Exploring excellence, quality education

Reading is a wonderful weekend relaxer, but when one decides to take on reading the ‘Quality Standards in Education, September 2009’ over a weekend, the person must be unwell!! No, I’m not unwell, in fact quite the opposite. In my quest to truly determine what is quality education and academic excellence in Rwanda, it is necessary to understand what MINEDUC calls quality standards in education. Schools require a management that allows for an up-bottom, bottom-up and horizontal fair flow of information. School managers are required to train and continually refresh in education management. But what is available in Rwanda to facilitate such updating of educational trends and methodologies? Perhaps there is room for a National Institute of Head Teachers that ensures that two trainings are held every year. If school leadership does not continue to grow, then how can it be expected that the quality of education and academic excellence can continue to grow? The standards require a budget portion of atleast 35% to be engaged with teaching-learning activities. The proportion of pedagogical meetings in relation to the total number of meetings organised should be one in three. Programmes are to include current and cross-cutting issues such as gender, social inclusion, environment, sustaining development, HIV-AIDS, human rights, peace education and conflict management, and in particular culture and values education. The curriculum is required to prepare students for a better integration into the world and develop the capacity of students so as to integrate easily in the work market. But looking at the curriculum in particular the sciences, how and where is the application and connectedness? The curricula is to provide a pedagogical guide for teachers and expressly requires atleast one text book per learner for core subjects, and one between two for other subjects. There should be a skills-focussed approach to learning with a special emphasis on critical thinking. The indicators of this include practice of interactive methodology; freedom of learner’s initiative and expression, valuing learners’ initiative, work and productions; balanced individual and group work; deep learning as characterised among others by debate, discussion, analysis, criticism and research. I teach in the classes of S4 and S5 and at the start of this year, I discovered these students have never been taught how to properly conduct their own research. Should we dare mention what the standards expect of regular, relevant and efficient evaluation of learning? Cram, cram, exam; cram, cram, exam. Evaluation is supposed to be equitable, adopted to the learners’ level, the content and in relation to the objectives/outcomes. In a parent meeting recently, the word drill, drill, drill was given as an answer to a question about what teachers do to ensure students learn. What kind of process and method is that? Cramming, drilling and exams simply test a students’ memory – rote-learnt material. How is that preparing anyone for better integration into the world or work market? How is this approach meaningful, connected, significant and deeply understood? How is it assessing critical thinking, analytical and evaluative processes, let alone recreating knowledge in a practical and applicable sense? It is no wonder we are barely producing educated students. The standards expect one thing but it seems to me everything we do about teaching and learning is contradictory. Teachers are made to look as bad teachers because there is no room in the curriculum to apply deep knowledge and deep understanding. Teachers are expected to teach in two terms a curriculum, that if taught for quality learning would take over year. But no, teachers must get through it in two terms so that revision is carried out in the final term, just so they can tell heads of departments and parents, ‘yes, we completed the curriculum’. How is that ever going to produce quality education and academic excellence? The writer is the deputy principal, Riviera High School