Rationale
In
the light of accelerated changes and situations that impact the young,
elementary school learners’ needs, interests, and capabilities are being
prioritized in child development programs, while teachers are being prepared to
adapt to these changes. Current trends show changes on acquiring new knowledge
and information through technology; heightened awareness and active
participation in addressing political, economic, social, ecological, and
spiritual issues and problems; the need for teachers with strong academic
preparation, values formation, and commitment; and the great concern for
education to expand the basics to include problem-solving, creativity, and
capability of the individual for lifelong learning (Salandanan, 2001).
Developing lifelong learners is
anchored on the philosophy that education is life and continues with life.
Developing an enterprising culture refers to enterprising teachers who are
ready to innovate strategies and approaches.
An enterprising caring teacher is marked for her attentive concern for
others, fair in dealing with others, and committed to others.
The educational development of
learners today is greatly influenced by the learner and family, teacher,
school, community or environment, and school factors. Significant among the
home factors cited by Barsaga and his co-authors (1996) are learner’s ability
and readiness, language used at home and in school, family’s financial status,
distance between home and school, and the parents’ attitudes towards education.
Unqualified or untrained teachers, low teacher motivation, teacher attitude
towards learner and teaching, inability to adapt the curricula to leaner needs,
and the lack of understanding of learner needs are the observed teacher-related
factors. School variables that have some bearing on learner training include
poor or inadequate resources, school location (distance), relevance of
curriculum, school schedule, and lack of
learning aids. Community-related factors stem from the community’s attitude
toward education, seasonal activities, topography, climatic conditions,
socio-economic level, and migration and mobility. Management-related factors include poor
teacher supervision and examination and evaluation processes. Generally, the
learners find themselves
sharing the difficulties experienced in the home, in school, and with
the teacher. Community influences make the learners busy with television shows,
movies, and helping parents in occupational tasks.
The Education for All project
explained by Barsaga and others (1996) has been optimizing the many channels of
learning recommending the use of a variety of learning delivery modes
responsive and tailor-fit to the learners’ needs and specific life situations.
The challenges for elementary teachers include creating family, school and
community partnerships; teaching all students with emphasis on the inclusion;
and reasserting the importance of education. Paradigm shifts have emerged to
take care of learners’ functional education developing more effective learners
along social, cultural, economic, political, technological, and environmental
dimensions (Pagalilawan, 1999). In the traditional context, learners exposed to
content in isolated cells with skills mastery as outcomes, shifted to learners
exposed to integrated content developing higher order competencies. The
transformation contributes to the total development of the learners.
The consistent low performance of
students, the very fast pace and exponential increase in information and
knowledge, the need for better information
and processing skills,
the deterioration in people’s values, and the need
to prepare students for global and future competition saw the need
for the
adoption of a new
curriculum, the 2002
Basic Education Curriculum per Republic Act 9155. The curriculum was
envisioned to promote the holistic growth
of Filipino learners
and enable them to acquire core competencies and proper
values. It is flexible to meet
learning needs of a diverse studentry, which
is relevant to their immediate environment and social and
cultural realities.
The seemingly unprepared elementary
school teachers resulted in poor achievement of elementary students in reading
and communication skills, and in understanding basic mathematics and scientific
concepts based on the report of the Presidential Commission in Educational
Reform (PCER). Ordoñez (2001) initiated to redefine and recreate teacher
training institutions for the twenty-first century within the key result areas
of critical analysis and creative thinking, the fostering of reading and
comprehension, familiarity with instructional technology, and solid
grounding in values education.
Lawal (2003) asserts that to enhance
instruction, education programs should focus on understanding both teaching and
learning student perceptions that are valuable to teaching practices because
they are authentic first-hand classroom experiences. Teachers find it difficult
to seek students’ voices and listen to them for some clues to learning and
teaching (Poetter, 1997).
Teachers think of teacher education
as requiring them to know the content of what they teach, teaching pedagogy in
the context of academic content, and offering
prospective teachers many and varied school-based experiences (Rigden,
1997). Classroom teachers work as full-fledged partners with college or
university faculty in training them on instruction and assessment, classroom
management, and effective relationship.
The laudable, meaningful, and timely
objectives of Education for All focused on internal efficiency and
effectiveness, expanded the vision of education for teacher retraining on
holistic approaches. Paradigm shifts and the PCER findings which led to
organizing the 2002 BEC, seriously considered teacher re-education and student
achievement. These academic highlights served as challenges which merit a
critical analysis of changing educational trends. The researcher was motivated
to conduct this study to ascertain teachers’ professional preparation in
relation to teaching effectiveness, as well as the relationship between their
professional practices and teaching effectiveness.
![thumbnail]( "Example - The Problem And Its Scope")
Title:
Example - The Problem And Its Scope
by:
om
at
2013-02-16T12:41:00+07:00
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Example - The Problem And Its Scope