Category: Curriculum Reform

Posted in Assessment, Curriculum Reform

Teachers teach to the test, students study to the test

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The DepEd is finally bidding adieu to multiple choice test. Better late than never, I must say. So my fellow math teachers, the next time you are required to make purely multiple choice items for periodical test or are given by the division, or by the regional office an achievement test in multiple choice, you can quote the following: Annex A – The Monitoring and Evaluation of the Implementation of the 2002 Basic Education Curriculum: Findings and Recommendations of the UbD-based 2010 Secondary Education Curriculum Guide for Mathematics 1 document released by DepEd. On page 9-10 of the said document you will find this report:

 

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.

Documentary analysis showed that schools in general lack an institutionalized system of utilizing test results for diagnostic and remedial purposes.

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.

I think the DepEd forgot to include another reason why teachers use multiple choice test. The sixth bullet should be: The National Achievement tests  in all subject areas are 100%  in multiple-choice type form and the test results are used more for comparing schools rather than as basis for developing programs for improving teaching competence and performance.

The day the National Achievement Test (NAT) of the DepEd will include constructed-response type questions should be declared a national holiday because it will really mark a turning point in the history of education in the Philippines.

Posted in Curriculum Reform

Enduring understanding

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To know the big picture ideas, to know the enduring understanding students are supposed to learn are indeed very important in planning and teaching a lesson. However, for teachers to be able to identify and articulate the enduring understanding for a particular content topic requires knowledge of the following:

  1. knowledge of the nature of the discipline;
  2. a deep content knowledge;
  3. knowledge of the connections among the different content topics
  4. some knowledge about the connection of your discipline with other discipline or subject area;
  5. knowledge of the relevance of your discipline to real-life

All these should already be partly articulated and reflected in the standards or curriculum framework to serve as guide to teachers when they design their lesson plans. If the curriculum framework is just a list of topics or some general statements then that’s bad news.

One can argue of course that teachers are expected to already know all these (the 5 items I listed above) and hence know the enduring understanding in their discipline. But the reality in this part of the world is that majority of our teachers still need more help in these aspects. This is my reason why we have to have a curriculum framework or Standards that supports the demands of articulating the enduring understanding expected in each unit before asking teachers to plan their “ubdized” (got this term from one reader of this blog) lesson.

Textbooks, which market themselves as “UbD-based”, or “UbD-compliant” should also be required to state the big ideas for the entire course and for each chapter or unit. Statements of enduring understanding and essential questions can also precede each chapter. Teachers can just add their own or state it in their own way when they make the lesson plans. It is not spoon-feeding the teachers. We just want them to have something to start with especially if the textbooks are their only resource.

Textbooks authors are supposed to have a clear big picture idea of what they are trying to teach in the textbooks and so why not require them to put it there. They have no business writing one if they don’t know the enduring understanding that students are supposed to learn. With all these in place, teachers will have more time to plan and design the lessons targeting these big picture ideas. They will also have more time to study their students’ difficulties and misconceptions about the topic and think of ways of addressing them. Most importantly, teachers will have more time to study the topic they are going to teach and how this content topic relates with previously learned concepts and future concept so they can find the right activity/ task and use appropriate assessment process. These are what can make or unmake a lesson, not whether or not the teachers use the backward or forward design in lesson planning.

This is my fifth post about this topic. Click here to link you to my other posts on UbD and backward design.

PS1. Having identified the enduring/essential understanding does not guarantee you’re going to have a good lesson plan or a good lesson implementation.

PS2. In one of the centennial lectures, part of the activities of the University of the Philippines centennial celebration, the speaker for education-related issues said that no one in this country is paying attention to learning. Indeed. We talk about lesson planning, we talk about curriculum frameworks and syllabus, we talk about multiple intelligences, …. we talk about essential understanding … we talk about everything except how pupils learn specific content topics.

Posted in Curriculum Reform

Understanding by Design, one more go

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I have so far written three posts about understanding by design. The first is about my  issues about DepEd’s adoption of understanding by design (UbD), the second is about the information posted about UbD Philippines in WikiPilipinas and the third is about curriculum change and UbD. These posts are very popular especially for readers from the Philippines. This is understandable as our Department of Education wants teachers to implement UbD this June 2010, barely two months from now. I don’t know if there’s a training out there about UbD for our public school teachers. Maybe they will have one, a week before the school year starts this June.

Is this backward or forward design?

Anyway, I am writing this post because some readers land on this blog searching for things like “how to teach algebra using UbD”, “teaching integers the UbD way”, etc. I don’t know if they are just looking for lesson plans using UbD which they will never find in this blog or there’s a misconception out there that UbD is a way of teaching. It is not. It is more a way of planning your lesson rather than how to teach your lesson. In fact the only difference that I see between UbD and the current way of planning the lesson is in the format, not in the way you will actually teach the lesson. UbD says theirs uses backward design. In this model you start with thinking on how you will assess understanding before selecting and organizing your learning activities.  For lack of term, let’s call the traditional method forward design. In this model you think about how you will assess understanding after selecting and organizing your learning activities. In both models of course you start with your learning goals. In UbD it’s called enduring understanding, in the traditional one it is called objectives.

I attended an international conference on science and mathematics teaching a few months ago. One of the parallel session presenter reported her research which compares the use of UbD way of planning the lesson and their so called usual way of planning the lesson for science. She said the class taught using UbD performed better than the one taught using the traditional one. So I asked why is that? She said that it’s because the class taught using UbD used inquiry-based teaching and the class taught using the traditional lesson plan format was taught by lecture method. So I asked further: In your country’s traditional way of planning the lesson, is it not possible to organize the lesson using inquiry-based teaching and teach it that way. She said, “of course we can, and we do. It depends upon the teacher”. There you go. Backward or forward design,  it’s still the teaching and not the format nor the way the lesson plan is prepared that spells the difference in learning.

Posted in Curriculum Reform, Mathematics education

Curriculum change and Understanding by Design, what are they solving?

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Not many teachers make an issue about curriculum framework or standards in this part of the globe. The only time I remember teachers raised an issue about it was in 1989, when the mathematics curriculum moved from compartmentalized (elem. algebra, intermediate algebra, geometry, adv. algebra & statistics) to spiral-integrated approach. The reason behind the change was the poor performance of the students. Many teachers didn’t like the change in the beginning not only because it’s the first time that the mathematics curriculum is organized that way, hence new, but also because it demands re-learning other areas of mathematics which they have not taught for years.  Also, teachers were not taught mathematics in high school nor in college that way. But the curriculum was pushed through just the same and eventually teachers complaints about it died down. Why? No one knows. They just continue teaching what they know in the way they think best.

Sometime in late 2001 or was it 2002, the then secretary of DepEd made a phone call to one of the country’s math education consultants. The country’s students seem not getting any better. Something’s got to be done about it. So one day, in 2002, the country’s basic math community woke up with a new curriculum, back to the compartmentalized system. The identified culprit according to the sponsor of the compartmentalized curriculum was that teachers are not that capable yet to implement the spiral-integrated curriculum that is why the still low students’ achievement. Clearly teachers need upgrading in their content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge and they need a lot of support resources for teaching.  The solution made to this problem? Change the curriculum. In fact not only to change it back to where it was but DepEd reduced the content further to minimum competencies consisting of learning of facts and procedures, a sprinkling of problem solving and an inch thick of content for mathematics. Did the teachers like it? Did it work? No one knows. They just continue teaching what they know in the way they think best.

It’s 2010. The minimum learning competencies lived up to its name. It provided minimum knowledge and skills. The students’ achievements did not get any better.

By June this year, the Math 1 (Year 7) teachers will be making their lesson plans based on UbD. UbD or Understanding by Design is the title of a book which proposes a new way of doing curriculum planning. In the school level, its in the way the teachers will be preparing their lesson plans. UbD is based on backward design. The main difference between backward design and the usual way of writing the lesson plan is that you spend time first formulating how you will assess the students based on your identified goals (aka enduring understanding and essential questions using UbD lingo) before thinking about the activity you will provide the class and how you will facilitate the learning.  I’ve yet to see and read a report from the proponents and users of UbD for evidence that it really works. And working in what aspect? in which subject area? and, whether it is better than the usual way teachers prepare their lesson plan?  Some schools who have tried it reported that at first, teachers had a lot of difficulty in making a UbD-based plan but they eventually got the hang of it. Are they teaching any better? Are the students doing well? Silence. I’m asking the wrong questions. For indeed, a great distance exist between way of preparing lesson plans and students’ achievement. So why are schools all over the country mandated to adopt UbD? I don’t know.

But this is what I know.  I know that teachers need support in upgrading and updating their knowledge of content and pedagogy.  I know that teachers teach what they know in the way they know.  These are things that cannot be addressed by simply changing the curriculum or changing the way of preparing the lesson plan, much more its format. The book The Teaching Gap which reports the TIMSS 1999 video study tells us what we should focus our attention and resources more on:

“Standards [curriculum] set the course, and assessments provide the benchmarks, but it is teaching that must be improved to push us along the path to success” (Stigler & Hiebert, The Teaching Gap, p.92).

I couldn’t agree more to this statement. I’m not very good at memorizing so to commit it to memory I paraphrased Stigler & Hiebert’s statement to: It’s the teaching, stupid.

Click here for my other post about UbD.