By Merlina Hernando-Malipot
In order to achieve quality education, the Department of Education (DepEd) underscored the need to “change the way we teach our learners.”
Department Of Education Office (Wikipedia / MANILA BULLETIN)
Education Secretary Leonor Magtolis Briones recently discussed the priority initiatives of the Department of Education (DepEd) for the last three years of her term during the Region VII management committee meeting in Dumaguete.
Briones stated that DepEd is “now pivoting to quality” as the Constitution prescribes both access and quality. She stressed that to achieve quality, “the teaching style needs to be changed.”
Speaking before the DepEd regional and division officials, supervisors, principals, and teachers, Briones highlighted the achievements of DepEd in terms of access to education which include increase of enrollment, decrease of dropout rates, and the rise of cohort survival rates.
“Insofar as access is concerned, we are doing very well,” Briones said. “We also succeeded in bringing more learners to the Alternative Learning System (ALS),” she added. However, she noted that “if we pivot from access to quality, we pivot from the traditional ways of teaching to different ways of teaching.”
For instance, Briones cited that the change of content has “caused a decline” in the learners’ National Achievement Test (NAT) performance. She further stressed that “there is a need to focus on the learners’ critical thinking.”
“It shows very clearly that we should teach our learners more about critical thinking, problem solving, and applying these to practical and real life situation,” Briones added.
Meanwhile, Briones also stressed the importance of transforming the National Educators Academy of the Philippines (NEAP).
Briones said that the transformation of NEAP will greatly help towards the achievement of quality of education. “We are going to change the content of the program of NEAP because if we want to transform the quality of learners, we have to transform NEAP,” she explained. “If we want to teach the learners new things, then the teachers will have to be the first to learn new manner of teaching,” she added.
Likewise, Briones further emphasized that learning is discovering and it should be fun like playing games. “To make learning real and to understand it better, relate it to the real world and to the things that learners are interested in,” she ended.