Continuous Quality Education for Learners Amidst COVID-19.

Fe T. Yalung

The corona virus pandemic has had a severe impact on teaching. As a result of the crisis, local and foreign educators had to quickly adapt and shift to remote teaching. Public and private educational institutions both in the country and abroad immediately closed during the outbreak and only allowed essential workers to continue their services. Lockdown was enforced at this time. Classes were suspended prior to the end of the school year set by the Department of Education. These students below 21 years old were not allowed to return to school and elderly persons 60 and above as well as pregnant and immunocompromised individuals were not allowed to go outside their residences.

The current pandemic brought by COVID-19 will always leave its impact in every country affecting its socio-economic aspect including education. It is undeniable that student’s right to education is threatened during this crisis. The pandemic has forced educational institutions at all levels in the country both private and public to suspend learning in order to protect the health of the learners as well as the students. Suspending the classes is one of the ways to curb the spread of the virus. This enables the teaching and learning community to come up with alternative delivery modes and alternate strategies for engaging our students.

The Department of Education has come up with distance learning modalities such as modular distance learning, online distance learning, TV-based instruction, Radiobased instruction and blended distance learning. Schools in the country have chosen learning delivery modality they think is suited to the needs of their learners. The school, teachers, students and parents must perform their roles in the chosen modality in order to ensure the success of the learning continuity plan.

The department has launched the learning delivery modalities 2 courses for instructional coaches and teachers with the aim of supporting teachers in preparation for the new learning delivery modality, assisting teachers to gain an understanding of the most essential learning competencies, providing a clear picture on how lessons and assessments are designed for the distance learning modality, giving teachers the knowledge on how to select and evaluate learning resources from DepEd and non-DepEd portals and helping teachers to improve their jobs by planning for continuous professional development in the new learning delivery modality the school has adopted. All these for the purpose of providing continuous quality education for learners amidst COVID-19.

The author is Teacher –

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III at Don Jesus Gonzales High School