Sunday Times 2
New education reforms: Schools reluctant to part with traditional approach
The term training that was popular in the pre-industrial era changed to education with industrialisation and then to development in the new knowledge era. The paradigm shift in education that is now taking place calls the teachers to give up their previous roles of transmission and transaction to embrace the new role of transformation. The children today do not come to school to get the knowledge available to the teacher to adopt as it is or to adapt as suitable. Instead they come to school to find out new knowledge and meaning for themselves to prepare for the emerging, complex and dynamic future.
Schools should focus on three types of development for students - physical, intellectual and emotional
Our schools for long rested on three traditional pillars that focus on retaining the known, learning the pre-determined and constructing what is. The demands of the new millennium called the educationists to move the schools onto three new pillars that focus on revising the known, exploring the undetermined and constructing what might be. Exploration thus gaining a central place in learning was for a new generation of proactive and futuristic citizens, who were ready to construct, not only new knowledge and meaning but also various requisites that the world needed in the future.
In view of taking our schools to the three new pillars early in the new millennium, the National Institute of Education introduced a new competency-based curriculum for state schools. Competencies were identified for subjects offered from grades 6 to 11, and broken down into competency levels that could be attained in a specified time period. At a time where many countries of the world were struggling with basic competencies, the officers responsible for the national curriculum followed a few developed nations that were moving into subject competencies. The purpose of all this was to motivate the students to go beyond subject knowledge to develop relevant attitudes and skills, which together with the knowledge, prepared them to face real life situations. Special attention was also paid to the subject Health and Physical Education.
To attain these targets, an activity-oriented approach was introduced for learning and teaching, in a learner-centred environment. The activities focused on the competency levels specified for each subject and incorporated a variety of learning-teaching methods in addition to the main method of exploration. The students were expected to explore in small groups receiving teacher support in terms of feedback and feed forward. Feedback resembling medicine was for student groups that were off the track. Feed forward regarded as a tonic or stimulant was for other groups that were reaching the target speedily. The new culture of assessment thus initiated was to enable the students to learn independently with minimum teacher intervention.
Exploring groups also got the opportunity to present findings, elaborate findings of their own group as well as other groups, and conduct a variety of evaluations. Such evaluations allowed the students to make judgments on their own performance, performance of their own group and other groups, and the performance of the teacher. Having to do something in the learning environment helped students develop intra-personal or personal skills, namely initiative, responsibility, accountability, commitment, entrepreneurship, stress management and self-discipline. Having to think while at work enabled them to develop skills such as creativity and critical thinking. Working in groups facilitated the development of inter-personal or social skills which nurtured caring and sharing, co-operation and collaboration, communication, leadership and followership. The activity-oriented approach thus took our children on to a new platform where they could develop creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication that are popular today as the 4C’s.
Reforms 2007 introduced five criteria for continuous assessment and evaluation within every activity. The first three of these, referred to as subject competencies, were hard skills derived from the content selected for the activity. The last two originating from the learning-teaching process were generic competencies, commonly known today as soft skills. Generic competencies thus coming to the fore had to be caught by the students during the learning-teaching process rather than taught by the teacher. These competencies did not allow subjects with similar characteristics to be present in the curriculum any longer. This situation made Life Competencies, a subject that was there in the curriculum to be dropped while prohibiting old subjects like Value Education to be re-considered in the future.
All in all, the first curriculum reform of the new millennium attempted to move the system of education away from the objectives approach that considered knowledge, attitudes and skills separately to a competency approach where these were integrated. The reform also tried to move the system from lesson plans to activity plans, from an evaluation culture to an assessment culture, and from teacher-centred education to learner-centred practices that were very much needed for competency development.
The learners thus coming to the fore in the new learning-teaching environment had to be active rather than passive. They also had to move away from the achievement tests that carried a pass mark of 40 to proficiency tests that required at least 60 marks to reach near proficiency. To make all these efforts successful, school-based assessment that was already there for formative evaluation was strengthened, and an authentic system of evaluation was introduced for summative evaluations conducted by the end of year school tests and the GCE OL examination. While continuous and formative evaluations thus introduced focused on the extent to which the students had attained the competency levels under concern, summative evaluations planned on the basis of authentic situations tested their preparedness to use the abilities so developed in real life situations.
The purpose of all this was to provide the youth with a good general education that could make them successful in any field they select for their future. As a means of laying a sound foundation for this, the schools had to equip their students with a well-integrated personality that comprised three types of development — physical, intellectual and emotional. Intellectual development had to go beyond knowledge to take account of the subject competencies that the students could master. Considering the fact that it is only in a healthy body that one can expect a healthy mind that is a must for intellectual development, the subject Health and Physical Education paid high attention to health, nutrition and physical fitness. The generic competencies that were newly introduced facilitated the emotional intelligence that the students needed for success in personal and work lives.
The reform also focused on gender disparity that was becoming visible in education. The girls with high endurance and better ability to learn by listening were outperforming the boys who were keen to learn by doing. At a time where many countries were focusing on multiple intelligences, the difficulty faced by our system in meeting at least the needs of the three main groups of learners – the auditory, visual and the tactile — was found alarming. The variety of methods that the reform introduced under its new methodology, however, could win the attention of all types of learners and make them active in the learning environment.
Irrespective of all these efforts, we find our schools still on the three traditional pillars. School teachers, who get their students to name, state and list things or define, describe and explain things have not given up the traditional method of imparting lower order mental skills to their students. Textbooks, teacher-made notes and answers written for model questions make the students cram for public examinations with limited understanding of the subject matter under concern. Short note books abundant in the market allow students to use them with no idea at least of the purpose of a short note. The mechanical and superficial learning of students merely for good examination results does not allow our schools to produce the type of citizen needed for the 21st century.
Many problems linked to both curriculum planning and implementation have not allowed the reforms of the new millennium to be institutionalised in our schools yet. Non alignment of textbooks and examinations with the new curriculum and delays associated with political interventions due to lack of a national education policy are two major reasons that relate to curriculum planning.
Open classrooms with limited space and heavy furniture, centralized facilities given prominence over mobile facilities, class sizes either too large or too small for group work and the inadequacy of the forty minute time period to complete the activities are a few examples of problems related to implementation. Replacing the bureaucratic organisational structures with matrix structures, introducing digital systems to acquaint all types of stakeholder groups on reform messages, changing the supervisory mechanisms that pay undue attention to examination success, and controlling pressure group action that cripples worthwhile ideas are some strategies proposed to overcome the problems.
The new thinking that is going on today towards a new system of education focuses on a skills-oriented thematic curriculum that provides opportunity for authentic learning and assessment. This curriculum goes far beyond the currently available skills-oriented subject curriculum that emphasises authentic assessment and evaluation. Considering the big gap between where we are and where we want to be, the success of any new reform proposed for the future depends on its actions to investigate the problems that have hindered the institutionalisation of the skills oriented curriculum introduced in 2007.
(The writer is a former Deputy Director General of the National Institute of Education)