Let's First Focus On Getting Basics Right

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CHALK TALK

Let's first focus on getting basics right

By PRIYAKORN PUSAWIRO

As no two schools have a shared identical learning environment, I think we have to accept the fact that there is a gap in achievement concerning learning outcomes of students, too.

Indeed, the country has not yet been able to provide children with equal access to all kinds of learning resources and materials. We have different socio-economic backgrounds in each school.

The Education Ministry has now centrally defined educational standards, assessment policy and fundamental examination in a bid to deliver equity in the distribution of learning opportunities through standardised direction.

The basic performance for all students should be literacy and numeracy. Have we ever defined this mission as the first step of achievement? Far from reaching the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) standard, in some low-performance schools, students hardly pass the basic reading skills.

How should we help our students pass such basic assessment - literacy and numeracy skills?

Lessons learned from experiences worldwide have confirmed that improved school systems need intervention to move the reform ahead. It is reported that each stage of the school system improvement journey is associated with a unique set of interventions, from poor to fair to good to great to excellent (Mourshed, 2010).

In order to push ahead a continuous nationwide reform, the factor of success should be expected on different levels of educational improvement, and specify the common developing footstep from poor to fair, from fair to good, from good to great and from great to excellent!

Basically, to jump step-by-step from poor to fair, the aforementioned report concluded the common unique intervention cluster that our students must reach the basic of literacy and numeracy. The poor performance level is defined by assessment as students are only able to read words.

For a basic achievement, the reformers aim to boost poor performance schools to minimum standard by focusing on outcome targets, giving additional support for low-performing schools, improving school infrastructure and giving them a provision of textbooks, according to Mourshed.

To move across a poor performance level, schools should provide scaffolding and motivation for low-skill teachers and principals, for example, scripted teaching materials; coaching on curriculum; instructional time on task; school visit by centre; and incentives for high performance.

Basically, schools aim to get students in by increasing school seats and fulfil students' basic needs to achieve basic literacy and numeracy skills.

Another attention level is the process intervention on structure and resource.

Yet, a system's context might not determine what needs to be done, but it does determine how it is done.

Each school always has its own success path, but the policy reformers should facilitate schools nationwide to understand their "a-must-thing and step-to-reform". To achieve their reform goals, the school should incrementally analyse and design its transition path to successful reform.

Importantly, the whole system reform should implement and sustain over a long period of time and should be synchronised with coherent policies and be arranged in a line consistently across all policies.

Indeed, to get better student outcomes, we should sustain the educational reform and continuously improve step by step for the whole system as well as at each step, in particular curriculum reform, teacher quality, teacher-student relations, assessment standards, learning opportunities and school quality.

Interestingly, we should address the problem at both the micro and macro level, and then define a set of problem-solving procedures. Afterwards, we should investigate and record the success process and result, then conclude as a reform guideline for other schools which face a similar problem.

Currently, the Education Ministry plans to improve the performance of 2,930 schools that failed to pass the assessments conducted by the Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment (Onesqa).

It has also planned to cut the number of small schools, which usually deliver relatively lower performance at a higher cost, by introducing at least one quality school per tambon.

The quality school is expected to attract students, thus reducing the need to have the small schools in the children's neighbourhood.

I am sure that we have a successful case in the past decade of educational reform which is continuously being improved. We must fasten links between policy implementers, researchers and educators

Shall we learn from our lesson, either the classroom achievement or the whole school success?

PRIYAKORN PUSAWIRO

Learning Scientist

Computer Engineering Department, KMUTT

[email protected]

-- The Nation 2010-12-27

[housepainter]

Blimey that was like time warp ......... all the jargon in place but the numbers don't add up. This is 2011, well almost but it sounded just like 1990s England and let's re-invent the National Curriculum. Only a Brit ex-pat would know that so this must go down a bomb tranlsated into Thai and served up at some high chaired talk shop.

All the jargon in the world doesn't amount to a single stroke's worth of chalk's difference to the performance of a single teacher. And yet we are told that with a single step ................ a journey begins. Problem is, some steps can be backwards. Some can be on the spot and does anyone have one foot better than the other? Most people actually put their foot in their mouth.

As for ensuring resources, redistributing resources or concentrating resources, I hope that umbrella actually covers the buildings we call schools. A drive anywhere up country reveals these depressing structures where kids stand in lines each morning being reminded you are about to be bored out of your mind. At the end of the day in case any spark of creatvity or worse, individulity has been ignited, they are again assembled and dumbed down. Great stuff.

Here's a practical suggestion. Introduce homework. Teach something that stimulates home work. Then mark. And punish multiple copying. Thais do like sharing.

What I return to is hyperbole and not a single practical suggestion as to what to do in the class room in order to raise standards. How about abandoning rote learning? How about actually failing failures and awarding grades lower than a 'c' when they are gained. How about an end to rubbing stamping every one as being successful when clearly knowledge can be balanced on a pin head.

How about actually creating free thinking critical individuals that are capable of adding to society by way of original creative responses. You may start by getting university students out of those ridiculous 'now we are 10' uniforms and allowing freedom of expression. Who knows? Freedom of thought may follow.

As for getting shut of under performing small schools, the sort of schools the state provides for the rural poor, how are the kids going to make it to the shinier big school further away? These kids already walk or cycle too many kilometres to be healthy. Sorry but practicalities tend to shoot ideas down.

The difference here is that in the UK they strive for excellence as if they never achieved it. Re-inventing the wheel when the thing just rolls along fine. But here, a few educated and western influenced self promoting chair dwellers pontificate on a system that is spokeless, let alone round and shiny and able to turn.

There needs to be put in place an educational system to start with. But here is the problem. Like so many areas across Thai society education is simply another example of an accepted practice, well intentioned that simply doesn't work. The Police being another example. Fine in theory but under-funded, under paid, under qualified, under resourced, under supported, without an ideology, without expectation, without satisfactory outcome, without enforcement, without independence or free from influence.

Those are the big issues that until they are tackled across the board in Thailand it is simply urinating in the wind.

The corruption is rife; the budgets are meagre and skimmed from top down. The Education Ministry itself is run by buffoons. Sorry, I'll try to be more accurate. Corrupt buffoons.

And then we get an article like this, which means nothing to the people running the shop, working in it or simply watching it happen. And people won't criticise it because they don't understand it. But what is there to understand other than some remote theoretical model that has a snow ball's chance in hell served up in a tangled jargon of Inspector speak. Not teacher speak. It's codswallop and should be dismissed as such. Give me a single example of where to start Monday morning, Class 4 , for the next hour?

From this article what will be different tomorrow, next month, next year?

The answer is nothing. Sweet fat nothing.Meanwhile another generation of kids are cheated of an education and turned out fit for manual labour as Thailand demands. The brightest brains allowed to rot due to a class eletism where you are trapped within your place because Education fails to deliver and is under valued by those charged with its delivery. The prospective brain surgeon becomes a motor bike fitter because his education failed him. And when they did 'improve' the sytem, it was to tell him aged 8, to travel by foot a further 8 kilometres to the new school.

My brain surgery example was carefully chosen as who knows? In the future they may be putting them in starting at the Ministry of Education.

Great system by the way. Carefull you don't start fixing it.

[Scott]

Thanks, Housepainter, I think most countries have some examples of how the system fails students. They also have examples of how it has worked. Unfortunately, in Thailand the first examples seem to far outnumber the second.