Private schools have more leeway with new curriculum

Private schools, like the St. Mary’s College of Baliuag (SMCB) in Bulacan province, are given the leeway to innovate as much as they can so long as they inform the DepEd, says Myrna Bondad, high school principal SMCB.

MANILA, Philippines—For some private schools, abiding by the directives of the Department of Education (DepEd) to implement certain features of the K to 12 curriculum was a matter of discretion.

Yes, they did adopt the new system, but not everything in it was followed to the letter.

One of the facets of the K to 12 curriculum that has not been fully executed a year after DepEd issued the go signal for Grade 1 and Grade 7 was the use of the mother tongue (MT).

“We now use Filipino in the classroom as a medium of instruction more than English, but we did not totally get rid of English because our students speak English,” said Maria Isabel Valente, grade school principal at Don Bosco Technical Institute (DBTI) in Mandaluyong City.

“As a subject, we didn’t really implement it. It’s more of an exposure to the language, but supposedly there’s a separate subject [for mother tongue]…. We didn’t stick to the framework,” she added.

There is another problem that surfaced in schools operating in Metro Manila and in neighboring Tagalog provinces.

Since MT is designed to be taught as another field, how do schools do that when they are already teaching Filipino? This was the question raised by sisters of the Religious of the Virgin Mary (RVM) school system. Hence, they sent a representative to discuss the matter with Education Secretary Armin Luistro sometime last year.

“Private schools are given the leeway to innovate as much as they can so long as they inform the DepEd. So last year and this [coming school] year, we were allowed to do away with the mother tongue,” said Myrna Bondad, high school principal at St. Mary’s College of Baliuag (SMCB) in Bulacan province, one of the schools run by the RVM sisters.

“They’re not imposing. What we did was just to add more contact time to Filipino. Besides, parents want their children to be proficient in English,” she added.

Different approaches

The two private schools also had different approaches in implementing the new grading system prescribed by the DepEd, which involved the use of letters rather than numbers in assessing students.

“We still follow the numerical grading system, but we translate it to descriptive letters using the rubrics that we made. We did not fully adopt the system enforced by DepEd so that we won’t have a hard time adjusting. But in time, once we can justify it already [to the parents], we’re going to implement the new grading system fully,” said Carmela Reforzado, DBTI assistant principal for academic affairs.

SMCB did not follow the descriptive grading system at all.

“The grading computation here is already programmed and computerized. We spent a lot of money for that…. But we are willing to stop if it is imposed by the DepEd. Again, we are allowed not to follow so long as we inform the DepEd,” Bondad explained.

Another reason why these private schools did not entirely apply the use of letters as grades was the way parents would react to the new system.

“Parents have to be oriented to the new system because they’d still be looking for numerical value. For them, they still can’t grasp how their children can get a score without using a numerical grade. That’s why we use a lot of rubrics for our boys, not the percentage system anymore,” Valente said.

Backward planning

One of the more complicated elements of the K to 12 curriculum is the use of understanding by design, or UbD, which involves “backward planning” with the end goals in mind. Here, the teacher starts with the desired results in order to come up with “curriculum units, performance assessments and classroom instruction.”

Although many private schools have adapted this pedagogical technique long before K to 12 took place, still many teachers had difficulty acclimatizing to it.

“We started adapting the UbD before the K to 12…. The RVM system was something like two to three years in advance. They took care of everything, even the sequence of the subjects,” Bondad said. “But the new teachers had a hard time applying UbD. It’s not that simple even if you attend seminars.”

Reforzado appeared frustrated as she shared how DBTI teachers had to adjust anew after refurbishing their old curriculum which only recently applied UbD.

“Our reaction to the K to 12 curriculum at first was rather negative because we were still experiencing a hangover from our UbD training. We attended all the seminars for that. We prepared so long to overhaul our curriculum, and in only less than a year of its implementation, all of a sudden we have K to 12.”

Edmerlyn Geralde, a Grade 1 Filipino teacher at SMCB, said she did not find it too hard adjusting to the new curriculum. She said teachers were given ample time to undergo seminars beforehand so the school did not apply the new grading system, and she did not have to train for MT since she used Tagalog as a medium of instruction.

For DBTI teachers, however, the transition to the new curriculum was “a struggle.”

“All the lesson plans of the teachers have to start from scratch,” Valente said.

Starting from scratch

Grade school teachers at DBTI were always asking her about the new curriculum during the first two quarters of the previous school year.

“What they were telling me was, at first, they felt the pacing was rather slow, that Grade 1 topics seemed like they were more appropriate for kindergarten.”

Valente then explained to them that K to 12 was designed specifically to “decongest the curriculum.” She advised the teachers to “look at your students. If you think they have a good grasp [of the lesson] already, then move on.”

In assessing the initial year of implementing K to 12, Bondad argued that she “could not yet compare the old to the new curriculum. I cannot say if it’s better or worse…. It’s too early to say. Of course, there are problems.”

Although difficulties abound, it somehow helped that the transition to K to 12 was done bit by bit. Valente said the gradual process “won’t be hard in the sense that we can study it. We can adjust from the experience every year.”

But one thing is clear: Reforzado said that all these changes in the educational system will be shouldered by the teachers. “Teachers will carry all the burden.”