FOR the past eight years, the quality of teachers in the country is experiencing a continuous decline as reflected in the Board Licensure Examination for Professional Teachers (BLEPT). Concerned agencies must act with a sense of urgency, Philippine Business for Education (PBEd) said.
Citing data from the Professional Regulation Commission, the private sector-led advocacy group shared in a recent press forum a list of consistently poor performing teacher education institutions (TEIs).
“The exam itself needs to be reformed. We must open it up to validity testing and item analysis, involve TEIs in test development, and revive the three-strike rule for takers,” PBEd Executive Director Love Basillote said.
With at least half of TEIs across the country performing below the national passing rate, Basillote urged for greater accountability, especially among government-funded TEIs. Moreover, the education advocacy group said the pursuit of cleansing measure includes closing down 22 TEIs consistently scoring below the 20-percent mark, of which 13 have zero overall passing rates.
PBEd also offered longer-term solutions in teacher development. One is selective TEI admissions for only the top 20 percent of the graduating high-school batch to enter teacher-education programs. Another is portfolio-based training and certification, where students and teachers build their competencies and expertise through a lifelong system of credentialing, as is the case in top-performing countries like Singapore and Finland.
Meanwhile, the Department of Education (DepEd) urged TEIs to implement learner-centered approaches in developing the country’s future educators, stressing quality teachers are the bulwark of quality education.
“There will be no change in the classrooms, in education, if the teacher themselves do not know how to use project-based learning, learner-centered activities and 21st-century skills. If you want the teachers to engage basic-education students, they must be 100-percent engaged as well,” DepEd Undersecretary for Curriculum and Instruction Lorna Dig-Dino said in a recent roundtable held in Makati City.
Dig-Dino said TEIs must discard lecture-type discussions because it does not bring positive learning results.
Fe Hidalgo, consultant of Knowledge Channel Education, called for the development of “specialist teachers” in the elementary level, especially in mathematics, science and reading.
Hidalgo also urged the DepEd, the Center for Higher Education (CHEd), and other concerned institutions to identify the loopholes that must be addressed in the teacher-training programs.
CHEd education program specialist Ericson Reyes said it would need several years to overhaul the current teacher-education program as it has been only developed in recent years.
“When the teacher-education curriculum was drafted, the PPST was not the only standard considered. There were other standards, which we needed to consider like the ICT [information and communications technology] competency standards. So, maybe, the group might share with us the studies for future reference for the review of our program standards and guidelines,” Reyes said.