Neither breadth nor depth
The Department of Education (DepEd) is proceeding with the shift to a trimestral calendar for the next school year as approved by President Marcos. Lately, DepEd has had a revolving door of big curricular changes that I imagine must be hard for students and their parents to keep up with. This change also seems especially rushed: no pilot testing was conducted, and consultations started only last January. As of now, DepEd has yet to release the implementing guidelines, even though the school year is only three months away. Public school teachers once again bear the brunt of actualizing the whims of the central agency’s higher-ups, while students will ultimately be the ones to suffer from a poorly done implementation.
To clarify, DepEd’s trimestral school calendar is a three-term calendar, where students have three grading periods instead of the traditional quarterly system. The start and end of the school year remain the same, so the summer break is preserved. This is different from the trimestral system employed by other schools, which uses the full year to divide the three terms. This shift, then, does not significantly add more learning days. It also does not change the coverage of topics in an academic year but distributes them among three terms rather than four. It might, perhaps, lessen the number of assessments, though how much a student has to study overall should remain the same.
If that isn’t enough change, we are also facing a new senior high school curriculum in June. The “strengthened” curriculum reduces streams to two, academic and technical-professional, and cuts down the core subjects from 15 to five.
DepEd must realize that every change comes with a cost. It is not okay to keep changing the rules, especially for children. Each change, whether well-meaning or effective, is a disruption. Children thrive best with consistency and predictability. We must ensure that children transition smoothly. This can be done through adequate orientation, allowing them to express their concerns and ask questions. When children understand why change must happen, they are more likely to accept it.
Support and resources need to be on hand when unintended consequences arise. For example, they need to be ready to support a learner who will struggle with the new calendar, such as those who have difficulty studying for a wider coverage of topics per test. They need to anticipate misalignment with the parents’ work and vacation schedules. A lot of these can be prevented with adequate pilot testing, which they did not do.
We also need to think beyond students’ fatigue; we need to be able to determine whether such a calendar change helps a student learn better. More than just acing a test, we should want to see if students are able to think deeper and handle more complex concepts and problems. We need to see if the learners are learning to learn. Are they able to apply a strategy to their studying? Do they have enough self-awareness to know when they need to rest and when they need to power through? Do they feel safe and confident enough to ask for more help and support? Do they yearn for challenge and enjoy having mastered something? Placing a premium on these metrics will not only improve learning outcomes but also have a more lifelong beneficial impact. When children learn to learn, they are less dependent on the variable skills of their teachers. It will matter less what they are being taught and more what they are learning.
DepEd also seems to like policies that remove or reduce subjects and content. Each new curriculum births a new “Frankenstein” of a subject. They seem to think that mashing subjects together would somehow save time and stress. It would have made sense if we were reducing the breadth of learning to gain more depth. But there is also no depth in their proposed curriculum. Like a butterfly flitting from one flower to the next, they make students lightly touch one concept after another, with no time for these ideas to germinate. Integration of subjects also first requires the mastery of each one. Many crucial mistakes happen when people skip the basics. Worse, we won’t even notice our mistakes and are left wondering why students still fail to learn.
Integrated subjects also require better teachers. When before, teachers would focus on mastering one subject, now they have to teach subjects that cover five or more disciplines. They can only teach what they know, and so it would be no surprise if teaching gets reduced to a rehashing of the textbook, and they are unable to guide students to think deeper.
Teaching is not content delivery. DepEd’s policies have long treated teachers as mere implementers of a standardized curriculum, which is why their policies feel top-down. What they don’t seem to emphasize enough are the mastery and skills needed to be facilitators of learning. Teachers need adequate transition and support, too. What good is a three-term calendar if teachers are still overworked, underpaid, and poorly trained?
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aatuazon@up.edu.ph
