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.
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