The priceless reward of teaching

Your job becomes your passion if you love what you are doing. In the Philippines, most public-school teachers continue teaching even without the recognition they deserve. Their passion is their motivation. As of last year, there were more than 880,000 public-school teachers nationwide.

These public-school teachers are the molders of the Filipino youth. Dedicated in their chosen profession, our educators work long hours, spend their own limited resources to innovate curriculum and do everything they can to make sure their classrooms are safe and conducive to learning.

Undoubtedly, public-school teachers love sharing knowledge and communicating concepts to their students. They do this day in and day out, notwithstanding the challenges currently facing our education system, which has plenty of room for improvement.

Most of our science teachers have to surmount big hurdles because of the lack of materials, equipment and facilities in our public schools. This situation holds true at Enrile Vocational High School, where I

have been teaching for more than 26 years. However, this did not dampen my enthusiasm to do my best for the sake of my students. I faced the challenged posed by lack of resources by becoming more creative and innovative.

Genetics, for example, is an area in biology that is important, but difficult for students to understand and master. Monohybrid cross is the basic topic that students must master in order to understand the other topics in genetics. Based on my experience, I have noticed that this topic is always the least mastered in the desired learning competency in biology.

The evidence I have to support this observation is the result of the National Achievement Test (NAT) for school year 2009 to 2010 in Science, where the second year students of Enrile Vocational High School got the lowest mean performance score of 55.6 percent in genetics. Results of the pretest and post-test that I used to administer to my grade 8 students at the beginning and at the end of the school year, respectively, also revealed that our students had the lowest proficiency level on monohybrid cross.

It is for these reasons that I thought of preparing a Strategic Intervention Material (SIM), dubbed “What Will I Be?,” to stimulate students’ understanding and interest on the topic of monohybrid cross to enhance the achievement level of my grade 8 students in biology.

I got the idea from the great education philosopher John Dewey, who pushed the idea of learning through activity and child-centered instruction. Students are learning as a result of busy hands when doing manipulative activities, and this is very true in the use of SIM in teaching.

A variety of activities that will help the students learn while having fun are included in the material to help them achieve mastery of the concept. The material includes the following: Guide Card, Activity

Card, Assessment Card, Enrichment Card, Reference and Answer Cards. of course, the skills of the students, appropriateness of the content and congruency to the secondary desired learning competencies were considered in writing the activities and assessment parts of the SIM.

The results of my action research revealed that my students attained higher proficiency level on monohybrid cross after they used the SIM that I made for them. If this strategy in teaching was found effective in biology, then I suppose that it will also work in other subjects.

For this reason, I encourage my fellow dedicated mentors in the field to try to identify the least mastered learning competencies in their subject area and try to make a similar SIM to enhance students’ interest. of course, designing a specific SIM needs a lot of sacrifice, but once you have seen the interest of students in using this teaching tool and their improvement in their learning ability, then the reward becomes priceless.

The author is Master Teacher 2 at Enrile Vocational High School in Enrile, Cagayan.