Redefining Teacher Training for Twenty-First Century

Keynote Address
International Conference on Teacher Education
Manila Hotel, Philippines
January 9, 2001

Distinguished guests and resource persons,

Fellow educators,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

 

It is with an unusual sense of anticipation and nervousness that I approach the podium this morning. It is true that giving speeches is not new to me, for one of the occupational hazards of my previous job with UNESCO was having to both give many speeches, some good and some bad, and to listen to many more, some useful, others useless.. But today I stand here for the first time in more than ten years speaking, not as an international diplomat of the United Nations, but as a private Filipino citizen. And today I speak on a topic, teacher education, that as I will try to show, is more important now than it has ever been.

I have returned home at a crucial time in the history of our country. And it is my deep concern for our country that has made me abandon my usual presentation style of international comparative analysis and statistical visual presentations to speak to you today from the heart.

This is neither the time nor the place, nor am I the person, to provide you with a political analysis of the current torrents besetting our nation. But as I reflected on the theme of teacher education for this conference, and on what I might usefully contribute to that theme, I saw the fundamental link between what we will be discussing over the next few days and the crisis gripping out country. Let me explain.

Like many of you, I sense that the impeachment process has brought to light the ills of our society, not just among our leadership, but also in the very fabric of our society itself. Yes, we are all mesmerized by how the harsh spotlight of the impeachment spectacle has brought out the character, foibles, strengths and weakness of our leaders, our senators, our government officials, even our opposition leaders. But I am more concerned about how this same spotlight is casting long shadows on the ordinary people of this land. True, there are brave witnesses and those among us who sincerely participate in the democratic process with patriotism and altruism. But many participants in all camps have too many ulterior or selfish motives. And even many more fellow Filipinos throughout the country remain uninvolved or uninterested or uncommitted.

Listen to the jeepney drivers, store clerks, lavanderas, street vendors, office messengers, factory workers, farmers and fishermen: "eh, ser, away lang yan mg mayaman, labas kami diyan," "ang mananalo po diyan ay hindi yung tama o yung mali,, pero yung may pera," "wala naman po kaming puwedeng gawin tungkol diyan," "pagbiyan na lang natin siya, mabait naman, pogi pa, atsaka bingiyan pa ng lupa and tiyo ko," "kung nasa poder din ako, e di magpapayaman din ako." There is a sense that this is a battle among the rich, with whom they do not identify. There is a sense of helplessness that there is nothing they can do about it anyway, or worse, a sense of moral fatigue, which allows them to tolerate the intolerable, to let evil go unchecked (or even participate in the evil) because they are too busy eking out their own survival in these hard times. In a perverse way, both extreme poverty and extreme wealth ultimately define their own distorted versions of morality, of what is good and what is bad.

Clearly a nation cannot prosper, or indeed long survive, with a citizenry drained of moral fiber and driven to helplessness, despair, indifference and ultimately moral bankruptcy. Clearly, if our nation is to develop and prosper, a fundamental shift in the mindset of its citizens is imperative. And this is where I see the link to teacher education.

I apologize in advance if I give you this overly pessimistic perception: I have given up hope that the fundamental mindset of the present generation of Filipinos will ever change. There is too much historical baggage, too many dangerous role models around us, too many counterproductive media messages, too many unresponsive structures, too little incentive to change, and too much poverty that militates against it. My hope will rest and must rest on the next generation.

The problem is that, as I visit schools and see the next generation being prepared, I see that teachers are preparing them in exactly the same way this present generation was prepared, with the same curriculum, the same implicit value and reward systems, the same approaches that produced the present citizens and the present leadership. So the next generation will be the same! Teachers continue to provide their students with the tools of the past, blindly assuming that what these teachers were taught and how they were taught should be good enough for the future. Nothing could be more dangerously mistaken. It has been said, "The future is not what it used to be." But today's teachers are themselves products of this generation and this society, affected by and indeed part of the damaged fabric of our society.

Which brings me to the link and to my main point: If we are to create a renewed Philippine society, and if we have to depend on the next generation to make it happen, we cannot afford to have the same type of education, specifically the same type of teacher that we had in the past. We have to break down and throw away the old mold and paradigms and refashion the teacher for the future. And that is squarely the responsibility of the teacher educators, and the teacher training institutions of this land. The progress or decline of our country will largely depend on how you carry out this responsibility.

I am sorry if all this sounds too rhetorical and philosophical. I will try and translate this into practical suggestions.

Let me start with my recent experience with the Philippine Presidential Commission on Education Reform, which I had the privilege and responsibility of chairing. Part of my responsibility was to provide the international context to see how the Philippine educational system was doing, compared to the education systems of our neighboring countries in Asia, and with those of other developing countries throughout the world. Among the more interesting findings were the facts that the Philippines had a general education cycle of only 10 years (6 years elementary and 4 years secondary), while most others had 11 or 12-year cycles. By contrast, the Philippine elementary education teachers had more years of schooling and preparation than their counterparts in other countries; whereas most teachers elsewhere have only a year or two or preparation after secondary schooling, Philippine teachers generally have to complete a four year college degree in education, and in addition hurdle a difficult national licensure examination.

On paper then, the Philippine teacher seems professionally superior to his or her counterpart in other countries. But a look at their products, the graduates of their schools, reveals that their students have not performed as well, and certainly have not come together to form a cohesive, productive society.

The PCER working committee on teacher development came up with several studies to analyze this situation; various types of needs analysis were conducted. The findings reveal that whereas our teachers are well prepared and competent in those areas dealing with mastery of subject matter and the pedagogy for these, they are severely unprepared in what the PCER committee identified as four Key Result Areas (KRAs): 1. critical analysis and creative thinking; 2. the fostering of reading and comprehension; 3. familiarity with instructional technology, and 4. solid grounding in values education. In other words, the Filipino teacher is good at teaching arithmetic, or social studies, or grammar, but not as good in fostering creative diversity in students, using the latest learning technologies, developing reading and analytical skills, or most importantly seeing to it that their students stride into the future with the values and attitudes that make them upright, productive, responsible, caring and peace-loving citizens of the future.

The PCER has therefore recommended a decentralized, division based, but nationwide in-service teacher competence strengthening program in these four key result areas. It would be wise for teacher training institutions to collaborate closely with this nationwide in-service effort and to examine their own pre-service programs and evaluate to what extent these four key result areas are imbedded or are missing in them.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let me take a step back and look at education in general. On many previous occasions I have tried to emphasize that the quick changing nature of both global and national environments and the potential problems looming large in our future demand no less than a fundamental revamp of what we teach and how we teach. If we are to prepare our students for the future, we must be aware of what this future looks like, even as it is taking shape before us. The advent of globalization and the explosion of information and communication technology are shrinking the world, yes, but they are also tearing it apart, as that unwelcome partner of globalization, namely polarization, is making this a world where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Research has shown that in the first few decades of free market propagation and global interchange, gross incomes did indeed rise across the board. But from the late seventies, globalization has made rich countries richer and poor ones poorer; more than that, even in the developing and tiger economies that originally benefited, the rich within those countries have become richer and the poor poorer. Now 20% of the world's rich control 80% of the world's wealth, and it will get worse. Technology has also exacerbated the digital divide, widening the gap between the info rich and the info poor. And the global social problems of HIV-AIDS, poverty and malnutrition, ethnic conflict and violence, and a continuing degradation of the planet's environment have not been adequately and systematically addressed. And how do we prepare our students to face all of that? We continue to teach the same old subjects in the same old way. And we evaluate our students according to the same old tests. I understand the speakers of future plenary sessions will locate teacher education reform in the context of globalization and the information revolution, and thus help us reshape our programs.

Let me illustrate this in another way. Those of you who have attended school reunions recently will bear me out when I say that often those who succeeded and did best after school were not the valedictorians or summa cum laudes of the class. More often they were those who handled the school paper, the class clowns, the athletes, the school activiss. All the book knowledge of the valedictorian did not serve him or her as well as the student reporter's talent for finding out important things, or the student leader's way of managing conflicting and diverse inputs, or the athlete's dedication to be the best he or she could be, or the activist's love of country, or even the class clown's ability to understand people, get along with them and make them laugh. These were the ingredients for success, not a knowledge of the historical dates of Balintawak or the Malolos Constitution, or the ability to multiply mixed fractions, or familiarity with the chemical table. And yet schools seem to focus on the latter as goals, rather than the former. When you leave school you are evaluated, tested and honored on the latter rather than on the former. I am not saying that we should stop teaching the traditional subjects of arithmetic, social science, grammar, and so on. But I am reminding us all that these are means to discipline and sharpen the student's mind, which indeed they can and do, and not ends in themselves. And looking at the traditional subjects as means rather than as ends logically translates into a fundamental rethinking of the education curriculum.

Educators around the world are saying more and more, in different ways, that education that is needed today is far more than just the transmission and storing of information, it is, in the words of UNESCO's Delors Commission report, not just learning to know, but "learning to do, learning to be, and learning to live together." Measured by these yardsticks, how do our standard curricula succeed or fail in these fostering these domains?

All too often, faculty committees and technical panels involved is so called curriculum revision end up tinkering with details of the curriculum instead of tackling fundamental reform. Typical discussions revolve around whether to teach geometry first of trigonometry first, or whether to include the chemical table in the first semester or the second semester. No one talks about whether we should continue to teach the chemical table at all, or whether we should introduce new subjects, such as garbage disposal principles or urban environmental protection instead. It reminds me somewhat of the waiters on the Titanic who worried during the last meal whether the silverware was in the proper sequence even as the entire ship was about to go down.

But attempts to fundamentally reform curricula do exist, and can provide useful lessons. I can cite a few examples where a program of study has departed from the traditional organization into the subjects of reading, writing, arithmetic, and so on. (Cite the examples of the Australian experience of organizing around the four Delors pillars, the Jilin example of its three level curriculum, the L.A. inner city school configuration of circles of concern, the Ethiopian example of community learning centers, finally the Philippine example of IQ, DQ, EQ, and SQ.)

Ladies and gentlemen,

Today I would like to apply this approach to teacher education in particular. In similar fashion the teachers in our school systems who turn out to be the most effective are not necessarily the ones who got the highest grades in their normal schools. Even the ones with the greatest grasp of their subject matter are not necessarily the ones who most influenced and shaped the education and character of their students, and best prepared them for the future. Looking back on my own student days, and you can look back on yours too, the teachers that most influenced and shaped me were not those who best understood subject matter, but those who best understood me, and cared for me. In this fast changing culture, a teacher who does not really understand the young, their music, their lingo, their dreams and aspirations, their role models, who does not realize and appreciate how differently they think from the way we do, why they dress and act and interact with each other the way they do, such a teacher cannot hope to be an effective teacher. Now does the BSE and BSEE program of studies in our schools help future teachers understand all of this?

I also remember my best teachers as the ones who challenged me with high goals, and yet did not spoon-feed me or stifle my initiative and creativity, allowing me to make mistakes and learn from them, respecting diversity within my class. Do our teacher training programs develop teachers who have this facility? Or on the contrary is the entire teacher education process imbedded in conformity and uniformity?

In my observation visits to schools and learning projects in over fifty countries throughout the world over the past decade, I have always been inspired and humbled by the steady dedication of classroom teachers. Interestingly, I have discovered many outstanding teachers who have performed with a far greater degree of success than their peers. The sad part of my discovery is that I often find that this success or innovation is not recognized or replicated for the benefit of the system. (Cite the examples of Rajastan and Sorsogon..) I have always envied the few Ministries I have visited that have an institutionalized mechanism for spotting innovations in the field, evaluating them, and if good, propagating and institutionalizing them.

And what do we have in the Philippines? One cynical colleague said we too have a system for spotting innovations. and then squelching them. We have a supervision system through our division academic supervisors, but it seems their concern is to promote conformity rather than innovation. "Why did you not follow the prescribed curriculum?" "Why is the lesson plan not in the prescribed format?" or even, "Why are you not in uniform?" Running a school system, like running any organization, requires management and discipline, but in the case of an educational system, it also requires supportive and positive academic supervision. Can we change this culture of conformity? Are we training future teachers and supervisors in our normal schools today to change this culture?

Our teacher training curricula could perhaps deal less with regulations on administration of schools and more with innovative practices that really work. I would love to see, for example, a course on secret pedagogical techniques which catapulted to success the ten most outstanding teachers awarded yearly by Metrobank. More systematically, I would love to see, coming out of this conference, a task force or study group created to profile the characteristics and competencies of the most outstanding teachers, and then reshape the teacher training curricula to make it deliberately develop these characteristics. The four KRAs of the PCER could be just a starting point. This is needs analysis at its best.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I realize this is an opening keynote speech, and my assigned task is merely to open the themes and lay out the topics for further discussion at this conference. But I would like to think I have now gone beyond the days when I was satisfied to merely present useful insights and food for discussion. I have in the past already done plenty of that. I have accepted to speak today because I value the potential of this conference, and I see a unique opportunity to plead to people who can truly make a difference that they translate these ideas into practical and concrete actions.

So with your permission, let me draw out some practical implications.

•  In the first place, the time for a fundamental revision of the teacher training curriculum is long overdue. I am aware of course that there have been several recent attempts at the national level to do just this, but I am afraid the deliberations and proposals have been focused on the periphery rather than on the essence of this issue. I am not calling for discussions on just whether to put practice teaching in the third year of the fourth year, or whether to have three units or six units for physical education, or what new ways there are of teaching mixed fractions. Curriculum discussions that remain at this level ignore the larger societal problems that teachers and theirs students must cope with. Again, it is a bit like waiters rearranging silverware on the Titanic.

•  In the second place, teacher training institutions must lead the way in changing, not only the content of education, but also the pedagogy of education. Teacher educators are the best, and in fact the principal, role models, for those they train to be the teachers of the future. Therefore the pedagogy of teacher trainers must exemplify and embody the desired pedagogy of the future. And here I am not talking about subject specific pedagogy, such as how to teach fractions or verb conjugations. I refer to the pedagogy of the total culture and philosophy of the classroom. Let me cite a few examples:

Those who succeed in life know that their success in not due to their individual efforts alone, but due to the success of every member of their team. This is true whether you are a school president, or the organizer of a conference such as this, or a movie director, or building contractor. If members of your team fail, no matter how good you are, your project or enterprise will fail. And yet all throughout schooling, individual effort is emphasized over team effort. For example, how many of you have used the practice of grouping your students and telling them they will not be graded on individual efforts but on the output of the team as a whole? Group grading forces the strong to help the weak and gives the weak more help to succeed. This is how it is in real life, but the pedagogy of the classroom and the grading system do little to prepare the student for it.

Another example: Did you know that up to one fourth of all Philippine classrooms outside the metropolitan areas are in fact multi-grade classrooms, with children or different ages and abilities in the same room with one teacher? And how many teacher training institutions devote any time at all, not to say one fourth of their curriculum, to training teachers to handle the very different pedagogy that this requires? No, most normal schools continue blindly assuming that their graduates will teach in urban well equipped schools with complete grades.

A final example: Not only ethnic conflicts in Mindanao, but class, political, ideological, and even religious conflicts are tearing families, communities, and our country apart. Never before has there been such a need to develop a tolerance, indeed even a respect and celebration of diversity, without giving up one's own culture and identity. And yet are the schools and the teachers by the pedagogy of the classroom promoting this respect for diversity? Or is the teacher the little dictator, who never admits to being wrong, who does not tolerate any disagreements or dissent from students, who forces them to memorize and conform ,conform, conform. And in case of dissent, is the principal or teacher quick to use force or even violence to enforce his or her way? I often wonder if the young rebels in the hills had such teachers and schools, and never saw how conflict and diversity were managed peacefully, and thus learned that the only way to get their way was to resort to force.

•  On another matter, there is a need for a more active partnership and collaboration in this country between pre-service education and in-service education. There are two sets of people (the DECS trainers on the one hand, and faculty in education colleges on the other hand), two different perspectives, and even two institutional cultures running what should be part and parcel of an integrated system. True, teacher educators may be better equipped with more time, resources and access to research and knowledge than their counterparts in in-service, but those in the field have a better grasp of what the real problems and issues are. Both can and should learn from each other. If and when DECS launches the implementation of the teacher competency program on the four KRAs recommended by PCER, this could be an excellent take-off point for greater collaboration between the academe and DECS, or more specifically, since this will be implemented in a decentralized manner, between the teacher training institutions and the school divisions in which they are located. Teacher training institutions can even take the initiative and help the division superintendents with the necessary preparatory and design work to launch this competency program.

•  A third area for specific action is the area of greater collaboration with DECS on the fostering, identification, and propagation of innovations and successful practices in pedagogy. The DECS bureaucracy is at present already so centralized, so overworked, and so burdened that it would not be prudent or effective to add at this point yet another function centralized unit with nationwide concern, and therefore with nationwide offices, for this purpose. This would only further bloat the bureaucracy. Once again at the regional level or better the school division level, teacher training institutions could volunteer to be the innovation watchtowers for the system, using research and field observations to ferret out the most successful teachers and teaching techniques, further develop and document them, and then pass them on to DECS for propagation and possible institutionalization. (Cite examples, both systemic and pedagogical: the eight-week pre-school concept, the multi-grade approach, the medium of instruction, etc.) The teacher training institutions will find this valuable even for their own sakes, without reference to DECS, because the function will provide numerous insights for the process of recasting the goals and contents of their programs of studies.

•  Existing networks, organizations, and forums must be further utilized to strengthen networks of information exchange and collaboration among teacher training institutions. It is not enough to merely have big annual conferences. Smaller, regional operating networks must be set up or strengthened to regularly exchange experiences, breakthroughs, new modalities of partnership with DECS and private institutions, non-formal education, etc. In particular greater synergy among both DECS and normal schools must take place as regards training programs, training venues, and training resources.

•  Finally, teacher training institutions must redefine and recreate themselves in the context of the twenty first century, the century of life-long learning total communities. These institutions must cast themselves are learning resources dedicated, not only to the students who will be future teachers, but also to its alumni and indeed all other teachers within its service area, to schools, public and private, and to literacy and non-formal education workers that could benefit from their work. And as learning becomes less and less the exclusive monopoly of schools, teacher training institutions must actively seek ways in which it can foster total learning societies, being at the service of parents, communities, industry and civil society as all join hands to create a larger community where everyone is always at the same time learning and teaching. Instructional technology advances and distance learning opportunities, which will be discussed by other speakers this week, are excellent tools to make teacher training intuitions real beacons of learning for their total communities.

But in all of the above, let us not forget my overriding concern: It is our solemn responsibility to develop the teacher of tomorrow, not a teacher patterned upon the ways of the past, but a teacher who can adequately prepare the next generation of Filipinos to turn this country around and bring it to the potential that it is capable of.

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me conclude.

As you see, this has not been the usual keynote speech that I have been accustomed to give, laying out general principles and statistics of education and making observations based on my experience and knowledge of education in different parts of the world. It is the simple but urgent cry of an anguished heart of a son of mother Philippines, a son who sees his beloved country in the throes of a fundamental crisis.

The only other time I remember having delivered a speech of this intensity was fifteen years ago, as the keynote for the educators' congress of 1986. The People Power revolution had just taken place, and the country was rejoicing then at their liberation from bondage and their new taste of freedom. But I remember airing a warning even at that time: Just as the Chosen People did not immediately reach their Promised Land after Moses delivered them from the bondage of Egypt, but rather had to undergo forty years of purification in the desert, so also the Philippines would have to undergo a long period of purification in the desert after their liberation before they could become an upright land of peace and prosperity. A four day peaceful revolution would not be enough to reshape the character and fiber of the country, a new set of educational tools and values was desperately needed, and an entire generation had to first be transformed or perhaps even replaced. Today I realize how sadly prophetic my words then turned out to be. We are now still in the middle of a political, economic, and moral desert and a motherland of peace and prosperity for all seems so remote.

But although mine is the anguished cry of a son who is deeply saddened, it is not from one who has despaired. It is a cry of one who, although he has given up on reforming the present generation, still has hope that his motherland can yet come into its Promised Land and glory days on the wings of the next generation. But whether this hope will be materialized or come crashing down will depend upon the whether the future teachers of this generation will be able to break away from the mold of the past and the present; and ultimately this hope will depend you in this room, and your ability to develop future teachers for this daunting task ahead of them. On you, ladies and gentlemen, my hope for the future of my beloved motherland depends Take a hard look at the globalizing, polarizing, information-exploding future taking shape around us. Take a harder look at the problems and malaise that beset our motherland. Wake up and recognize that the learning needs of future students will be radically different. Think deeply and work hard to develop future teachers than can adequately meet these needs. Above all, do not just rearrange the silverware on the tables, rather save the sinking ship. Sa inyong kamay ang huling kong pagasa para sa mahal nating bansa. Please, please, do not let me down.