Cagayan de Oro City through its Local School Board (LSB) recently conducted the “Nanay, Tatay, Okay Ka Ba Diyan?” wellness workshop for parents in partnership with Synergeia Foundation, Inc. and the Oro Wellness and Development Center.
Over 100 parents of Kinder to Grade 3 students from public schools in the said city in Northern Mindanao joined the virtual event which is part of the local government’s efforts to sustain its education program.
Honorable Mayor Oscar S. Moreno of Cagayan De Oro City praised the parents for their resilience and perseverance in helping their children adapt to the sudden shift of learning modality. In his welcome remarks, Moreno assured the participants that the local government has deployed numerous initiatives to help the people cope with the new normal.
According to a study, when COVID-19 hit the Philippines and impacted all sectors, the top most critical problems faced by families were food security, education opportunities and access to health care. The loss of income forced parents and caregivers to consider drastic measures that will impact the well-being of children. For education, both parents and children were concerned of the obstacles to distance learning.
Held to aid in coping with the challenges of the current learning modality, the parents participated in a plenary session on Parental Burnout led by the head of the city’s Social Welfare and Development Office, Dr. Rhyselle Bernadette B. Melliza-Descallar.
Specializing on mental health and well-being, the guest speaker emphasized the importance of addressing the signs and symptoms of parental burnt out to avoid its long-term damaging effects to one’s mental health. The breakout sessions were facilitated by volunteers from Synergeia Foundation, the LSB and documented by scholars of the city’s Scholarship Office.
Talking about wellness, Dr. Melliza-Descallar, who is also a lecturer on topics about health, life and love, parenting and leadership, explained the science behind a stress-free parenthood while adding that “parenting need not be a taxing and draining task to do.”
In her message, Synergeia Foundation’s President and Chief Executive Officer Dr. Milwida Guevara encouraged the parents to become role models for their children for “the kind of children we see at school reflects the kind of upbringing they have at home.”
As a champion of good local governance, Synergeia Foundation’s mission is to transform how leaders govern and to empower communities to create a better life for themselves and their children. Reinventing the Local School Board is one of the foundation’s way of promoting local government-led systemic education reforms at the community level.
Dr. Rosalio Vitorillo, the city’s Chief Education Program Supervisor delivered the closing remarks by expressing his gratitude to all partners and reiterating the Schools Governance and Operations Division’s support to the parents and children of Cagayan De Oro City. ###
KASpaces: Rethinking Educational Infrastructure and Teacher Development
April 28, 2022
Oftentimes in educational conferences in the Philippines and abroad, I am drawn to discussions on inventive ways to get students to learn; how to make them think creatively, how to develop inquiry in their minds, and develop opinions, critiques, and a highly developed appreciation of the things around them, instead of just pushing the “Like” button.
For over half a century, I have taught and lectured teachers and students and, more recently, under the auspices of our educational organization, Synergeia. Every time I am in front of an audience, I test reactions to what I say or project onscreen. I look for what engages an audience, what makes them linger in my phrases, what makes an impact in the way I juxtapose sentences or pause for effect.
Teaching creativity in the advanced world oftentimes means having each student or teacher in front of a computer screen learning the most creative app with often colorful and cheerful greetings. Oftentimes, the presentation is fast-clipped, reflective of the fast pacing of their society. It is assumed that each participant has a level of technical savvy to be at a screen not aided and can fix any glitch when it happens. Any teacher will be enthused to add to one’s teaching arsenal how to get students to be engaged.
But I come from the Philippines and poverty rears its obstructive head at any attempt to improve creative learning. For example, in a recent Zoom class that I had with a class on improving English grammar about 100 kilometers north of Manila, where I am, the class has selected students who showed high interest in the selected subjects and had access or ownership to a cell phone, which would be their video screens for the next hour. That lessened the class to half, or a total of 20 students. The attendance number would later decline throughout the hour. There were brownouts, or electric stoppage, which cancelled the participation of four or five students Then there was the matter of weak signals. Students connected intermittently and when they decided to find a steady signal, they resorted to climb a tree or run up the side of a mountain to secure a signal. When, finally, the remainder of the students made it so far, connected, there were issues of self-confidence and inability to speak with confidence. They needed goading and eventually responded and interacted. But that was only with 15 minutes left. Clearly, any sort of modern act of inclusion in creative teaching will hardly work in the Philippine setting. Let me therefore share with you what I do in an underdeveloped country without the accoutrements of creating the impossible.
First, I welcome the return of face-to-face teaching. I welcome that because of the very faulty Zoom teaching and the failed modules that were distributed throughout the country, in lieu of a teacher’s absence.
Next, I welcome the return of teachers renewing basic reading lessons The pandemic has significantly decreased the reading and comprehension skills of students. If the national scores before the pandemic showed students behind, it has been exacerbated by the pandemic and the accompanying school disruption. With the return of face-to-face classes, we are back with the opportunity to increase reading and comprehension and, in like manner, lay the groundwork for creative thinking. I will share with you some low-tech but effective teaching methods that I’ve used to spawn creative thinking and inquiry. These methods include using visuals employing storytelling establish a reading mandate, accessibility to libraries, proving art materials, and visiting museums. I
In the area of visuals in a few weeks I will have an exhibition of my organization’s library, the Ortigas Library, an exhibition of 100 vintage photographs of the tribal people of the Mountain Province in the North. It will be in a high school in a small town known for having graduated high achieving students. The principal welcomed the exhibition, stating that test scores of her students have plummeted again due to the pandemic, and she needed another way to reach the students who have been without a schooling discipline and schedule. She believes the never-seen photographs of the students’ ancestors in their native dress, events, and local architecture that they no longer see will be a revelation to their identity and ignite a learning moment.
Storytelling. Teachers have been taught to develop an authoritarian reserve in their teaching. That, to me, is a prescription to failure. I have been successful communicating to students when I relate a personal story or insight. Personal storytelling decreases the unequal relationship between students and teachers, an informal manner of relating events and people, especially if they mirror the experiences of the students, are the wedges to securing access to the student’s mind.
A reading mandate. To be creative and to have an opinion means to have read much to reach such a level. Reading and the corresponding comprehension scores in the country are abysmal. If in the past, the level of television watching exceeded study and school time hours, now there is additional video gaming and mindless watching that wipes out the hours for potential reading.
I have been quite strict on a reading mandate. Whenever I go around the provinces, I just impose. I just tell the teachers there shall be no video and TV watching for the whole school week and watching is only allowed on weekends after homework is completed and for a few hours. My Draconian law is hard to implement, given the supervision parents and teachers have to do. But what has to be impressed is there must be reading time for at least a half hour each day. A book to read and later to report are also compulsory. Reading regains the flow of time in imbibing words in sentence and paragraph constructions, and, most importantly, in understanding the import of the author’s overall message. Reading has no abrupt ending like TikTok, as it leads a reader through stories that may have taken several days to finish reading. A student’s mind is rewired from the immediacy offered by video to a steady, more realistic pace of digesting the written text and making sense of it. Likewise, with TV’s dulling powers, reading has an engaging quality, raising questions and even greater thought and rumination on the matter.
Access to libraries. Libraries are under-utilized in my country. There are city and school libraries that are mostly free to enter and use. There are a fair number of libraries throughout the country and, unfortunately, much of the reading fare in them are dated. Nonetheless, there are good reading books still and there are current newspapers and magazines to read. Students must be acquainted with libraries as a place for reading and as a place for solace. In recent times, libraries, like the Ortigas Library, which I work in, have been visited to borrow books and documents that straighten and clarify the flurry of false news now besetting us.
Access to museums. The treasures in museums are undoubtedly a way to stimulate creative and critical thinking. Not all student visitors get that experience. The ways of a child’s socialization at home or at school affect the way stimuli is received as in a visit to a museum. A visit, nonetheless, is a departure from a normal day, allowing students to gaze at master artworks or ancient artifacts, spurring thought to wander and reflect. The mind is most supple to receiving wider dimensions of creative and critical thinking in a museum setting.
Lastly, access to art supplies. Art therapy has been used successfully in drawing and drawing out emotional expressions in children affected by external factors, such as war. So it is to devote time in school or at home sharing coloring pencils, paint brushes, and paper. This is a new world of communication for the student other than the written text. It stimulates students and, for some, it may lead a path to an artistic streak or vocation in the future.
For underdeveloped countries like the Philippines with a failed educational system, these low-tech methods of developing creative and critical thinking still manage to stimulate students in that direction
Lastly, the steep learning decline in students…. distributing modules in lieu of teachers’ absence, the faulty learning through cell phones and screens affected by no signals or weak signals have been a severe setback for education in the Philippines. We are ever more aware now that face-to-face teaching led by a well-trained dedicated corps of teachers and, mind you, parents, are the only and most effective way to spark the genius inherent in each student.
KASpaces: Rethinking Educational Infrastructure and Teacher Development
April 28, 2022
I like to start with this question. I think it is a question that should haunt every educator:
“How do you make good people out of educated people?” Because it does not follow that just because you educate a person, that person will become a good person, whatever good means. And so this is a question that I pose to myself and to others and perhaps, this morning, to us as well: “How to you make good people out of educated people?”
When I talk about leadership or social responsibility, I like to go back to this experience with our medical students. These are students who will become doctors someday. Some will go to public health and other fields. I think they were in second year a couple of years ago but, aside from their heavy academic load, they produced a two-hour film, Mga Kuwentong Tsubibo. It means “stories of the merry-go-round or of the ferris wheel—anything that goes around and around. And I was very much pleasantly surprised because it was a film (do doctors know how to make films?) that talked about not just medicine. It talked about poverty. It talked about organ transplant and the desperation of people, how they are forced to sell, for instance. their kidneys, all of these underground, which is illegal. They talked about these issues and how things are systemic, how things just keep on coming back. At the end of the film, I congratulated them. I said, “I am so proud of you because I know that you will be more than just doctors.” And yes indeed, they will be more than just clinicians.
Where I work is a school that starts with the young ones, all the way to the professionals. So we start them early, at about five, six years old, till they perhaps graduate from us in their 20s. I just want to say that I am a Jesuit and this is my perspective. We have been in education for about 500 years now and we educate not just Catholics or Christians; we’ve educated Moslems, Buddhists, even non-believers. This is what we always bear in mind: we want to form the whole person and the whole person “for others”–an expression that means we try to tell people that their happiness is ultimately tied to the happiness of others, trying to make others happy, in the oblation of life that they make for others. And the second is that they are here in this world, not just for themselves, but to serve the common good. Now any school can say that this is what they are about. In a Jesuit school, we say, “Yes, any school will do that.” In our schools, we say we are shaped by a particular inspiration.
So what are the challenges these days?
Leaders are supposed to preside over realities that are bigger than themselves. And so I think the task and the mission of education, especially today, is to connect our students to all sorts of worlds.
First is the world of learning. The second is the world of tools and technologies. And third is the world of cultures with an “s” because there are many cultures. Connect them also to the world of nature and to the world of the poor. And the world of interiority. I shall explain this briefly as we go along.
These are the challenges of leaders, not just leaders, but individuals, all of us. We are in a world that is more connected, but we are also divided. We are divided more than ever despite the 24/7 hyper-connection that we experience. We already know some of the reasons. There is a lot of information and data out there and yet we seem to know less now. The change is disruptive. The speed of the change not just in technology but also in the human psyche and even in our social organization and economies (you’ve heard of the gig economy). One last challenge is the environment. I think among young people, there is anxiety because they feel that what they are inheriting from us is a world in peril and the future is not clear. They hear about climate change, disasters, and so they worry.
So, how shall we nurture leaders? How shall we do this in a hyper-connected world? We will need to form hyper-connected leaders. And what do I mean? Learners who are connected inside themselves, who struggle with the fragmentation inside of them and who try to connect all these things within themselves; creators who try to connect technology to people; global citizens who will connect cultures and the many ways that peoples do the same thing; stewards who connect people to nature; leaders who connect the excluded, the margins, to the center; and then, for those men and women of faith, shepherds who connect people to themselves and to our God.
The first part is to foster that love for learning. When we try to educate these young minds, we tell them you are not just a mind—you are not just what you think. We expose them to all sorts of worlds and I think this is crucial to the whole person that we are trying to form, not just the intellect. So, we look at psychology, even at athletics, physical formation. We look at ethics, conscience. We look at all these other realms in the person.
I like to share this quote from Eric Hoffer, an American philosopher back in the 1970s. Those who inherit the future are not the learned but those who are always learning, and so I believe that you first form leaders by teaching them to love learning. I mentioned liberal arts, which is crucial. Our students are exposed to the classics, to theater, to the arts. I know this is easier said than done because, in school, we always try to put things in learned packages, the outcome that is needed, but we believe that, especially in these past days, the capacity for learning is important especially if you don’t know what is going to happen.
Creators who try to connect technology to people
We try to foster creators who can navigate the world of technology and not just technology, but technology and people. You’ve heard of the “Internet of Things,” where they connect to data from our devices. The “Internet of Things” is possible because of the “Internet of People” and so we tell them: technological progress might be there but social progress does not necessarily follow from technological progress. And we have seen how people regress even if they have all sorts of technology at their disposal.
Global citizens who will connect cultures
Global citizens who connect cultures, especially now that we seem to be fractured as a globe with the Ukraine and Russia war. I think now, more than ever, we try to connect people. Give them experiences of cultures, of people who believe differently or who do not believe at all. By culture, we mean many different ways that we do the same thing—language, cuisine, etc. So, we try to foster this appreciation of diversity of humanity, and that means communication, language. So important. Not just words as you know. We try to sharpen that skill of listening and of articulating and of being careful about our words and silences.
Stewards who connect people to nature
Try to expose them to nature. We have “extra-curricular” activities because they are outside the curriculum. We try our best to relate what is “extra” to what is “intra,” to what is inside the classroom. Exposure or immersion in the beauty and the vulnerability and sensitivity of nature is important, so we try to connect them and to impress upon them that we can destroy this garden. But we also have the power to take care of this garden.
Leaders with compassion for the margins
We also provide opportunity for students to enter the world of the poor. Many of our students come from privileged families. About a fifth are from poor families because they are scholars but the majority, about 80%, come from well-to-do families. We tell them “Is your goal in life to make yourself richer?” Systematically, throughout their formation, while they are with us we try to give them experiences that make them question (even God!) why there are poor people and other questions that disturb them and, hopefully, lead them to the conviction of who they are.
Leaders who connect the excluded to the community
Disasters will always be a challenge for us and disasters will continue to isolate people, and so we try to expose them as well to the reality of environmental risk
Shepherds who cultivate habits of stillness, silence, and prayer.
Lastly, you need not to be a person of faith or a religious person to develop the habit of interior stillness and silence–simple habits, like praying before and after the class or certain rituals of silence, meditation. We have a program called “Unplugged.” They let go of the wires and the technology so that they can be comfortable with solitude or even talking face to face with each other.
Our banig strategy
This is our strategy. It is a matrix format. On the vertical, you have the academic disciplines—Math, English, Pilipino, History—but running across them are skill sets for leadership competence that we try to foster. For instance, if you are a teacher of Math, you can try to choose the kinds of problems or equations that can perhaps touch on topics, like technology or poverty.
Let me end saying that I began that it does not follow that because you are educated you can become good. But it does happen that educated people can become good people. And, when that happens, I think the joy is priceless—the joy that makes us jump corridors.
