FB Post of Kristine Joan Barredo (December 4, 2019)

My takeaways...
1. Rethinking what we consider to be effective teaching—and how we facilitate it—
is an integral part of ensuring students receive a quality education.
2. It is assumed, that teachers and the actions they take in the classroom
fundamentally impact students and what they learn.
3. When a child join a school and start attending the classes, teacher is the only
person who decides what should be taught and how. A child is like a clean
paper, where teachers are responsible to write on.
4. Uplift, Inspire and Motivate Teachers' morale
#PISAresults2019
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Reasons Why we have very low PISA scores
Prof. Oligario, UP Diliman
1) Performance tasks have been interpreted as performing arts tasks (i.e.,
dramatization instead of reading analysis tasks)
2) Memorization instead of direct application. Exams instead of correct
experimentation (wrong experimentation is when students simply follow steps)
3) Computation instead of authentic problem-solving. Students use the ruler to draw a
line, instead of measure the length of actual objects. Teachers give too many
computation tasks and not enough experience in real-life problem-solving.
4) And let me add, the wrong interpretation and implementation of "no child left
behind" as simply mass promotion, thus promoting students despite lack of
competence. And they know this. The focus should be on developing competence.
5) Wrong interpretation and wrong implementation of the spiral curriculum, leaving
students to learn fragmented knowledge in different math areas and science areas.
6) Teacher observation has become simply for grading of teachers and PBB concerns,
instead of equipping them with skills to improve teaching.
7) NAT is used to rank schools, instead of checking where the schools can improve
instruction. And worse, schools manipulate the scores in NAT to make it appear
that there have been improvements in student performance when in fact, none.
8) The term "facilitating learning" being interpreted and implemented as leaving the
tasks to the students and not lecturing to the students anymore, so meaning, not
giving input to the discussion anymore.
9) Much time spent on other matters like paper works and programs, when teachers
should be spending more time on action research and finding ways to improve
teaching.
10) Focus on teacher training, instead of mentoring. Teachers collect certificates from
fragmented series of trainings when they can be mentored in the classroom as they
face daily challenges.