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| Tuesday, 15 June 2004 |
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Accelerating educational reforms by Anil Pagoda Arachchi Lecturer, Siyane National College of Education, Veyangoda The President's keeping the ministerial portfolio of education with her shows her genuine interest in developing the country's eduction system and her commitment to it.
The main objective of this article is to discuss the constraints encountered in the process of implementing the reforms in the school setup. There is no denying the fact that the most important people in bringing the changes made in the reforms to the grass roots level, the student population, are the teachers with whom lies a great responsibility of gaining a considerable knowledge of the content of the reforms and channelling their energy to achieve the goals set. However, the majority of the teachers in the country do not seem to have a comprehensive knowledge of the reforms. One senior teacher in a leading government school in Kandy told the writer that she could not say anything about the progress a student has made according to the assessment done under school based assessment, but would have to wait till the final term test was conducted. Many teachers failed to tell him the nine national goals and the five general competencies envisaged in the reforms. This boils down to the fact that the mechanism used to transmit the changes made at the policy planning level to the grass roots level entails some drawbacks which need to be overcome in order to equip the teachers with the necessary skills and knowledge. Teacher training Though there are several teacher training institutions in the country, it is disheartening to note that there is no proper co-ordination among them to steer into a national plan for training teachers to reach the national goals stipulated in the education reforms. With the changes made at the policy level, there occurs a need to introduce innovations on teacher training methodology targeted at them. For example, the first national goal is the achievement of national cohesion, national integrity and national unity. This goal can be achieved only if the teachers are knowledgeable about the appropriate and effective methodology on teaching social cohesion in the classroom. This situation requires either an attempt to introduce a new subject called social cohesion to the curriculum of the teacher training institutes or incorporate strategies into other subject areas on how to teach peace particularly in the segregated schools in Sri Lanka. What must be emphasized here is the fact that the structure of the teacher training courses has to be redesigned to suit the changes proposed in the reforms. One of the major complaints made by both the teachers and the parents is that though the assessment procedures have been changed within the school system, the question papers for both GCE Ordinary and Advanced Level Examinations are generally set in the traditional way only with a slight variation. If the changes introduced into the curriculum and syllabi are to yield the expected results, the external assessment done has to be based on these changes. One effective endeavour would be to integrate the marks the students obtain for their school based assessment tests with the marks they get at the final external examinations. One could perhaps oppose this suggestion with an argument that the assessment culture in our school system is not rich enough for such a venture. This is very effectively done in some European countries. What is of paramount important is training the teachers for the purpose. Learning theories The biggest problem Sri Lankan teachers face today is how to give the learning responsibility to the students themselves. The majority of the students are still dependent on their teachers for gaining knowledge partly due to the inappropriate methodology employed by them whereas many of the teachers seem to be of the opinion that teaching merely means transmitting what is given in the textbooks to their students. The effective learning theory for producing a self-confident creative child is constructivism where students make their own sense of the ideas with which they are presented, and they construct their own reality of what they learn. But what appears to be done in a typical classroom is using methodologies connected to behavioursim which would finally produce a student generation good at imitating rather than becoming innovative and creative. A comprehensive training can be given for the teachers to act as reflective practitioners in the classroom and to get use of the new theories such as multi intelligent theory which will pave the way for them to look at the different aspects of teaching and learning with different perspectives. It is indeed heartening to see that the National Institute of Education has embarked on rewriting the textbooks keeping in line with the changes proposed in the reforms. However, a close scrutiny of some of these textbooks reveals that they do not depict the reality of the socio-cultural aspects of the country. Inclusion of merely some names from other communities and descriptions of certain cultural events is not enough, but there must be an attempt to write textbooks after a need analysis of all the communities in order to capture their collective thinking patterns and to seek the essence of all the religions and ethnic groups to build up a Sri Lankan culture. School management The major problem in implementing the education reforms successfully is that the majority of the principals, particularly those in the rural schools, are not well informed of the reforms. This has made it difficult for them to supervise the work done by the teachers and to see whether there is qualitative improvement of the education provided by their respective schools. Therefore, parallel to the teacher training institutes, there must be a different institute to provide both pre-service and in-service training for the principals. It is the in-service advisers who act as mediators between the policy planners, curriculum designers and the teachers doing a yeoman but unrecognised service. One reason for the failure of properly educating the teachers of the changes made at the level of the ministry and the NIE is the irregularity of the in-service advising. The best thing to overcome this problem is to establish a different service for the in-service teacher advisers or to absorb them into teacher educators' service. In conclusion, if the drawbacks discussed in this article are looked into an remedial measures are taken the education reforms will definitely pave the way for producing a creative, innovative and productive future generation. |
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She seems to be particularly interested in seeing whether the education
reforms introduced by her previous government are yielding the results
expected, and putting the process on the correct track again.
