How Did the Covid-19 Change the Education Landscape in the Classroom?

The author is Teacher II at Sta. Cruz (Main) Elementary School Mery Grace S. de la Fuente

Much has been said about the abrupt change in the teaching-learning process during this pandemic time. From the traditional face-to-face classes, today's learning delivery has become confined to the four corners of every learner’s home. Parents must go to school to get the modules once a week and hand them over to a child. Handing over the learning materials to a learner doesn’t mean the parents are done with their duties to their children. They must guide their children throughout their weekly learning modules to ensure that learners get the best out of them. Parents’ guidance should be felt by their children, otherwise, their learning opportunities for those specific competencies will be compromised. The process of learning during this national health emergency is an arduous task for each and everyone involved. The teachers have to go through a lot of preparations in school, like crafting, modifying, and printing the learning materials, writing scripts for those that implement radio-based lessons, designing assessment tests to ensure that the learners get something from what they have read and studied for a couple of weeks, checking and evaluating as to whether or not they can proceed to the succeeding learning competencies, and personal home visits and monitoring to see for themselves how a learner and parents support each other in the name of education. For parents, on the other hand, going to and from school to get and return the accomplished modules of their children makes their schedules for living a bit disruptive. Their time to guide their children in their studies is also quite sacrificial as it is also their time to make a living for their family. It’s herculean on their part. The learners, on the one hand, being engaged in distance education, are also quite stressed by the strategies and techniques they have used before. With this sudden change, learners will find it a bit boring and disinteresting. In this case, teachers and parents need to talk more often to remedy this kind of response by learners toward home-schooling or modular approaches. The process of teaching-learning that we have today is still new to many, especially to parents and learners. However, the end goal is still the same as that of the traditional form of learning, which is the attainment of quality basic education for the Filipino youth. To make this more responsive and relevant, we should go together with putting more life into this kind of learning delivery. Teachers should always keep their communication with parents burning to properly assess the academic progress of the learners. Parents, on the other hand, should be honest and open with the teacher in terms of their observations and assessment of their children. That way, the teacher can act immediately on the problems and solve them right away. Learners should also practice honesty in dealing with all their exercises and that the value of learning rather than their numerical rating should be considered. All these things could be done very smoothly, so long as everyone involved in them does their proper share.