No Read?

Madusmog kaw nan dako na A! This was the usual words teachers of our generation utter when one cannot read. We were then compelled to read the basic sight words and in Grade 2, this writer could read those words well without batting an eyelash.

Inquirer.net reported that more than 70,000 elementary students in Bicol cannot read in both English and Filipino, according to the Department of Education (DepEd), citing initial results of a 2019 study. Of this number, 18,143 are pupils in Grades 3 to 6, data released by Grace Rabelas, education supervisor for curriculum and learning management division of DepEd Bicol, showed.

Rabelas said the rest of what she called “nonreaders” were in Grades 1 to 2. The data were based on results of pretests administered by the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI) between July and August 2019, the report continued.

The news stirred the academic community which even prompted the secretary of education to have a press conference explaining the details of the data. She mentioned that the result did not say that interventions were nil. This was just the pre-test results and the DepEd is doing everything to raise the quality of learning via Sulong Edukalidad.

Before we proceed to our discourse on one’s inability to read, let us first know what good readers do. According to Beers (2003), good readers recognize that reading is done for a purpose, to get meaning, and that this involves the reader actively participating. They use a variety of comprehension strategies such as predicting, summarizing, questioning and visualizing the text. They make inferences about the text. They use prior knowledge about their lives and their world to inform their understanding of a text. They monitor their understanding of a text, identify what is challenging, and have strategies to improve their understanding. They evaluate their enjoyment of a text and why it did or did not appeal to them. They know many vocabulary words and how to use the context, word parts, and roots to help understand new words. They recognize most words automatically, read fluently, vary their reading rate, and “hear” the text as they read.

But do these indicators manifest even to our high school students? Result of the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) revealed Filipino students ranked last among the 79 countries assessed for reading comprehension.

There are various factors that lead to reading failure, including impoverished exposure to language and early literacy activities, lack of adequate instruction, and/or more biologically based risk factors. While there are ongoing research efforts in all three areas, the most critical are: instruction and markers for at-risk readers (Cutting, 2018).

The K-12 curriculum dictates the standards and competencies for reading and comprehension. Yet there are other macro skills and strands for the learners to master since reading has this complex range to reach the level of arriving towards comprehension. In short the curriculum is jam-packed with other competencies that the teachers’ instructions are congested as well. There is a need to slim down the competencies and focus on the basics. This, too, is being considered by the department with the launching of the Sulong Edukalidad.

What about markers for at-risk readers? Cutting continued that poor phonological awareness, which can be tested long before children enter school, is one marker. Another concerning sign is if children are struggling with learning sound-symbol relationships when they begin to read. Finally, one of the best predictors we know of for future reading problems is if one or more relatives, particularly parents, struggled with reading themselves.

Family orientation is a great influence since how could the learners have these follow-up episodes when nary a trace of reading material can be found in their houses? We can still remember the times when the parents of the older generations invest on buying those humongous encyclopedias for their children’s reference and reading materials. Most of the parents these days are either influenced by what they see on social media or immature ones thriving on their own selfish needs than their children’s well-being.

Parent involvement in early literacy is directly connected to academic achievement. Children need parents to be their reading role models with daily practice in order to navigate successfully through beginning literacy skills (Evans, Shaw, Bell, 2000).

Educators and parents play key roles in reading. This skill is the backbone of one’s competence and literacy. What would happen to the world if people could not predict outcomes? Worse, what if no one can follow a simple direction?

Let us invest on the minds of the young. Let them devour the contents of the books we can buy, borrow or lend.

Misleading the Schools

Aber iton basta kay nagdawat nan sweldo! Although this phrase is not directly uttered, this can be read through the individual’s performance and actions in capital letters. When this happens, it is saddening to realize that the system will become jaded to the point that low performance will be the norm.

It is terrifying to realize that such entropy is happening in the educational system where school heads are delegating much of the work to the teachers who in return cannot perform their roles well due to overlapping functions.

Educational leaders play a pivotal role in affecting the climate, attitude and reputation of their schools. They are the cornerstone on which learning communities function and grow. With successful school leadership, schools become effective incubators of learning, places where students are not only educated but challenged, nurtured and encouraged.

On the other hand, according to Lathan (2018), poor or absent school leadership can undermine the goals of an educational system. When schools lack a strong foundation and direction, learning is compromised, and students suffer. According to a Wallace Foundation study, “Leadership is second only to classroom instruction as an influence on student learning.”

The way our learners are being gauged through the National Achievement Test and even the school’s mean percentage score show the input of school leaders and teachers. It could never happen that the output is NOT correlated to the input and processes.

University of San Diego posits these questions: what makes a successful school leader? How do you become truly effective as a principal or in a leadership position? While there is no one solution to successful school leadership, there are certain strategies, skills, traits and beliefs that many of the most effective school leaders share.

The school head must simply CARE. The I-don’t-care mentality is either a product of sloth or ignorance. Once a person receives his appointment as stated, s/he must directly understand the terms of reference and the job description. If it is beyond the individual’s capacity, the person seeks technical assistance to better his services.

Great leaders find the balance between foresight, performance, and character. They have vision, courage, integrity, humility and focus along with the ability to plan strategically and catalyze cooperation among their team (Tracy, 2017).

To many, leadership comes naturally and stems from an innate ability to take control of a situation and seek the best possible outcome for all parties involved. For others, it’s a special talent nurtured and grown every day.

So why do other school leaders do not manifest the aforementioned values and traits?

While it’s understandable that there are limits to what one leader can do, there is still room for excellence. If we take one thing and work on it until we’re satisfied it is now excellent, we’ve taken one step closer to overall excellence in our journey (Cummuta, 2017).

It doesn’t really matter so much what we choose to do in our lives, only how well we do it. Why not choose excellence?

According to Mars and Moses (2019), exercising leadership skillfully can mean simply asking the right question at the right moment in the right way. Alternatively, it can mean remaining silent at the right moment. Or it can mean giving your version of the “I Have a Dream” speech in front of thousands. Regardless of the scope, leadership entails inserting yourself in a way that can move a group in a new direction toward good. Usually such interventions require being an agent of change. And change inevitably means loss for some people. So those who exercise leadership will often encounter resistance. And to do that work skillfully, effectively, and with excellence, one must bring several qualities to bear.

Again, there is this discussion on commitment and having the right mindset. But then again it is needed for school leaders to be one step ahead of their teachers. It is dismaying to see that some of them grope on the writing of observation notes which is tantamount to instructional supervision.

The question would then mutate to: Are we hiring the right persons for the job?

The Blurred Side

Sige’g maoy. In preparing lessons, most of the teachers write the verb APPRECIATE when they want the learners to develop something on their affective side. As a school head, this writer often ask why is it difficult for the students to master the act of appreciation when in fact whole year round the teachers target for them to master it?

Appreciation is “an emotion that is typically evoked when one receives costly, unexpected, and intentionally rendered benefits, and is thought to play a key role in regulating the initiation and maintenance of social relationships” (Forster et al., 2017).

The word costly is then relative to the person defining it. An example is this, if one does not appreciate the gift of being alive, s/he will then resort to complain in the so-called misfortunes encountered along the way. But the grateful ones see them as challenges worthy to be faced and become leaning grounds.

Steve Taylor (2014) says that the taking for granted syndrome is clearly related to the phenomenon of adaptation, the process by which we quickly “get used to” new environments and situations. When we’re first exposed to new experiences and environments, they affect us powerfully. For example, the first few days in an unfamiliar foreign country, the first few days in a new job, or the first exposure to a new smell or taste. But these experiences and sensations quickly lose their sensory power as we become habituated to them. There almost seems to be a psychological mechanism of “desensitization,” which quickly filters out the intensity of experiences, turning newness to familiarity.

Then, we fall into the trap of taking things for granted.

With the exposure to information about the dismal events in the world, one’s mindset can be muddled with negativity. But if the mind is trained to dwell on the positive side, a different mindset which allows the person to take positive actions can be created.

So why is it that young people these days do not know HOW TO APPRECIATE? Most of them are only concerned on how to be famous; how to have relationships and how to create “Instagramable” moments. So what is the gap?

Even though gratitude has long been considered a powerful ingredient of health and well-being for both individuals and societies, no systematic attempt has ever been made to understand its development in youth. This is a gap that seriously hampers progress in the science of gratitude.

According to the Youth Gratitude Project (YGP), these questions must be asked by parents and educators:

What is the role of gratitude in positive youth development? What can the people with the greatest influence over children—parents; teachers, coaches, and others—do to foster gratitude in children? What school-based programs can promote sustainable increases in grateful character traits? Is there a critical period when the capacity for gratitude is best transmitted from an older to a younger generation? To what degree does gratitude predict positive outcomes such as school success, overall well-being, community service, resiliency, health behaviors, and less risk taking?

But do we care? Do parents transcend on their roles and leave the SELF behind to serve as a good parent to the kids? Do teachers perform things beyond the curriculum in humanizing the learners?

According to Froh, J. J., Emmons, et al. (2011), good parenting and teaching require these four main scopes in looking into the mindset of the young:

Create gratitude scales for children and adolescents; examine the development of gratitude in teens; examine the role of parental and social determinants of youth gratitude; conduct cross-cultural research on a school-based gratitude curriculum.

Embedded in an insecure age of growing through relentless developmental change, to see themselves so positively reflected in parental eyes can mean a lot: “I’m not just a bunch of problems after all; in a lot of ways, I'm OK.”

That is probably the biggest gap. Young people are left alone by the adults to venture the world they do not understand. Basically, the technological backdrop of their ecology is being created by the adults themselves. They are not guided to APPRECIATE simple things and they got overwhelmed by the world they see on the internet. They do not want to be left out that their priorities become twisted so to compete what they have observed on the virtual world.

Yes, we are the reflections of our kids. Did we manage to master APPRECIATION ourselves?

Overload

Hurot dakan baja yaot? As February is being ushered in, a lot of people are airing their pleas in social media sites to make this month a “better” one. They have enumerated the crisis in Iran, the eruption of Taal volcano, the tragic death of Kobe Bryant and the Corona virus lately. For them 2020 seems to be a bad year since the first month brought some sort of chaos to the world.

Yet, those people who are not “connected” seem to be living the way they have been doing. They are in a state of equilibrium. Some are even content… Is the collective fear being caused by over information?

The term “information overload” was coined by Bertram Gross, the Professor of Political Science at Hunter College, in his 1964 work – The Managing of Organizations. However, it was popularized by Alvin Toffler, the American writer and futurist, in his book “Future Shock” in 1970.

Gross defined information overload as follows:

“Information overload occurs when the amount of input to a system exceeds its processing capacity. Decision makers have fairly limited cognitive processing capacity. Consequently, when information overload occurs, it is likely that a reduction in decision quality will occur.”

Since the coming of Industrial Revolution 4.0, people seem to rely on too much information they could get at the tip of their fingertips. They seem to make the internet as the overall source of information that some could not even work without it. Students and even some educators are stooped on their phones and laptops to be updated with the latest innovation and even gossip. Pre-school kids are allowed by their parents to be exposed on online games not realizing the mental stress they will have when the limit to absorb movements and visuals will be reached.

And there lies the danger: the capacity to decide, infer and make practical solutions will not be developed due to information overload.

Jill Monde of philnews.ph wrote: It is just the first month of a new year and it seems like things and circumstances are getting really alarming and disturbing already: Many dies, worldwide dilemma, outbreaks, natural phenomena, death of a legend, and among others. All of these made headlines and got many people worried and bothered. She then enumerated the following events:

1.    1. Australian Wildfires; 2. Iran-US Conflict; .3. Ukrainian Plane Crash: 4. Taal Eruption; 5. Novel Coronavirus Outbreak; 6. NBA Legend Kobe Bryant and Gigi’s Helicopter Crash

This information could create quite a stir in the mental foundation of those who are constantly monitoring such events in the macro scale. They will then concede to the insinuated message of the information that indeed, the month of January is catastrophic. 

They fail to consider that they are healthy, they have a job and humanity is doing good deeds to counter such negativity. The information muddled their positive disposition since they fail to go deeper to the inner person and reflect. They automatically react on the stimulus.

Andrea Brandt, PhD (2018) mentions that when you’re reactive, your feelings depend on external events outside your influence or control. Whether you have a good or bad day depends entirely on what happens to you and around you. The weather, what your boss says about your presentation, what mood your partner is in when you get home, how your favorite team played: All these outside things control your emotions; you don’t.

Reflective people are pro-active. They choose what to focus on and let go of worrying about things over which they have no influence. They take individual steps to make external factors be solved within their spheres of control.

Excessive use of smartphone paired with negative attitude and feeling of anxiety and dependency on gadgets may increase the risk of anxiety and depression (Rosen et al., 2013[18], Thomée et al., 2011[20]).

Information or cognitive overload can lead to indecisiveness, bad decisions and stress. Indecisiveness or analysis paralysis occurs when you’re “overwhelmed by too many choices, your brain mildly freezes and by default, [and] you passively wait and see.” Or you make a hasty decision because vital facts get wedged between trivial ones, and you consider credible and non-credible sources equally (Tartakovsky,2018).

So, why not regain our control over things which we cannot control and focus on the things that we can? We can lessen the time we spend exposing our minds to multiple information that our minds could sometimes do not accommodate?

As adults, we can detach ourselves and our children’s attention to the virtual world and focus on the real one. We can appreciate better the birds (which are still) on the trees, chirping.

Life will be easier to fathom.

No Surpassing!

Way sajop, pirme eksakto! Lately, one can observe that difficult people are thriving all around. We can hear them complain on everything. In public utility vehicles, they won’t consider the elderly and even other passengers by sitting as if they own the vehicle. There are those who find minute details in the services of a restaurant just to underscore his or her presence. They point out “wrong” details crossing borders by shaming the service-providers. There are those who would slave-drive hotel personnel for them to be served right. Most of them are adults.

When we point out the humane side of things, they give retorts telling you that it is right for them to give the right services! When you ask: even to the point of embarrassing them? YES! Is the big answer.

In 1999 Cornell psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, coined the eponymous Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Essentially, low ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence. The combination of poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability leads them to overestimate their own capabilities (Cherry, 2019).

Difficult people believe than they are better than anybody since their perceptions of their intellect and abilities are the topmost of all knowledge and skills. They do not understand that learning and knowledge are dynamic. And when someone manifests higher intellect, they still do not agree since their sphere of understanding about capabilities are only limited to what they have.

Cherry continued: this phenomenon is something you have likely experienced in real life, perhaps around the dinner table at a holiday family gathering. Throughout the course of the meal, a member of your extended family begins spouting off on a topic at length, boldly proclaiming that he is correct and that everyone else's opinion is stupid, uninformed, and just plain wrong. It may be plainly evident to everyone in the room that this person has no idea what he is talking about, yet he prattles on, blithely oblivious to his own ignorance.

What causes such behavioral phenomenon?

Dunning and Kruger suggest that this phenomenon stems from what they refer to as a "dual burden." People are not only incompetent; their incompetence robs them of the mental ability to realize just how inept they are. Incompetent people tend to: Overestimate their own skill levels; Fail to recognize the genuine skill and expertise of other people; Fail to recognize their own mistakes and lack of skill.

Dunning has pointed out that the very knowledge and skills necessary to be good at a task are the exact same qualities that a person needs to recognize that they are not good at that task. So if a person lacks those abilities, they remain not only bad at that task but ignorant to their own inability.

They then continue to believe that they are better than anyone. NO ONE CAN SURPASS THEM!

In organizations, these people tend to cause chaos and conflict. It takes a self-mastered manager to point out their inadequacies and teach them how to humbly accept their incompetence. And since most of them do not contribute a lot to the group, there must be a focused intervention for them to become better.

Since their area of belief is only focused on their own, exposure to successful figures and icons is necessary for them to be taken out from their ignorance. They can also be given reprimands which may shatter their bias.

Psychology Today says that the Dunning-Kruger effect has been found in domains ranging from logical reasoning to emotional intelligence, financial knowledge, and firearm safety. And the effect isn't spotted only among incompetent individuals; most people have weak points where the bias can take hold. This tendency may occur because gaining a small amount of knowledge in an area about which one was previously ignorant can make them feel as though they’re suddenly virtual experts. Only after continuing to explore a topic do people often realize how extensive it is and how much they still have to master.

We sometimes learn to live with them. But if they cross our lines, we can give them a dose of their own medicine.

When Educators Cheat

Pwede baja? A system will malfunction if one of its parts do something NOT aligned to the different processes which are geared towards specific outputs. What will happen to the teaching-learning processes when the educators lose their integrity? When the new performance-based evaluation was set by both the department and the Civil Service Commission, there were some raters and ratees who “calibrated” the results for their benefits.

There were even times when some educators instructed teachers and other personnel to alter the result of the National Achievement Test (NAT) so that their credibility will be “saved”. Their integrity was smeared to conceal a mistake; to hide a flaw; to fill-in a gap.

Integrity is a personality trait and comprises the personal inner sense of "wholeness" deriving from honesty and consistent uprightness of character. The etymology of the word relates it to the Latin adjective integer (whole, complete).

Seth Meyers (2015) says that the root of integrity is about doing the right thing even when it’s not acknowledged by others, or convenient for you. An individual with integrity is the antidote to self-interest.

But in the international scale, there are those teachers and school heads who manipulate the assessment results of their students. Some do this so that no further workload in remediation will be given to them. Others put up a face of being effective so they resort to manipulate the results of the learning outcome.

Education Week reports on various studies showing teachers who have cheated on standardized testing have a long-term negative effect on students, and new research from Stanford University economists looks at what happens to students whose scores were fabricated. One consequence is that some students were subsequently unable to take remediation classes or partake in other kinds of intervention that may have otherwise helped their academic performance. In the long run, they will not master the needed competencies.

But what is the deeper meaning why educators cheat?

Cheating on academic work involves a diverse array of psychological phenomena, including learning, development, and motivation. These phenomena form the core of the field of educational psychology. From the perspective of learning, cheating is a strategy that serves as a cognitive shortcut. Whereas effective learning often involves the use of complex self-regulatory and cognitive strategies, cheating precludes the need to use such strategies (Anderman, Murdock, 2007).

So, we can infer that since they want to have cognitive shortcuts, they need to have lesser “work” in the cognitive side. Does it mean they can be stressed thinking or their absorptive capacity of cognitive learning is less? Or, this could be a by-product of being NOT motivated to let the learners learn in the correct flow of the different processes. Is this the reason why there are supervisors and school principals who tag a teacher as LAZY?

One recent study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), looks at New York’s Regents Exams, the high-school tests in a handful of subjects that students are required to pass to graduate. Until 2010, teachers were responsible for grading their own students’ exams; they were also required to rescore any tests that fell just a few points below the proficiency threshold. These scoring policies, the economists found, enabled widespread manipulation: 40 percent of the scores near the cutoffs—or 6 percent of all the exams in core subjects—were inflated.

Alia Wong (2016) mentions that there’s good evidence that score manipulation does harm kids, particularly when teachers are falsifying their responses outright for the sake of avoiding sanctions.

So, another reason is self-preservation? An educator cheats so that s/he will not be reprimanded for the lack of efforts to perform the job assigned to him/her. But then, isn’t this the thing that workers do? A cook will make actions to better the taste of the food by adding salt or water before it will be served. The teacher could accept the result of the teaching process and consider remediation!

A cheating educator discounts the value not only his or her good name, character, and trustworthiness, but also the key element of education — learning. The teacher who cheats abandons faith in his or her ability to learn. Exam manipulation is a symptom of profound self-despair and loss of confidence.

So what must be done? There is a need to overhaul the system and revisit the value of INTEGRITY. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation must also be reflected deeper by the individuals so that the person inside could do GOOD to her ecology.

Scribble

Pag journal dakan! These are often heard when someone continues to lament and complain on things happening to the culprit’s life. Also, when someone verbally airs out ideas and often digressing to the main point, chances are some friends would irritably say: write them down than allow us to feel dizzy.

Personally, journal writing has become an extension of my thinking. Jotting down ideas, notes and observations seem to empower the person inside that it even allow this writer to know how to confront emotions either good or bad.

Journaling is an aid to self-discovery and personal growth through writing. Keeping a journal of your thoughts, feelings, and experiences helps one’s well-being. In general, it helps you “know yourself” in isolation and leads to greater understanding and behavior change in your interactions with others.

Atherton (2018) mentions that keeping a journal is important because it creates a space amid the general chaos and clutter from which to pause, collect, organize and untangle. Journaling enables a person to set things down, sort through them, unpick them, understand them and heal them. Also, journaling presents the opportunity to reflect, dissect, analyze, learn, understand and future-proof against detrimental repetition.

Lots of persons automatically react to situations allowing themselves to regret their actions related to the stimulus. But there are those who stop and try to write their feelings and even the resolutions to the things they experienced and make them as learning grounds.

The personal learning process stimulated through dialogue with oneself or with one's instructor over time arises from the cognitive and affective synthesis of shared thoughts and the meanings ascribed to these thoughts. Journal strategies have successfully been applied in traditional learning environments and should be carefully considered in different arenas (Davie, 1997).

Why do we have to reflect and write them down? Simple: We are the managers of our thoughts and our thoughts matter. These are the springboards of our decisions and eventually our actions. That is the reason why social scientists believe that the success and failure of a person depend on his/her calculations. There is an impact of writing your thoughts down. They will become tangible ideas printed on paper. And you can weigh things out through them.

In learning, students are encouraged to have journals. Most of the research involving journal writing has been qualitative in nature, with the journal entries analyzed for trends. Davies found that in the process of journal writing, students moved from being passive to active learners during their clinical debriefing sessions.

This type of paradigm shift was also reported by Sedlack, who found that journal writing aided in placing responsibility with the student for active engagement and self-directed learning. In addition, the students' self-confidence increased because the journals enabled them to identify their own lack of motivation (Walker, 2006).

Teachers, on the other hand, are encouraged to write their reflections in the daily lesson logs. This will allow them to dig deeper into the whys and wherefores of the lessons they have conducted during the week.

Research by Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano, and Bradley Staats in call centers demonstrated that employees who spent 15 minutes at the end of the day reflecting about lessons learned performed 23% better after 10 days than those who did not reflect. A study of UK commuters found a similar result when those who were prompted to use their commute to think about and plan for their day were happier, more productive, and less burned out than people who didn’t.

So, why is it that it is difficult to write down our reflections? Some of us see that writing is a task. Something that is done in the classroom or in the office. There are those who do not want to confront their inner demons. And most do not find meaning in it.

Still, we need to keep a journal. It is heartwarming that notebooks are proliferating inside bookstores and there is a market for the young who jot down their thoughts and feelings. It is in doing this that we can be assured that people are still monitoring themselves.