September
1st, 2012: Facing Productivity and Quality Challenges in Galapagos Education
After serving as a
teacher in a K-12 school since April of this year, I am impressed by the
positive aspects of the educational system and concerned with the productivity
and quality challenges. While students tend to enjoy group projects and
organize fun events, I have found that, in general, they lack personal commitment
to learning and concentration in their subjects. In addition, teachers and
administrators disagree over schedule and resource issues, and, at least in my
case, spend more time on bureaucratic processes and trying to evaluate students
fairly more than lesson plan development and ensuring learning of the key
knowledge and competencies.
Focusing on the
disagreements between adults, the negative energy interchanged between these actors
in the system impacts everyone, often more than we
appreciate. For reasons I am still exploring (one of which is unequivocally low
self-esteem), many people in the community tend to perceive things around them
negatively and look to blame someone else, playing the victim role and
unwilling to address issues for self-improvement. For me as a professional, it
is not this negative energy that is the most concerning because I had already
developed mechanisms to overcome it. Rather, I am concerned by and trying to
adapt to the commonly accepted norms of low productivity and complacency towards
identifying and engaging in the challenging work necessary to advance towards
one’s personal goals.
In Washington, DC
due to the high expectations and resulting stress, I often experienced
negativity in the workplace, sometimes as the receiver, other times as the
transmitter. However, given my strong belief in the power of positive energy
and shared devotion to work hard, my peers and I were able to help one another
rise above the negative energy and work more productively in a healthier
environment. I really enjoyed the team spirit at Chemonics and definitely miss
it in my daily life here; not to say it doesn’t exist, but it is less common
and constant. J
While I am thankful
to my three peers at the school for their dedicated work ethic and open
communication, as well as other hard-working colleagues that contribute to an
atmosphere of quality education, I am still trying to identify the roots to the
negative forces that demote productivity so that we can try to redirect the
energy positively to promote productivity. So far, I have identified two roots
to the problem and possible solutions:
1.
We
focus too much on results and not enough on the process.
Most all students and parents want to receive a score of 20/20 points
consistently without sufficient focus on ensuring a quality learning process
and demonstrated mastery of the learning objectives. Often, these students do
not pay attention in class, copy from their classmates, do attend class
regularly, and do not demonstrate mastery of the learning objectives.
Nevertheless, they still have this unwarranted expectation that they should
receive a perfect score to maintain their image as “good students”, even though
they are not performing at the standards of “good students” as identified in
other parts of the world: good time management, concentration, knowledge
acquisition, high performance and other valuable skills. A suggested
solution here would be to democratically redefine “good student” and what
“20/20” means, share this new definition and then, the most challenging part:
hold teachers and students accountable to this new definition!
2.
We
don’t value the importance of holding others accountable enough.
As a social norm in this small community of around 8,000 people, excuses are
accepted and pardons given regularly without firm limits and respect for
holding someone responsible when he or she does not meet his or her obligation.
Many times, the teacher will assign homework due the next day and receive only
a few responses. The majority of students who have not complied will come up
with various excuses, with some turning in the work up to a month late.
Similarly, a student will not pay attention in class and take notes when
instructed, then will ask a classmate for his or her notebook to copy. In
either case, if the teacher or student does not accept the late work or comply
with the request to copy, then he or she is seen as un-loyal and mean. As many
of us know, holding people accountable is an important social measure to help
them be more responsible and grow as a human being. Thus, the obvious
suggested solution would be to develop rules of conduct that promote holding
one another accountable, being productive and not allowing one to evade
responsibility and project guilt onto others.
3. We
don’t plan enough in advance to give sufficient time to implement, including
collection of adequate resources, for projects.
As in many social settings, and likely in many schools, projects are part of
the learning process but many times occur outside of curricular planning. The
result is reduced official curricular learning time and increased project
preparation time. This, of course, can be a positive learning process, but the
concern is that many times it happens last minute, subsumes the planned
learning process, and discourages students if haphazard and not planned well
(which, in my opinion, is more often than not). A recent example is my high
school’s preparation for today’s Independence Day parade. Yesterday, classes
were cancelled all morning (6 hours) so they could march up and down the street
and through the schools’ courtyards to perfect their performance. The students
were all very frustrated and exhausted, not to mention, as I noticed in an
afternoon meeting with the student council, they were all sunburnt! What was
the objective of this? To show that our students can march well and the band
could play a wartime piece for the parade. While they likely reached this
social goal, I don’t think the benefit outweighed the cost of exhausting the
students and stripping them of any pure voluntary desire to participate. A
suggested solution is much more advanced planning in line with classes and
teachers’ curricular planning to better match these two types of learning
activities (traditional classroom and extracurricular during school hours) and
better guarantee student engagement and interest in the process and outcomes.
What is the
conclusion of this lengthy and delayed blog entry? Life on the island is a
challenge in many ways. Of course it is beautiful, peaceful and relatively
safe, but every week I am learning reasons that discourage productive and
positive people from staying. I resolve to persevere and stay to make a
positive impact, even if it is only in a small way. In addition to sharing
these ideas with my colleagues, I also want to explore the opportunity to do a
post-master’s degree in program development and project management for sustainable
behavior change to try to develop a solid toolkit of mechanisms and processes
that can be implemented by various institutions to work towards the vision of
the “good life” in the islands that balances human development with
conservation.
Thanks for reading,
and I welcome your thoughts!
