How the Congested Curriculum affects the Performance of Learners

Rosemay C. Garcia

Curriculum serves as a guide for teachers that establishes standards for student performance and teacher accountability. It is a combination of instructional practices, learning experiences, and student performance assessment that are designed to bring out and evaluate the target learning outcomes of a particular subject or course. However, the curriculum sometimes does not serve its purpose for the reason that it is becoming overcrowded. Overcrowded in a way that the learning competencies our learners ought to learn were doubled through the years. Additional competencies were added to the existing ones making our learners bombarded with lots of work and competencies to meet. Thus, they tend to get little opportunity to personally process and contextualize the major concepts and make weak connections among the other competencies causing their unsatisfactory performance/achievement.

I agree that the congested or overcrowded curriculum is one of the root causes of the unsatisfactory achievement of our students. It is because of the number of competencies to be taught on a limited given time. We, teachers, need to proceed to the next competency even though some of the learners have not yet mastered the desired previous competency.

It is our duty to follow the curriculum. But also, we are obliged to teach our learners based on their level of understanding. We should think of different strategies and ways to teach the curriculum that can be easier for our learners to learn the competencies. It is more important to the learners to gain knowledge and use it to their daily living rather than to just teach them the competencies and proceed to next without mastery and understanding at all.

As a teacher the most important thing in teaching is to teach the basic 3Rs, Reading Writing and Arithmetic. Mastery is one of the skills that we need to develop to our learners, most especially now adays there are lots of subjects that they need to study without mastery that is why most of them are having hard time and poor performance in school. Follow up of the parents at home and monitoring of the teacher is very important to ensure the learners improvement and progress in the learning process .

But, with the current situation that we are in, learning competencies were transformed into Most Essential Learning Competencies (MELCS) in which almost the same competencies were merged, others were retained, and the unnecessary/ not applicable were dropped. Thus, I realized that making the curriculum simpler and easier is possible for as long as we have the willingness to do it. I just hope that when teaching / schooling will be back to the old way, we'll still find and make ways in implementing the curriculum in a simpler and easier manner so that our learners will reach their full potentials.

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The author is Teacher III at San Nicolas Elementary School, Arayat East

District