure higher order thinking skills. However, they tend to resort to the traditional forms for several compelling reasons:
Teachers tend to teach to the test; students tend to study to the test. This culture is reinforced by supervisors who specify units to be taught and tested for each grading period and use test results more for judging rather than improving teacher and student performance.
Recommendations:
Schools should review their present assessment practices. The teacher appraisal system and the kinds of tests used in the classroom as well as those, in the division and national examinations, should be evaluated against the goals and objectives of the Basic Education Curriculum, among which is the development of critical thinkers and problem solvers.
Schools should also consider the use of alternative assessment tools and techniques that would provide opportunities for students to experience learning as an enjoyable, delighting process of inquiry, discovery, construction and creation of new knowledge, rather than as a tedious process of cramming to pass examinations.
While schools should double their efforts for students mastery of the basic competencies they should also never lose sight of the fact that their ultimate goal should be the development of functionally literate citizens of a democratic community.
10. Schools are moving toward shared governance.
Although most of the centralized organizational charts displayed in the principals’ office, are still the same charts before R.A.9155, yet shared governance and participative leadership were clearly evident in many schools.
The involvement of ad hoc committees, task forces, study groups, action cells, and the conduct of consultative meetings, and brainstorming sessions, to assist the school head make administrative or instructional decisions, were regular patterns that cropped up in individual and group interviews.
Another promising pattern is rotational delegation of authority by the school head, among department heads and subject leaders, as well.
Recommendations:
Schools should continue reinforcing their efforts toward the institutionalization of shared governance as envisioned in R.A. 9155. To facilitate the process, they should make shared governance as one of the strategic goals in their educational plans. The goals should be supported by a long-range program jointly designed, developed, implemented, monitored by the school heads, department heads and teachers. The program components should include needs analysis, competency-based training, benchmarking studies, design and development of appropriate organizational structure and staffing, monitoring and evaluation and a reward system.
The traditional end-of-the-year assessment, characterized by achievement testing and one-shot school visits, should be evaluated. The process which has been going on for decades, has not improved school performance and student achievement. A better alternative should be considered.
The Bureau of Secondary Education was tasked by the Department of Education to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the new curriculum in secondary schools of the country.
Accordingly, the Bureau conducted case studies of twenty secondary schools, grouped as follows:
- General high schools funded fully by the national government
- Newly established high schools funded jointly by the national, provincial, and municipal government
- Science high schools
- Private high schools
- Technical-vocational high schools
The case studies recognize that the school is a learning community where people continuously plan, observe, review and reflect on what they do in order to achieve shared goals and aspirations.
The first monitoring and evaluation of the BEC implementation was conducted in September 2002, the second in October 2003, and the latest in September 2004.
The findings from the case studies were based primarily on qualitative data. To verify their reliability, the findings were compared with those obtained from quantitative data. No marked difference in both findings was observed.
The following are the themes and patterns of school practices that emerged from the implementation of the BEC.
1. There are gross inconsistencies between means and ends.
School heads, department heads, and teachers fully agree with the BEC that the desired learner/graduate should be functionally literate, a creative and critical thinker, an independent problem solver and a work-oriented lifelong learner who is MakaDiyos, Makabayan, Makatao and Makakalikasan.
However, except in some Science high schools, there are gross inconsistencies between the kind of learner/graduate that the schools desire to produce and the strategies they employ. For example, instruction is still predominantly authoritative and textbook-based; learning is usually recipient and reproductive; supervision is commonly prescriptive and directive; and assessment is focused more on judging rather than improving performance.
Moreover, while teachers believe in the importance of contextualizing or localizing the curriculum, yet many of them derive lessons more from course syllabi, textbooks, and competency lists rather than from the learners’ felt needs. While they believe in the full development of the learners’ potentials, yet lessons that they provide do not adequately address the differing needs and capabilities of the students.
Recommendations:
In schools where the inconsistencies exist, the following actions may be taken:
The school head should organize a committee to identify and describe the curricular, instructional, supervisory, assessment, and managerial practices that do not contribute to the development of the desired learner/graduate. Focus group conversations may be conducted to clarify the school and non-school factors that reinforce the questionable practices and to develop and implement action programs to remove the inconsistencies. There should be a school assurance team to coordinate, monitor, and evaluate the implementation of the action program. The removal of the inconsistencies should be among the primary goals of the school improvement plan and the focus of instructional supervision.
2. Teachers want to know more about integrated teaching.
Across all school types, teachers have a positive attitude toward the integrative, interactive, brain-based approaches endorsed in the BEC. However, teachers do not feel confident to use the approaches because of their limited knowledge to operationalize them in terms of lesson planning; instructional materials development; and subject matter organization, presentation, and evaluation.
Some of the school heads and teachers who returned from the BEC training seriously conducted school-based training. They reproduced and distributed BEC materials and coached teachers how to use them. Some, however, merely echoed what they learned; thus there are still many teachers who do not have enough knowledge about the key concepts and approaches in the BEC.
Teachers do not just need ready-made daily or weekly lesson plans. They want full understanding of integrated teaching, i.e., its basic concepts, underlying assumptions, operational principles and approaches.
Recommendations:
School heads should capitalize and reinforce the positive attitude of the teachers toward the BEC, particularly its instructional approaches. They should increase the teachers’ capability and confidence in using the approaches by providing the competencies they need. A needs assessment managed by teachers themselves should be conducted to identify gaps between actual and expected competencies.
A benchmarking study may be conducted to close the gap. The study can start with internal benchmarking of successful practices by department or year level, and later expand to external benchmarking of successful practices of other schools.
A handbook which explains the nature of integrated teaching, i.e., its underlying assumptions, principles, operational definition of terms, practical methods and approaches and examples of long and short range plans, can help remove discrepancies between process and output. Schools are also encouraged to prepare leaflets and flyers on the integrative approaches.
3. Teachers have limited knowledge of constructivism as a learning theory.
“Learning as a construction process and the learner as a constructor of meaning” is among the basic concepts of the BEC. The concept underlies the integrated approaches endorsed in the BEC. Although the concept was unfamiliar to many teachers, yet its operationalization was observable in some classes in Mathematics, Science, and Araling Panlipunan where problem-solving, inquiry or discovery approaches were being used.
Application of the concept, however, was very limited. School documents like the yearly reports, school development and improvement plans, instructional and remedial programs, lesson plans, course syllabi, and teachers’ reports made little mention of how the concept was being applied to the teaching-learning process.
Recommendations:
The school head should develop a consensual understanding of “constructivist learning” among his teachers. This can be done through focus group conversations (FGC) by year level or by department. The conversations shall be facilitated preferably, by the school head, with division supervisors or nearby university professors as resource persons and consultants. The conversations should be backed up by extensive references on constructivist or integrative learning.
The FGC shall be followed through by activities on the practical application of the theory; i.e., lesson planning, demonstrations, field tests of approaches, team teaching, etc.
The outputs of the FGC can be additional inputs into the school’s BEC Handbook. The Handbook should be revisited regularly to keep it self-correcting and self-renewing.
4. Students are having difficulties using English as learning medium.
School heads and teachers recognize the difficulties that students face in learning English as a language and at the same time using it as a medium of learning. As such they have resorted to various ways of increasing the English proficiency of the students like holding essay contests, English campaigns, public speaking competitions and the like. The problem, however, has remained unabated.
In English medium classes, both teachers and students usually shift to the local language to ensure that they understand each other. The fall-back language is usually Taglish, which students in non-Tagalog provinces are ill at ease.
BEC advocates the development of creative, critical thinkers and problem solvers. Teachers find this difficult to achieve in English medium classes where students have poor oral, aural, reading, and writing skills. In these classes, teachers are prone to resort to simple recall, recognition and leading questions and to minimize questions that demand complex reasoning, explanations, elaborations, analysis, synthesis and evaluation, which students find frustrating and even exasperating.
Recommendations:
Schools should consider developing and testing the effectiveness of the following measures in increasing students’ English proficiency:
- Voluntary participation in English remedial sessions facilitated by volunteer students. Facilitators are selected on the basis of their English proficiency and are given special training on how to facilitate group learning. A system of incentives is provided to both walk-in students and volunteer facilitators.
- Proficient English students from higher levels, mentoring students from the lower levels. The participation in the project of both mentors and learners is voluntary but the school provides an incentive system to support the project.
- Holding regular English writing and impromptu speaking contests using criterion-referenced evaluation. To encourage wide participation, multiple winners, not only the best, are proclaimed. At the end of the semester, the classes with the biggest number of winners are given citations.
- Using the results of achievement tests for the previous years, the school conducts frequency and error analysis of English competencies that students failed to master. Remedial measures are instituted and continuously evaluated for their effectiveness in producing the desired change in achievement.
Teachers are open to new opportunities and possibilities offered by the BEC to accelerate learning. They are fully aware of the limitations of the traditional expository methods in facilitating the full development of the students’ potentials and are willing to learn how to be more effective facilitators of the integrative learning process.
From the field data, however, emerged several factors that inhibit the teachers from playing the facilitator’s role effectively: namely, students’ English deficiency that hinders critical discussion; overcrowded classes that restrict interactive learning; insufficient supply of textbooks that predisposes teachers to lecture; prescriptive supervision that constricts teacher creativity and initiative; and an examination system that encourages authoritative teaching. Confronted with these constraints teachers tend to fall back on traditional expository modes like lecturing, question-and-answer, dictation exercises, and practice tests.
Recommendations:
Use “best practices” approach by benchmarking classes, which, despite constraints of overcrowding, a foreign learning medium, insufficient textbooks, and supervisory and assessment restrictions, still continue to be facilitative rather than directive or prescriptive in teaching.
6. Promising alternative supervisory approaches are emerging.
Several promising supervisory approaches are emerging. One of these is collaborative supervision whereby groups of two or more teachers help one another to improve their teaching practices as well as discover better ways of teaching. They identify and address common instructional problems, share experiences and resources, and monitor and evaluate their progress.
Another emerging approach is self-directed supervision, which is common among experienced and highly-motivated teachers. In this practice each teacher assumes full responsibility for improving his instructional practices and promoting his professional growth.
In both above-mentioned approaches the school head participates mainly as consultant, adviser, resource linker or provider, reinforcer and facilitator. These supervisory approaches however, are not widespread.
Mentoring is also emerging as an alternative supervisory approach although it is still in a tentative and inchoate state. There are schools, however, that are already talking about putting up a mentors’ pool for the professional and career development of their teachers.
The most common supervisory practice is the conventional type whereby the supervisor observes a class as an expert or authority and makes on-the-spot recommendations which the teacher is expected to implement. Teachers find the practice threatening and disempowering. It stifles initiatives and creativity, lowers self-esteem, and encourages conformity but not commitment. In many cases the school head delegates the supervisory function to department heads, who, teachers claim tend to inspect and evaluate rather than improve performance.
A common but unpopular practice is the laissez faire type, whereby school heads, assuming that teachers know best being major in their subjects, give teachers the freedom to select teaching methods. Many of these school heads do not observe classes.
Recommendations:
With the continuing increase in supervisor-teacher ratio it would not be practical anymore to depend on the traditional supervisory approach to improve teachers’ performance.
The school head should explore the following alternatives:
- Self-directed supervision for experienced, strongly motivated, and innovative teachers;
- Peer or collaborative supervision for teachers who can work in teams or quality circles;
- Mentoring of new teachers and coaching the mediocre and low performers. These necessitate putting up a pool of trained volunteer mentors.
Supervisors as instructional leaders should not only limit their functions to giving direct instructional assistance, curriculum development, and staff development. Educational impact cannot be produced by teachers working individually but by teachers working collaboratively toward shared goals. Therefore, teachers’ group development for collective action should also be part of the supervisor’s responsibility.
So that teachers would not be slavishly dependent upon foreign ideas and methods, supervisors should help them become knowledge workers by training them in classroom-based action research. This type of research is collaborative, user-friendly, nonstatistical and naturalistic. Public school teachers are using many innovative teaching methods and materials which do not become part of our educational heritage because they are not systematically developed and properly documented. There is a need for supervisors to train teachers how to test their methods as they teach. This is classroom-based action research, a practical technique for developing and confirming best practices.
7. Teachers need more knowledge and skills to operationalize Makabayan as a “Laboratory of Life”.
School heads and teachers find the “laboratory of life” concept of Makabayan novel and quite interesting and have come up with some imaginative schemes to implement the concept. Among these are the 8-2 plan (8 weeks of the grading period for teaching the four learning areas separately and 2 weeks for the integrated culminating activities), the planned or deliberate integration (a weekly lesson plan carries two or three related objectives from the other learning areas) and incidental integration (related content and skills from other disciplines are taken up as they crop up during the development of the lesson).
Teachers, however, find the integration of the four Makabayan learning areas difficult to plan, implement, monitor and evaluate for several reasons: (1) lack of a common vacant period for planning the integration, (2) limited knowledge of the interdisciplinary, interactive methods, and (3) lack of readily available teacher-friendly expert assistance.
Moreover, the anxiety of not being able to cover the units expected for a grading period and the threat of division achievement tests that are text-book based, predispose teachers to separate-subject teaching.
There are also teachers who are lukewarm toward integration because they believe that integrating other subjects would reduce the time to teach the competencies prescribed for their own subject. Since their efficiency is assessed more by their students’ performance in division tests than by how well they have integrated their subject with other subjects, their tendency is to give less attention to integration.
Recommendations:
School heads should conduct consultative or brainstorming sessions with their staff to resolve problems and issues related to the implementation of “Makabayan as laboratory of life.”
The four Makabayan learning areas have to be scheduled in such a way that the teachers will have time to meet and plan integrated lessons.
Schools superintendents should also consider putting up pilot or experimental schools for the teaching of Makabayan to lessen the trial-and-error practices which confuse teachers.
8. Teachers are divided on how to teach values.
Two patterns of thought emerged from the field data. One favors the integration of values education in all the subjects and not teaching it as a separate subject. It recommends that the time allotted to values education in the present curriculum should be used instead to increase the time allotment for TLE and AP.
The other pattern favors the teaching of values education as a separate subject for the reason that effective teaching of values involves going through the valuing process of clarifying, analyzing and choosing in relation to decisions and actions, which cannot be adequately enhanced in the integrated scheme. It is further argued that since values shape and guide important decisions and actions, their development should not be left to chance. Hence, value education should remain a separate subject.
Recommendations:
To help resolve the issue whether values education should remain as a separate subject or as an integral part of the other subjects, two approaches are recommended:
- The values education teachers should approach the teaching of the subject as action researchers. Working as a team, they identify a common teaching problem, plan and implement a solution, observe and reflect on the feedback, and continue the process until they get the desired result. The action research process would shed more light on the issue.
- Values education as a separate subject in the Basic Education Curriculum today should be viewed as a case study or a focus of inquiry rather than a mandate. How do students personally perceive and feel about the methods, materials, and the assessment and reporting systems that are being used?
9. Teachers teach to the test, students study to the test.
The use of traditional assessment tools like the multiple-response, simple recall, recognition and application tests is predominant. Rubrics, portfolios, and other forms of authentic assessment are not widely used. Teachers are aware of the limitations of traditional tests and the need for alternative forms to measure higher order thinking skills. However, they tend to resort to the traditional forms for several compelling reasons:
- These are the types used in periodic and achievement examinations.
- They are easier to score. (Teachers teach as many as 300 to 400 students a day and scoring non-traditional measures like rubrics could be an ordeal.)
- They are easier to prepare than the non-traditional forms like portfolios, rubrics, and other authentic measures.
- These are what everybody else is using.
- Teachers have inadequate knowledge of authentic learning and authentic assessment.
Teachers tend to teach to the test; students tend to study to the test. This culture is reinforced by supervisors who specify units to be taught and tested for each grading period and use test results more for judging rather than improving teacher and student performance.
Recommendations:
Schools should review their present assessment practices. The teacher appraisal system and the kinds of tests used in the classroom as well as those, in the division and national examinations, should be evaluated against the goals and objectives of the Basic Education Curriculum, among which is the development of critical thinkers and problem solvers.
Schools should also consider the use of alternative assessment tools and techniques that would provide opportunities for students to experience learning as an enjoyable, delighting process of inquiry, discovery, construction and creation of new knowledge, rather than as a tedious process of cramming to pass examinations.
While schools should double their efforts for students mastery of the basic competencies they should also never lose sight of the fact that their ultimate goal should be the development of functionally literate citizens of a democratic community.
10. Schools are moving toward shared governance.
Although most of the centralized organizational charts displayed in the principals’ office, are still the same charts before R.A.9155, yet shared governance and participative leadership were clearly evident in many schools.
The involvement of ad hoc committees, task forces, study groups, action cells, and the conduct of consultative meetings, and brainstorming sessions, to assist the school head make administrative or instructional decisions, were regular patterns that cropped up in individual and group interviews.
Another promising pattern is rotational delegation of authority by the school head, among department heads and subject leaders, as well.
Recommendations:
Schools should continue reinforcing their efforts toward the institutionalization of shared governance as envisioned in R.A. 9155. To facilitate the process, they should make shared governance as one of the strategic goals in their educational plans. The goals should be supported by a long-range program jointly designed, developed, implemented, monitored by the school heads, department heads and teachers. The program components should include needs analysis, competency-based training, benchmarking studies, design and development of appropriate organizational structure and staffing, monitoring and evaluation and a reward system.
The traditional end-of-the-year assessment, characterized by achievement testing and one-shot school visits, should be evaluated. The process which has been going on for decades, has not improved school performance and student achievement. A better alternative should be considered.
