There are about half a million teachers toiling away in our 42,000 public schools today. They are tasked with meeting the learning needs of roughly 20 million students throughout the country. As such, in this instance and without exaggeration whatsoever, a teacher’s work is never really done.
If being a public school teacher is an unenviable job, then being the principal is probably a thankless one. Just thinking of all the acronyms you have to remember will make your head hurt. There’s the NETRC’s NAT and the MPS that you need to discuss with your SDS who has to meet with the RD. You worry about your MOOE and if any portion of the SEF from the LGU would go your school’s way.
NAT, of course, is the annual National Achievement Test designed and administered by the National Education Testing and Research Center (NETRC). The results of the test are represented as Mean Percentage Scores. The Schools Division Superintendent (SDS) and the Regional Director (RD) are local officials of the Department of Education. Schools have Maintenance and Other Operating Expenditures (MOOE) while the Local Government Unit (LGU) has a Special Education Fund (SEF) derived from 1 percent of the total collected Real Estate Tax.
On a daily basis, the school head has to lead her faculty through an unbelievable number of administrative, interpersonal and instructional issues. Some issues are easy to resolve, and some are difficult. All of these detract from any school’s raison d’ étre: to promote a culture of lifelong learning in both the teachers and the students.
The Foundation for Worldwide People Power’s Mentoring the Mentors Program (MMP) is very popular among school heads because one of the first things they do in the sessions is to systematically find—and break—the barriers to learning. Mentors do this reflexively, but it is a learned ability rather than an innate one.
Two years ago, retired Butuan City superintendent Dr. Eden Omboy—the FWWPP’s MMP coordinator for Mindanao—organized a full-scale Mentoring the Mentors session for the Bukidnon Province Schools Division. One of the participants was the unassuming but quite intense school head of Alanib Elementary School (AES) in Lantapan. The principal—quite appropriately named Sunny Ray Amit—identified a number of serious issues that he believed hampered his school from reaching its true potential. To begin with, AES’ 2006 NAT scores were dismal, to put it mildly. His teachers invariably pointed to resource gaps (i.e., lack of good instructional materials), inadequate teacher training and the overall workload as the collective culprit. Sunny Ray himself observed that his teachers seemed indifferent to the challenge of improving learning outcomes. To complicate matters, the Parent Teacher Community Association itself was virtually dysfunctional. As the school head, Sunny Ray had to find a way to change all that.
After the Mentoring the Mentors sessions, Sunny Ray knew what he had to do. As an initial output of the MMP sessions, every participant drafts an Action Plan for his own school. Sunny Ray brought his back to AES and buckled down to work.
He opened up channels of communication and did everything he could to impress upon the faculty and the school community that the challenges could be met if they worked together. Quite soon, Sunny Ray’s unwavering commitment began to resonate throughout the school community. His teachers began to look at test results as indicators of mastery rather than as goals. The parents began to understand that acquiring a good education meant more opportunities for their children and so they started to give more attention to helping AES in whatever way they could. Their collective efforts did not go unnoticed. AES became one of the beneficiaries of the Department of Education’s Adopt-A-School Program through the Corporate Social Responsibility initiative of Chiquita Unifrutti Philippines (CUP). In his progress report to CUP, Sunny Ray wrote that AES’ NAT scores for 2007 went up to 62.62 percent from 42 percent in 2006, which is indeed very significant. More importantly, Sunny Ray says that today, the AES teaching staff is “more goal-oriented.” From teacher, Sunny Ray is now a mentor.
Dr. Eve Mejillano, MMP national coordinator, says that in the context of the education discipline, the road to being a mentor is not a haphazard one. In fact, this journey has distinct stages of development. The transition from teacher to mentor begins with the framing of a carefully considered personal development plan. The mentor-to-be then puts his teaching strategies to the test to objectively assess their effectivity. Then, the teacher starts to self-manage his learning. The transformation continues when the school head and the teachers start exchanging views and insights while sharing successes and setbacks. Intuitively, the teachers have created an atmosphere of mutual learning.
Dr. Eve Mejillano never tires of reminding participating school heads that a mentor is a special kind of teacher. “A mentor does not just teach us how to read books, or write paragraphs or solve math problems. He or she empowers us to deal with life itself.”
Butch Hernandez (butchhernandez@gmail.com) is the executive director of The Foundation for Worldwide People Power.
