Ma. Salve Duplito

June 17, 2009

 

In far off Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) where only 6 out of 10 can read and write, committed and inspired teachers are in huge demand. That’s why Mercibel Fegarido, a 40-year-old grade school Math teacher in Ateneo de Zamboanga University, dedicated half of her life to the profession.

 

But Mercy doesn’t stop there. Since 2005, she and a group of teachers from Synergeia Foundation’s academic partners have taken time to mentor other teachers in the region in a non-threatening peer environment—the best strategy for raising the bar among teachers based on Synergeia’s experience.

 

“It’s not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes, I wonder how I can handle situations when some don’t want to accept the ideas of others, but it all works out in the end. The truth is, I’m the one who learns a lot from them,” says Mercy.

 

Last May, Mercy and trainors from ADZU, Notre Dame of Cotabato, Xavier University and the Division of Bulacan mentored more than 400 grade school teachers from Sulu, Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur, three of eight provinces in ARMM where the lowest National Achievement Test scores are currently recorded.

 

The mentors took pains to make the training experiential. Games and interactive discussions helped the teachers have fun while learning, something organizers hope will be carried into their classrooms. At one point during the training, they took a break from discussing what “increased by” and “decreased by” mean, values and place values—several commonly misunderstood concepts in ARMM classrooms—and did a “Math Trail” game outside the social hall.

 

Patterned after the “Amazing Race” game show, teachers gathered clues and solved puzzles to finish the race. Birds inside a huge circular cage were subjected to intense analysis as grade school Math teachers discussed how to compute the area of the cage and how many birds can fit inside given certain assumptions.

 

Meanwhile, Science teachers excitedly worked with a compound microscope—an old model that they had to put under the sun for illumination--for the first time! Grades 5 and 6 teachers from Maguindanao formed long lines under the scorching sun to view magnified plant cells from the leaves they collected.

 

Showing their ingenuity and problem-solving skills, Grades 3 and 4 teachers who were not able to use the microscope discovered that putting two magnifying lens on top of each other allowed them to discover how butterfly eggs looked like up close!

 

“To them, this was more practical because they said it was clearer, cheaper, and they can use it when they go back to their respective schools. They were also spared from the long lines and scorching sun,” said Dindo L. Guevara, a program officer at Synergeia.

 

Synergeia will raise more funds to provide ARMM schools with their own microscopes, but the series of 4-day training sessions itself were funded by the US Agency for International Development to ensure that children in the country’s poorest region are not deprived of quality education.

 

USAID, through the Education Development Center, aims to improve access to quality education and livelihood skills in areas afflicted by conflict and poverty, particularly in Mindanao. Its Education Quality and Access for Learning and Livelihood Skills (EQuALLS) program, which counts the recent ARMM training as one of its activities, was launched in 2005.

 

Synergeia has been tapped as one of USAID’s partners to reach these goals. Synergeia is an organization that spearheads education reforms by bringing together schools, parents, local government units, communities and other stakeholders to improve the quality of basic education.

 

 

The more than 400 teachers chosen carefully by school heads to attend the training are expected to cascade what they learned when they go back to their own schools. Education and empowerment are tides that lift all boats so sharing knowledge is a key part of the program.

 

“These trainings have been a very big help to us from this region. Imagine some of these teachers come from islands, and some don’t have electricity. We need all the help we can get,” said Mercy.

 

There is no region in the Philippines where basic education is as bad as in ARMM. The poverty level in ARMM is double the national average. More children drop out of school and more don’t graduate in ARMM than in any other province. There are around five students for every teacher, and one of those five has no chair and doesn’t have the luxury of sitting down comfortably while being taught reading and arithmetic.

 

In recent years, however, the Department of Education has reported slight improvements. Enrollment growth rate in ARMM in school year 2008-2009 was highest at more than 7% for elementary schools and more than 6.5% for secondary schools. 

 

Before the first phase of EQuALLS, eight out of 10 first grade students in Maguindanao and Marawi City could not read. Three years after, Synergeia’s figures show that non-readers number only one out of 10. In Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, there was a marked decline from nine out of 10 non-readers in 2006 in Siasi and Bongao to five out of 10.

 

Students in second and third grades are into advanced reading and solving math problems.  Children from Indanan, Sulu were the best performers by the end of EQuALLS 1 with an average score of 73% in a Math achievement test.

 

At the training last May for EQuALLS 2, ARMM science and math teachers were given tests before and after the mentoring and most of them showed big leaps of improvement in their grasp of concepts both in Math and Science. If these improvements can also happen when they get back to their home schools, organizers hope that more Filipino children will get the quality education they deserve.

 

For Milwida Guevara, president and CEO of Synergeia, ARMM’s children will benefit more if teachers, principals and supervisors are empowered to plan, create their own training modules and improve their own region.

 

“We see to it that we train them and we make them independent and capable on their own. We build their capacity to plan. We don’t tell them how to spend their budget. We teach them how and guide them, but they decide on their own,” said Guevara.

 

So far, the strategy seems to be working. Understanding the limited resources, they spend more of their budgets on training materials instead of refreshments. They discover their own strengths as they rise to challenge.

 

Mercy said ARMM will be reaping huge benefits from the help it receives from organizations like USAID, EDC and Synergeia, but in the end, it’s still the teacher who will be the ARMM child’s doorway to the world of learning.

 

“It still depends on the teacher, whether he or she will use all of these things to improve herself. You know, at the end of the training, many of them were in tears as they realized that they can make a big difference in the lives of their students. This realization is even more important than math and science,” Mercy said. END