Vice President Sara Duterte—Inday Sara Duterte FB
The pilot implementation of the revised and recalibrated K-10 curriculum, which focuses on foundational skills and intensified values and “peace education,” will begin this school year (SY) 2023 to 2024, the Department of Education (DepEd) announced on Thursday.
“The new K to 10 curriculum will integrate peace competencies—highlighting the promotion of nonviolent actions and the development of conflict-resolution skills in learners. For after all, [if] there is security, there is peace,” Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte said.
She earlier drew flak after she sought for the second year in a row P150 million in confidential funds under DepEd’s proposed 2024 budget of P758.59 billion. Duterte later justified her request by saying that “education is intertwined with national security.”
The decongested “Matatag” curriculum—the result of a two-year review of the current K-12 curriculum—also reduced the number of learning competencies from 11,738 to only 3,664, or by 70 percent.
Learning competencies refer to concepts learned in the previous grade level that students are expected to bring to the next one.
“For instance in Grade 2, if they can do addition and multiplication … they can use that as a springboard in learning more complex mathematical skills [in Grade 3], ” said Jocelyn Andaya, DepEd’s Bureau of Curriculum Development director.
For Grades 1 and 2, for example, the subject areas were reduced from seven to five consisting of language, reading and literacy, mathematics, good manners and right conduct, and Makabansa.
The review of the senior high school curriculum, or Grades 11 to 12, is still ongoing, according to Undersecretary Michael Poa.
“We are still going to continue K-12. It just happened that the K-10 curriculum was reviewed and revised first,” he said.
Among the features of the revised curriculum is the focus on foundational skills, particularly literacy, numeracy and socioemotional skills, according to Andaya.
Others are the intensified values education and strengthened peace education, a new feature which Duterte said “holds a very special place in my heart.”
Mother Tongue
Another change in the curriculum is the removal of Mother Tongue (MT) as a separate subject due to challenges in the implementation of the learning area.
Gina Gonong, DepEd undersecretary for curriculum and teaching, said that MT caused confusion among teachers, especially in Luzon.
“There is a Filipino subject and then there is a mother tongue subject, so what they are asking is, what is the difference between Filipino and mother tongue subject? That is one of the reasons why MT was removed as a subject—to eliminate that confusion,” Gonong said.
Andaya also clarified that DepEd did not remove MT as a medium of instruction. “Mother Tongue as a subject is something that can be explained or taken up in languages and reading and literacy,” she said.
According to Gonong, DepEd is now preparing the learning resources in-house for the pilot study of the recalibrated curriculum.
“We’ll train the teachers. It’s not the usual training that you see wherein they are gathered in a big venue. Here, we will go to them since there are just a few [schools] in the pilot and we’ll provide technical assistance,” she said.
Phased rollout
She added that DepEd has yet to finalize its sampling data, noting that they were planning to choose from schools in Metro Manila, Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao “that could represent [those] across the country.”
After the pilot run, DepEd will conduct a phased implementation of the recalibrated curriculum starting SY 2024 to 2025 for Kindergarten and Grades 1, 4 and 7, followed by Grades 2, 5 and 8 (SY 2025 to 2026) and then Grades 3, 6, and 9 (SY 2026 to 2027). By SY 2027 to 2028, the new curriculum will be implemented in Grade 10.
Ariz Cawilan, director of DepEd’s Bureau of Learning Resources, said that textbooks and teachers manuals would still be used under the new curriculum.
“Our first textbooks to be released will be Grades 1, 4 and 7. We are already talking with the publishers so that we can already prepare the textbooks as early as now,” he said.