Education: Key to Empowerment

May 24, 2024

Rogie Espulgar: A pleasant afternoon to all of you. It’s really an honor to be a part of this sharing engagement across the regions through the Konrad Adenauer Political and Civic Engagement Spaces.

There are a lot of teachers that show the present status of education in the Philippines, from the evolution of the curriculum, to the existing infrastructure, to the availability of learning resources, to the completeness of physical facilities in our schools, to the extent of stakeholder engagement and teacher development programs, among others.

Schools have different contexts in terms of needs and vary on how these needs are given attention. The COVID 19 pandemic was among the challenging events in the implementation of basic education in our country and Bacjawan Sur Elementary School in the municipality of Concepcion, Iloilo Philippines, where I am presently connected, faced a lot of struggles in the New Normal.

To give you a scenario of Bacjawan Sur Elementary School, it is a primary school turned into a complete elementary school because of the sudden increase of enrollment from a hundred to three-fold of that (number). This increase of the learner population was due to the presence of housing units provided to the victims of Typhoon Yolanda in 2013. There are 14 teachers catering to around 370 learners but there were only five standard classrooms for temporary learning spaces and single detached segregated toilets; handwashing facilities and water sources are also limited. These are just few of the issues and concerns that need to be addressed by a single school prior to the opening of the School Year 2020-2021 under the New Normal. Our topic is focused on infrastructure and teacher development and I will be sharing our experiences on how we thrived.

The provision of standard classrooms will take a lot of process, such as reporting to the Enhanced Basic Education Information System. It’s a data base of education statistics, sector performance indicators in public and private schools, learning centers, and other education service providers. The needs were identified and included in the planning for the allocation of funds. All the rest of the processes entailed schools to wait.

But, of course, the lack of classrooms for our learners was a need that had to be addressed immediately. Our school division provided us P400,000, enough to build six temporary learning spaces. Our local government, headed by our municipal mayor, Dr. Bañez, also provided us an additional P400,000 for the improvement of the TLS. We saved a lot of donations for an additional site for the proposed additional classrooms from the local government unit and other NGOs. Our barangay officials were also on top of giving us assistance.

The point of sharing this is we have lots to be addressed when it comes to infrastructure. It is not only the concern of the Department of Education. In the present educational structure, our local education stakeholders can also do their share. It is indeed everyone’s responsibility to provide the best possible learning spaces for our learners. As mentioned by Mayor Rex yesterday, it really takes a village to educate a child.

The New Normal in education has the Department of Education exploring different learning modalities to cater to the various needs of our learners, and this is a new experience on the part of our teachers. When we started distance education, each school prepared the contextualized learning continuity plan adopted from Department Order No. 12 Series of 2020. From each school, the interventions were laid down to ensure learning continuity, and that includes capacity building of teachers. We went through a series of training to include LDM 1 or what we call the Learning Delivery Modalities for administrators, and the Learning Delivery Modality 2 for our teachers. These short term courses capacitate teachers to handle distance education and it is on its second year of implementation. Each school is also conducting SLACs or what we call the School Learning Action Cells based on DepEd Order No. 35 series of 2016. What we do in SLACs is we have sessions conducted by groups of teachers engaged in collaborative learning sessions to solve shared challenges encountered within the context of the school. A lot of virtual trainings were conducted by our division, our regional office, and our DepEd central office on different topics to include the preparation of the contextualized self-learning modules, capacity building of our LSAs or the Learning Support Aids, mental health, and psycho-social support, to mention a few.

While we believe that DepEd is facing a lot of cuts focusing on infrastructure and teacher development, school principals are empowered by Republic Act 9155, where decentralization takes place. It’s really in the hands of our school heads to improve operations through the proper utilization of financial and human resources. I believe that the successful implementation of basic education in the Philippines even during this time of the pandemic will lie mostly in the capacity of school leaders to navigate the school.

I am Mr. Rogie Gonzales Espulgar, the school principal. It is my priority to provide quality education to our Filipino learners. Para sa bata, para sa bayan.

Alina Reiss: it’s different from the other perspective that we’ve heard so far. So, because you put a lot of esteem on the role of principals in delivering quality education, what would you share as the best practices in difficult times that we could take home to our own schools and check whether certain things are in place or planned in the same way?

RE: This pandemic really affected the implementation of education in the Philippines, not only in our locality, but also in the whole Philippines. And if there is one thing that I have learned in my 15 years of teaching, is that education is really a shared responsibility. If we want to get the most in providing basic education to our students, we must involve all the stakeholders. We must involve the whole school and the community. More than ever, during this time of the pandemic, the more that we involve our parents, the guardians, our local government unit, our community members, the more we can provide more quality, accessible, relevant basic education delivery. It really takes a village to educate a child, so if you want to provide quality education, you have to help each other—all the members of the community must be involved.

AR: So how do you do about it? Do you have a parents’ roundtable? How easy is it to engage the parents and what are your mechanisms to engage other stakeholders, especially in COVID times, which makes it more difficult?

RE: When we started distance learning, most of our students in the Philippines had module print learning modalities, meaning self-learning modules. The teachers are not there. The learners are learning at home. We talked with our parents, our guardians, members of the family who can provide technical assistance to our students. They served as learning support. So, before we conducted the School Year 2020-2021, we prepared a school learning continuity plan on how to go about the very next school year. We wanted to involve all the education stakeholders. We conducted meetings with our parents, with our local officials, and we have this collaboration with the LGUs. The question was, who will be serving as learning support aids of our learners? And so we utilized our parents and guardians. We provided trainings to our parents, we taught them how to go about accomplishing the learning support materials of our learners. It’s not easy, much more because we find it difficult to communicate with our learners. It’s either we conduct home visits or call those learners who have mobile phones. And that’s one thing that we have to strengthen in the distance learning education that we have, that is, providing learning support to our learners. This is how parents and guardians play an important role in the delivery of distance learning.

AR: As a principal, what kind of support do you wish for from the government?

RE: I think if there is one thing that I would like to improve in the implementation of distance learning in this time of pandemic is the Internet connection. Majority of our schools in the Philippines have no stable Internet connection and we know that most of our learning competencies are through the Internet. We want to have that stable Internet connection for us to improve our teaching and learning processes. In Concepcion, there are 36 schools, including high schools and I think only the mainland schools can access Internet connection. Those schools in the islands, in the mountains, can hardly reach the signal for the Internet connection, so I would appeal to the government that if there is one thing that we want to improve in the Department of Education: some of our curriculum, our competencies require Internet connection and so there are some things that we cannot do and that are beyond our control.

AR: We have someone from the audience asking whether the online learning platforms are free of charge. Are they available or do you use your own applications to facilitate student learning? How do you do it in your school?

RE: As what I have mentioned earlier, in the municipality of Concepcion, or even in the school division of Iloilo in the Philippines, majority of our learners are learning through our self-learning modules. So, we may combine Internet connectivity platforms but we are mainly using printed modules. The parents get the modules from the school, then these will be answered by our learners at home. We hardly use the Internet in this time of the pandemic because of issues in the Internet connection. So, I can say that majority of our learners are using printed modules instead of the Internet.

Source: Synergeia

April 28, 2022

Oftentimes in educational conferences in the Philippines and abroad, I am drawn to discussions on inventive ways to get students to learn; how to make them think creatively, how to develop inquiry in their minds, and develop opinions, critiques, and a highly developed appreciation of the things around them, instead of just pushing the “Like” button.

For over half a century, I have taught and lectured teachers and students and, more recently, under the auspices of our educational organization, Synergeia. Every time I am in front of an audience, I test reactions to what I say or project onscreen. I look for what engages an audience, what makes them linger in my phrases, what makes an impact in the way I juxtapose sentences or pause for effect.

Teaching creativity in the advanced world oftentimes means having each student or teacher in front of a computer screen learning the most creative app with often colorful and cheerful greetings. Oftentimes, the presentation is fast-clipped, reflective of the fast pacing of their society. It is assumed that each participant has a level of technical savvy to be at a screen not aided and can fix any glitch when it happens. Any teacher will be enthused to add to one’s teaching arsenal how to get students to be engaged.

But I come from the Philippines and poverty rears its obstructive head at any attempt to improve creative learning. For example, in a recent Zoom class that I had with a class on improving English grammar about 100 kilometers north of Manila, where I am, the class has selected students who showed high interest in the selected subjects and had access or ownership to a cell phone, which would be their video screens for the next hour. That lessened the class to half, or a total of 20 students. The attendance number would later decline throughout the hour. There were brownouts, or electric stoppage, which cancelled the participation of four or five students Then there was the matter of weak signals. Students connected intermittently and when they decided to find a steady signal, they resorted to climb a tree or run up the side of a mountain to secure a signal. When, finally, the remainder of the students made it so far, connected, there were issues of self-confidence and inability to speak with confidence. They needed goading and eventually responded and interacted. But that was only with 15 minutes left. Clearly, any sort of modern act of inclusion in creative teaching will hardly work in the Philippine setting. Let me therefore share with you what I do in an underdeveloped country without the accoutrements of creating the impossible.

First, I welcome the return of face-to-face teaching. I welcome that because of the very faulty Zoom teaching and the failed modules that were distributed throughout the country, in lieu of a teacher’s absence.

Next, I welcome the return of teachers renewing basic reading lessons The pandemic has significantly decreased the reading and comprehension skills of students. If the national scores before the pandemic showed students behind, it has been exacerbated by the pandemic and the accompanying school disruption. With the return of face-to-face classes, we are back with the opportunity to increase reading and comprehension and, in like manner, lay the groundwork for creative thinking. I will share with you some low-tech but effective teaching methods that I’ve used to spawn creative thinking and inquiry. These methods include using visuals employing storytelling establish a reading mandate, accessibility to libraries, proving art materials, and visiting museums. I

In the area of visuals in a few weeks I will have an exhibition of my organization’s library, the Ortigas Library, an exhibition of 100 vintage photographs of the tribal people of the Mountain Province in the North. It will be in a high school in a small town known for having graduated high achieving students. The principal welcomed the exhibition, stating that test scores of her students have plummeted again due to the pandemic, and she needed another way to reach the students who have been without a schooling discipline and schedule. She believes the never-seen photographs of the students’ ancestors in their native dress, events, and local architecture that they no longer see will be a revelation to their identity and ignite a learning moment.

Storytelling. Teachers have been taught to develop an authoritarian reserve in their teaching. That, to me, is a prescription to failure. I have been successful communicating to students when I relate a personal story or insight. Personal storytelling decreases the unequal relationship between students and teachers, an informal manner of relating events and people, especially if they mirror the experiences of the students, are the wedges to securing access to the student’s mind.

A reading mandate. To be creative and to have an opinion means to have read much to reach such a level. Reading and the corresponding comprehension scores in the country are abysmal. If in the past, the level of television watching exceeded study and school time hours, now there is additional video gaming and mindless watching that wipes out the hours for potential reading.

I have been quite strict on a reading mandate. Whenever I go around the provinces, I just impose. I just tell the teachers there shall be no video and TV watching for the whole school week and watching is only allowed on weekends after homework is completed and for a few hours. My Draconian law is hard to implement, given the supervision parents and teachers have to do. But what has to be impressed is there must be reading time for at least a half hour each day. A book to read and later to report are also compulsory. Reading regains the flow of time in imbibing words in sentence and paragraph constructions, and, most importantly, in understanding the import of the author’s overall message. Reading has no abrupt ending like TikTok, as it leads a reader through stories that may have taken several days to finish reading. A student’s mind is rewired from the immediacy offered by video to a steady, more realistic pace of digesting the written text and making sense of it. Likewise, with TV’s dulling powers, reading has an engaging quality, raising questions and even greater thought and rumination on the matter.

Access to libraries. Libraries are under-utilized in my country. There are city and school libraries that are mostly free to enter and use. There are a fair number of libraries throughout the country and, unfortunately, much of the reading fare in them are dated. Nonetheless, there are good reading books still and there are current newspapers and magazines to read. Students must be acquainted with libraries as a place for reading and as a place for solace. In recent times, libraries, like the Ortigas Library, which I work in, have been visited to borrow books and documents that straighten and clarify the flurry of false news now besetting us.

Access to museums. The treasures in museums are undoubtedly a way to stimulate creative and critical thinking. Not all student visitors get that experience. The ways of a child’s socialization at home or at school affect the way stimuli is received as in a visit to a museum. A visit, nonetheless, is a departure from a normal day, allowing students to gaze at master artworks or ancient artifacts, spurring thought to wander and reflect. The mind is most supple to receiving wider dimensions of creative and critical thinking in a museum setting.

Lastly, access to art supplies. Art therapy has been used successfully in drawing and drawing out emotional expressions in children affected by external factors, such as war. So it is to devote time in school or at home sharing coloring pencils, paint brushes, and paper. This is a new world of communication for the student other than the written text. It stimulates students and, for some, it may lead a path to an artistic streak or vocation in the future.

For underdeveloped countries like the Philippines with a failed educational system, these low-tech methods of developing creative and critical thinking still manage to stimulate students in that direction

Lastly, the steep learning decline in students…. distributing modules in lieu of teachers’ absence, the faulty learning through cell phones and screens affected by no signals or weak signals have been a severe setback for education in the Philippines. We are ever more aware now that face-to-face teaching led by a well-trained dedicated corps of teachers and, mind you, parents, are the only and most effective way to spark the genius inherent in each student.

John Silva
Executive Director, Ortigas Foundation

Source: Synergeia