RAQUEL USMAN has stopped hoping for miracles, not from the heavens, but from the Department of Education in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

“I have been requesting for textbooks and other teaching aids from our department but nothing came, although I have read in newspapers that the textbooks were even delivered door-to-door,” the principal of the Datu Halun Elementary School in Bongao, Tawi-Tawi, said.

The teachers also have to content themselves with recycling old books, Usman said. Others spend their own money to produce teaching materials, but because of their delayed salaries, not all of them could do so.

“Some have to loan money just to ensure that their school children got the best education,” she said.

Only about 1,200 teachers look after the province’s 70,000 children in preschools up to Grade 6 levels, according to schools division superintendent Abduhasad Mukarrama. But with interventions from different nongovernment agencies, mostly foreign organizations, “we managed to introduce better teaching approaches to ensure that our pupils develop skills, comprehension and critical thinking.”

Among the interventions, Mukarrama said, was the Ronald McDonald’s House Charities, which provides trainings for a “more active learning process between teachers and their pupils.”

Hopes were lifted when the Ronald McDonald’s House Charities introduced the Bright Minds Read (BMR) program to first graders two years ago, Usman and Shirley Dawila of the Provincial Housing Laboratory School (PHLS) said.

“Our Grade 1 pupils have developed a critical thinking. At the same time, our teachers discovered better ways to improve their approaches,” Usman said. They later fared better than the second graders,” Dawila said.

Hadja Avelina Baridji, a Grade 1 teacher of the Datu Halun Laboratory School, said her pupils now learned more through storytelling. “They are motivated to understand the story through reading and became confident in answering questions,” she said.

“Before, I felt so frustrated teaching our pupils that I had to queue at the library at the Mindanao State University and most of the time, other teachers were already ahead in borrowing the books. So what I did then was to review old materials and started teaching them through board works,” Baridji said.

When Ronald McDonald’s House Charities trained selected teachers and provided them with BMR kits that contained 32 teaching training modules, 32 huge House of Adarna’s illustrated books in English and Filipino as well as worksheets, “everyone, both teachers and pupils, became inspired to learn.”

Monieta Gambe, a Grade 1 teacher of the PHLS, admitted that “not only my pupils are learning” but the teachers, too.

“The effective tool in teaching is not to let the children get bored at board works. Group activities and storytelling with real books help a lot,” she added.