What is an Ideal School?

I was lucky to be one of the participants in the School Heads Development Program (SHDP)Module 1 Course held in Hotelinda, Vigan Ilocos Sur on January 22-29,2018. The participants in the training are school heads in the Department of Education coming from Benguet, Ifugao, Mt. Province, Abra, Kalinga, Tabuk, Apayao and Baguio City. Most of us are newly promoted school heads but there are few seasoned principals who joined the training because they did not attend last years’ SHDP Course because of some family and health reasons. Fifteen of us came from Benguet Division. One of our sessions in our 9 days’ seminar is to illustrate “What to you is an ideal school or dream school?”. Each group was given 10 minutes to illustrate their dream school or ideal school. After each group were done with their output, we displayed in the wall and had gallery walk to benchmark the output of each group. We were also tasked to put “likes” in the most ideal school that attracted us. In our group, we just received two likes. When we revisited our work, we did not organize well the placement of facilities due to limited time. The comment in our work is that the comfort room is too far for the learners. In our gallery walk, we had seen commonalities from the output of each group that an ideal school has complete facilities and equipment. It has Ecopark, school canteen, playground, Gulayan sa Paaralan , clinic, laboratory building, academic building, library, guidance office and Moral Recovery Facility (MRF). In our realization or small group discussion, we were enlightened that an ideal school is not only focusing in the physical aspect of the school. Although Provision of complete facilities, equipment and conducive learning atmosphere are contributory in the teachinglearning process, the inner components of the school comprising school head, teachers and non-teaching play the most essential role in making it an ideal school. An ideal school respects the rights of children, they are protected from bullying and abuse. An ideal school provides immediate interventions or remediation to address learners at risk of failure. In this case, no learners will be left behind and failures will be avoided at the end of the school year. An ideal school is fair and just in grading students. In an ideal school, teachers closely monitor projects or performance output of learners. Students or pupils do it in the classroom and their teacher is there to assist them in the process or procedures in coming up with their projects. It is not a take home work to insure that learners do it themselves in the school and they learn the skills. An ideal school has teachers who follow the greatest teacher Jesus who search for the” lost sheep “. They show concern to their learners by visiting a student who incurred consecutive absences, find out the reason, provide intervention to this learner and motivate them to go back to school. An ideal school does not only focus their attention in honing the talents, abilities and potentials of advance learners representing the schools in various competitions, the school insures that there is continuity of learning for the learners left in the school. To sum up, an ideal school provides quality education to learners. The school head as an over seer of the institution and as instructional leader has great responsibilities in providing technical assistance to teachers to improve their pedagogical skills to insure that learners attain the prescribe content and performance standards. Vilma E. Balaodan