Teach students how to deal with constant changes – Briones

Education Secretary Leonor Briones on Friday challenged teachers to revolutionize the way they teach to help their students “accept change” and cope with the challenges of the ever-changing world.

Speaking at MB Hot Seat, a rountable discussion with Manila Bulletin editors, Briones underscored the need for teachers not to focus too much on the current trends since many things are changing. “By the time our learners graduate, whatever we taught them would be irrelevant,” she said. “In five years’ time, the catching up that you need to do with knowledge will be really massive and tremendous,” she added.

Briones noted that even three years would be too long because every day, something new is happening. “Every day, theories are being challenged, every day something new is being invented and if you are not abreast with all these things, then your learners will not be prepared for the world outside,” she said.

What teachers should be teaching, Briones said, is how students can “cope with change because the world is changing very fast.” She noted that teachers should realize that things will “not be the way they were taught by their teachers.” Thus, students should be “taught to be creative and be taught to solve problems not only to cope but to accept change.”

Accepting change, Briones said, is difficult for many people. “The young people, we have to teach them right from the beginning that the world is changing and it’s not necessarily be a friendly world it might even be a hostile environment,” she said.

Briones said that “environments are not necessarily friendly or facilitative, they will be challenging” so it is the role of the teachers to teach their students how to deal with constant changes. “I have noticed that in other countries, they are doing it…for example, in teaching Math, teachers are not so much calculation but more on analysis and reasoning and we try to bring that in especially in the way we teach our teachers,” she said.

Currently, Briones said there are around 674,000 teachers under DepEd. “We have to teach our children courage to live in a changing world – in a possibly hostile world and a world which is possibly different from the home which nurtured and created them,” she said.

Briones also urged teachers to be more creative in teaching. To be able to be more effective in their chosen profession, she said that teachers nationwide should continue to capacitate themselves and learn new things that they can impart with their students.

“We want to teach our children to think creatively, to respond to change, to ask questions, to be critical, to find solutions because the world is changing very, very fast,” she said. “We also encourage and challenge them to continually keep up with the world, to continually keep up with the competition from other countries [and] keep up with all that is changing, all that is new and most important, to teach them courage,” she ended.

Pre-curriculum review Education Secretary Leonor Briones expressed support for the review of the pre-service curriculum of Teacher Education Institutions (TEIs) and look into the test questions to find out what causes the continued decline of teachers’ performance in the board exams. “There’s nothing wrong in looking or assessing,” Briones said when asked if she would agree to look into the test questions being asked for the Board Licensure Examination for Professional Teachers (BLEPT). The world changes because people look, because they re-examine, and they ask questions,” she added.

Briones noted that looking or assessing the possible reasons for the low performance of teachers in the board exams “could be the basis for reviewing the law” which cites the regulation of the licensure examination and professionalization of the practice of the teaching profession.

Earlier, the Philippine for Business Education (PBEd) released its latest study on the teachers’ board exams performance of all the TEIs in the country from October 2009 to March 2017. After analyzing data from the PRC, PBEd said that in the past 9 years, the BLEPT takers registered only a “dismal 31 percent passing rate.” It was also noted that around half of the TEIs – or schools which offer education programs – continue to “perform poorly.”

PBED is a non-profit, non-stock organization that aims to be the business community’s response to the need for consensus and sustained advocacy in education reform. Its study showed that 497 out of 1,024 TEIs – who had their graduates take the board exams for elementary – are “below” the national passing rate. Likewise, 637 out of 1,258 TEIs for the secondary examination are also performing “below average.”

Among the possible reasons teachers continue to perform so poorly in board exams is the test questions. Thus, PBED has been asking the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) is being urged to reveal the questionnaires used for the test so it can be “scrutinized.”

Briones noted that based on the previous meetings with other DepEd officials and stakeholders, the possibility of lowering the passing rate and looking into the pre-service curriculum of TEIs were also discussed.

“We have been debating over this and the issue is, do we lower the passing rate which is over 70 or do we retain and perhaps look into what is the problem,” Briones said. “The thinking right now is we don’t lower the passing rates but we look into the content of the training,” she added.

Professional standards for teachers

Undersecretary for Planning and Field Operations Jesus Mateo said that DepEd has an attach agency called the Teacher Education Council which is being looked into after the policy, “Philippine Professional Standards for Teachers” has been issued.

“This policy is also based on the international standards for teachers and will be used to tell the TEIs – through the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) – if they can look into the pre-service curriculum to ensure that what is being taught to future teachers would be aligned with what the system needs,” Mateo said.