Teacher Training: The X Factor

Lina B. Diaz de Rivera

Time and again, the DepEd sends scores of teachers to participate in training programs. It might be during the regular school year, it might be on weekends, it might be in the same barangay where they had always taught or they might be sent farther way, out of the country to avail of foreign-based training venues; but most of the time, they are trained in the capital cities or municipalities when school is out and summer is here. Time and again, the feedback coming from the field is that these teacher trainees, the cream of the crop, the top of the heap, the kings of the hill do not seem to be able to make headway, toward the improvement of teaching and, consequently the improvement of school progress. I suppose there are as many reasons you could cite as there are participants in this hall. I should like to offer my two centavos worth of opinion regarding this strange, bitter, and expensive irony.
1

Shared at the Leadership Seminar sponsored by the Reading Association of the Philippines (RAP) Pearl Hotel, January, 2006.

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One, the teacher trainees are swallowed up by the system that wishes to reward them. How is that again? They are very good teachers and natural leaders so, they are taken out of the classroom. Just when these returning scholars and grantees are ripened and honed and streamlined as teachers, they are kept far away from the students and other ordinary, less endowed colleagues because they deserve to be taken out of the rut. They are given jobs with fancy titles. They are made to assist some big boss by acting as his or her speech or lecture writer. They are given every other job but the one job they were trained for: to teach. So, what happens to the home school? It is still making do with mediocre teachers left to develop more mediocre minds. (As an aside, the added issue of how the system has lost all good teachers who have left the schoolroom to be at call centers, human resource training centers or worse have entered Italy or Singapore illegally in order to work as domestics.) The preceeding might sound like a sweepimg judgement but the long and short of it is this: when a teacher is deemed good, she is not made to just teach. She is made to do every other task BUT teach. Second, the returning teacher trainees may have been given the chance to create a difference in their place of work but what they have to share are exact carbon copies of what they were exposed to back in the city. Is that bad? It is, when the teacher trainee uses the prototype materials like a crutch. But arent these prototype materials child tested and truly great? Yes, they are, but the returning teacher trainee usually parrots and copies the lesson plans explained to them. They copy the ideal plans verbatim but in the light of what we have observed they would copy without understanding. Dr. Felicitas Prado and I and most of the members of the RAP Board have given countless lectures and demonstrations all over the country. We have observed in the course of our sharing and interaction with even the best of the teacher trainees through over a fourth of a century, that after each session, they would run after us for copies not only of the exemplars we used (for they had been given these earlier as handouts) but also every bit of the devices we had employed. Asked why they had to do this, they would readily reply that they needed every morsel of our lecture for the echoing they are expected to deliver when they returned to their places of work.

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Fine. But they do not seem to understand that for as long as the lecture or demonstration was internalized, it would take only transfer of knowledge for them to produce a similar lesson plan plus necessary devices OF THEIR OWN. Just because Dr. Pado used A Very Hungry Catterpillar to show that a reading lesson can cut across several content areas like simple math, science and health does not mean they will be using A Very Hungry Catterpillar forever. Just because I used The Kings Picture to show the integration of literature teaching and the use of correct grammar points does not mean it will be The Kings Picture from here to eternity.

Theories and paradigm when properly understood would enable a true, scholarly teacher to apply their implications everytime they sit down and prepare a reading lesson for the day with or without the help of examples. When truly understood, a training concept will be dealt with in every reading material used in the classroom a story, a poem or an essay of any type. But stay, we have beeen talking about the failure of inservice training, really.

What I am actually expected to share with you is what had been done at the CHED in order to improve the PRE SERVICE training of the teachers. For it is believed that the best time to train our teachers is from the very beginning. Most of the time inservice teaching is far too late in the game. I was part of a group TEI (Teacher Education Institutions) to see what may be done about the BEEd and BSEd Curricula. The CMO Number 30 Series of 2004 contains all the wonderful revisions made by the experts in the field in order to create a more realistic program of studies for future teachers. I shall dwell on the teaching of reading only, it being the area I got deeply involved in.

The trouble with the old general assumption regarding the teaching of reading was the wrong premise that all the teachers of English Communication Arts CAN teach reading. Nothing of course was farther from then truth. Reading is such a complex process and such a fundamental skill that to approach it with a cavalier attitude is very dangerous, indeed. For about a decade since I first ventured on this, I have made random samplings of the 1000 or so TEIs in the country. My study has shown that less than 10 of the TEIs offer courses beyond developmental reading. Institutions like the Bicol University, Saint Marys in Bayombong and San Jose Recoletos in Cebu plus Roosevelt College in Marikina are among those who ventured beyond DR. They offer such courses as diagnosis and remediation as well as development of reading programs but not one of those offered Teaching Beginning Reading. As far as my
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survey is concerned only PNU and the UP College of Education offer a full blown reading program that includes Teaching Beginning Reading. In UP, undergraduates take EDR 169, a tutorial clinical approach that combines theory and apprenticeship. After initial lectures on the Four Pronged Approach which the area has evolved for years, the students observe and assist a cooperating teacher till the middle of the semester. Afterwards, the rest of the term which would amount to eight weeks, allow the student apprentice to slowly, prong by prong, take on the teachers role. Many of our graduates return to give us feedback after a year and they are one in saying how confident they had been in helping the young learners break the code and develop a lasting devotion to reading. That EDR 169 helped them the most as neophyte teachers.

What about the rest of the TEIs? Well, they had Development Reading, all right but looking at their old syllabus, it sought NOT to teach them how to teach reading but to REVIEW or REDEVELOP their own reading skills. That is not a bad idea, but that does not prepare the future teacher for tackling the business of teaching reading. The acetate shows you the revised content of DR1 for BEEd students.

We still retain the nomenclature Developmental Reading for DR 1 and 2. Only the contents are enriched or totally different:

The DR 1 is something we have envisioned to hone the teachers skills in reading as well as to introduce them to the nature of the reading process. Skills in reading means to teach them how to read narratives, essays or poetry, the three types of literature they are most likely to meet in the textbooks that thay are expected to use. The first semester will focus on this. The materials chosen must be well-selected and will ensure the development of their lasting love for reading.

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They will be made to read poems such as will follow such that they will appreciate the pleasant rhythm of words, envision the word pictures framed in every stanza and feel akin to the persona whose voice is heard here: I cannot love thee with a love that out compares the boundless sea. For no such love and no such ocean could ever be. But I shall love thee with a love as finite as the wave that dies And dying, holds from crest to crest, the blue of everlasting skies. Given the honed sensibility produced by good reading, it would be easy for the teacher to unfold the enjoyment thats there to indulge in when reading to the children such verses as this: Some people talk and talk and never say a thing. Some people look at you and birds begin to sing. Some people laugh and laugh and yet you want to cry. Some people touch your hand and music fills the sky. The second part of the semester for DR 1 will introduce the future teacher to the psychology of reading. Some factors that make success or failure in reading are also covered such that when they go into DR 2, it would be easier to grasp the philosophy of the 4 pronged approach. DR 2 therefore is similar to EDR 169 at the UP College of Education. The BSEd students will also be made to take up DR 1 but they will not have to take DR 2 as this is tailored for elementary school teachers. We proposed a different stream for the BSEd but this was not included in the new curriculum. It would have trained the future teacher to diagnose reading problems and to design intervention programs to help the low achieving learner. But the CHED probably thought such skills could be taken up in the graduate level and will help create a stable of reading specialists which we hope would acquire a career track in the near future. The RAP can be very instrumental in seeking a place in the sun for the reading specialist or the reading clinician. Theres still hope for the future teacher of reading which will redound to the development of young readers who will learn to develop critical thinking skills and more extraordinary ways of looking at the most ordinary things. Such a mind is seen in this little poem which I shall use to close this sharing with you.

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New Sights I like to see a thing I know Has not been seen before, Thats why I cut my apple through To look into the core. Its nice to think, though many an eye Has seen the ruddy skin. Mine is the very first to spy The five brown pips within. Let us hope that given the new avenues for the training of teachers in teaching reading, we may indeed develop young minds capable of perceiving new sights.

Reference: CHED Memorandum #30, Series of 2004, Commission on Higher Education, Pasig City MM

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