More time for teachers

In 2009, two astronauts from Nasa visited the Philippines and invited several schools to a career talk. During their presentation, they showed the different flags representing the nationalities of the astronauts who have been to space, and pointed out that there was no Philippine flag yet. Benz, one of the Mano Amiga kindergarten students, raised his hand and declared, “I’m going to be the first Filipino astronaut.”

Last Friday, Benz graduated from senior high school along with 17 other scholars. Now 18 years old, he still remembers his childhood dream but his heart is set on a new goal: He wants to pursue a degree in education and hopes to return to Mano Amiga as a science or English teacher. He said he was inspired by how his teachers constantly made sure that none of his classmates fell behind in school. By teaching, he could help others receive the same opportunity he did.

A child’s likelihood to succeed later in life is largely influenced by the quality of the education they had access to. As Plato had described in the “Allegory of the Cave,” to be educated is to be liberated from the shackles of ignorance. Having a good education opens up opportunities; and with it, the ability to break from the limitations imposed by one’s personal circumstances, and the freedom to chart one’s own path.

Alarmingly, despite past efforts to improve our education system, a huge number of Filipino children are still unable to meet basic skills. In 2022, the World Bank reported that the Philippines has a 90.9-percent learning poverty among school-going children. This means that even if the students are enrolled in school, majority are still unable to read and understand what they’re reading at 10 years old. This is a crucial setback with long-term consequences: Lack of reading proficiency hinders a child from gaining both the foundational and higher level knowledge they need to grasp and progress in other subjects.

Part of the solution is to allocate more resources. The Philippines has the lowest per pupil expenditure compared to those in other Asean countries. As several experts have pointed out, however, other neighboring countries, whose government expenditure per student is not significantly higher than ours, have much less learning poverty rates than we do. The World Bank highlighted that there is also a need for what it referred to as “better learning.” This entails revisiting current education practices and identifying why is it that the time spent in school by Filipino children is not translating into the acquisition of key skills and capabilities, and how we could address those gaps.

Perhaps one key issue that local schools need to address is not that our teachers are doing too little, but that they are doing too much. In Finland, teachers spend fewer hours in the classroom compared to other countries. This enables them to allot more time to develop tailored learning programs and assessments for their students. Part of their philosophy is that standardized exams may be good for benchmarking, but they cannot compare to the nuanced understanding that teachers have about the different factors affecting a child’s performance. By shifting to a less prescriptive curriculum and removing the pressure to teach according to what will come out in an exam, Finnish teachers have more autonomy and flexibility to meet students at the level they are at. Amazingly enough, the unintended impact of these changes is that they now consistently top Programme for International Student Assessment rankings.

Not all of Finland’s education reforms are applicable to the Philippine setting but I do believe there is merit in reflecting how we could use teachers’ time more efficiently. In practice, this could be lessening the required forms and reports they need to fill out, or having less stringent curriculum requirements and a lighter teaching load. This way, teachers will have more bandwidth for planning instruction and creating more responsive student-centered strategies. Teachers could focus more on adapting their lessons to student needs, employing individualized formative assessments that lead to more frequent and timely feedback, and introducing additional learning interventions whenever necessary.

I cannot claim to have all the solutions for such a complex and multilayered problem, but I do wish to share Benz’s insight on what enabled him to thrive in school even in moments when the odds seemed to be stacked against him: He felt he could always ask his teachers for help. Whenever he and his classmates struggled with a challenge — whether related to academics or not — their teachers readily gave their attention and support. For a teacher, every second holds within it the potential to shape another person’s future. We should enable them to use it more wisely.

eleanor@shetalksasia.com