Are best practices universal, or do cultural norms and class sizes impact effective instructional practice? With all of the financial issues Chicago Public Schools face, class sizes are growing. I would like to see how Filipino teachers engage their students and how they handle the different abilities in the classroom.
Every year, the financial situation of the Chicago Public Schools gets worse and worse. It is always a roller coaster. The budget gets cut right before school starts, and then you have to wait for the tenth day of school (for a preliminary budget) and then the twentieth day of school (for the final budget) to get the final count of student enrollment for student based budgeting. Of course, Chicago Public Schools can have significant changes to enrollment during the year, but the budget is set based on enrollment on the twentieth day of school. At Sayre Language Academy, it was not unheard of to have some students transfer out of the school after the twentieth day. But I usually ended the year with more students than I started the year because students would also transfer to our school. Our school would not receive additional funding for those new students who enrolled. Quite the contrary. For the past few years, budgets have been cut during the school year. This puts a tremendous amount of stress on principals and teachers. There are constant discussions of increasing classroom sizes to up to 40 students. Before going to the Philippines, the largest class size I ever taught was 32 students (seventh graders). I remember how tough it was to move around the room to get to all of the students to answer their questions or to provide additional support. It was a very challenging year. I knew that Filipino classrooms tend to have a lot more students than American classrooms, so I was curious to see how they run and what the teachers do to engage the students. The first class I observed was a tenth-grade science class with my host teacher Rose. She created a very engaging lesson on plate tectonics. Students worked in pairs and were using their resources to complete the activity. There were nearly 60 students in the classroom. There was not a lot of space to move around, so students partnered up mostly with someone who sat near them. Just a few students got up to retrieve materials from the back cabinet to help them complete the assignment. I had the privilege of shadowing Mehlaine from the English department. The lesson I observed was her teaching the students which words to stress when speaking English (it was fascinating to learn with the students since I am a native speaker and word stress comes naturally instead of being taught). She had 4 classes the day that I observed her. Students are grouped by ability, so classrooms are fairly homogenous. The first class I observed had 60 students in it, and it was the 11th group of 8th graders, which meant that these students were, for the most part, on grade level. The other three classes I observed were STEM classes, so these students were the top of the class. There are rigorous standards to get into STEM classes, and students have to meet certain benchmarks in order to stay in the STEM program. It seems like it would be worth it to stay in the program because the maximum number of students in each of those rooms was 40. The structure of each of her classes was similar. They reviewed the rules. She modeled some examples and then had students volunteer to show the work they tried on their own. Students worked in pairs, and they were allowed to choose five out of the remaining eight sentences to complete. At the end of class, students stood up in pairs and said their sentences out loud, so she could hear if they were getting the stress correct. Everyone in the class benefitted from hearing the sentences repeatedly, and she made some corrections and had everyone repeat them. So, I observed many of the same best practices being done in the Filipino classrooms as in US classrooms. I tend to have the students work in groups of four, so they can have more ideas being shared, but groups of four would be challenging in the classrooms I observed in the Philippines because of space constraints. Teachers in both settings model how to do the work and gradually release the amount of work to the students. A challenge that the Filipino teachers faced was not being able to catch misunderstandings and provide additional support while the students were working with their partners. The teachers physically could not get around the room to see what the students were doing. They had to rely on the students raising their hands to ask questions. Community building is a bit different between the countries. Teachers in the US are always encouraged to get to know their students and build a community in that way. Filipino teachers have so many students that they do not learn everyone’s name. The community is built by the students being in the same room every day for all of their classes and by doing partner work. So, the students create their own community without the inclusion of the teacher. They adhere to the teacher’s rules and expectations and show the teacher tremendous respect. It would seem that Chicago could increase class sizes to 40 without issues since the Filipino model appeared to work. This is not the case. Culture comes into play here. First of all, education is highly regarded in the Philippines, and teachers are shown great respect. In the US, you can best see an anti-intellectual movement in the political arena, where education and experience are seen as negatives. Candidates are being lauded for having no political experience (experience equals corruption to many). Intellectuals are considered pompous and arrogant, and I have heard many people say they like a candidate because they feel they can have a beer with him. So, education is not highly valued in our society. Teachers in Chicago certainly, as well as all over the US, have been vilified. We are portrayed as lazy, greedy, and incompetent. The governor of Illinois, a businessman with no previous political experience, called all Chicago Public School teachers illiterate. The lack of value and respect plays out in the classroom, where individual students want the class to run according to their wishes. Certainly not all students or their families feel this way about teachers and education, but it is easy for kids to get swept up in the chaos in the classroom once it starts. I experienced a group of students in one of the classrooms in the Philippines who were not all that interested in their English class. When I was teaching the class, they only did their work when I was standing by them. If those students were sitting in my classroom in Chicago, they would likely be disrupting the whole class. In my host school, I walked by many classrooms in session in addition to the classes I observed. Students simply were not disruptive in the room. That is not culturally acceptable in the Philippines. Class sizes of 40+ would also not work in the US because classes tend to have students with mixed abilities in the room. The push is for teachers to differentiate their lessons to reach all of the students in the room. The more students you have, the harder that is to do. First, as I saw with my Filipino counterparts, you just cannot establish a close relationship with every student (most teachers had over 300 students each year). Without that relationship, it is challenging to truly determine the student’s exact needs. Smaller class sizes allow the teacher to get to know the student’s strengths and weaknesses. Fewer students overall makes it easier for teachers to work with students individually or in small groups. There have been many studies about the benefits for all students in heterogenous classrooms. Moving to larger class sizes would have to lead to losing those benefits and having homogenous classrooms. Increasing class size would also mean the loss of the classroom community as is currently established in the US. Classroom community seemed less important in the Philippines where family stability seems pretty strong. Students left school and spent time with their families. I have seen many of the parents of my students in Chicago making great sacrifices in order to make ends meet. They pick up a second job, or they might be working second or third shift, making it impossible for them to be home when their children get home. I have seen students who desperately need that structured classroom and to have a bond with their teacher because their life outside of school is not structured. Some students have experienced trauma, and they need to form bonds with adults who are dependable and consistent. Our schools try to provide that, despite budgets being cut and staff members being moved around. So, if Chicago wants to move in the direction of the Filipino model of education and increase class sizes, then we need to also adapt their cultural beliefs about education and family. Those changes do not happen overnight. In the meantime, the Philippines is heavily investing in education right now and making some major changes. They just added 11th and 12th grade because they recognize the importance of increasing education for everyone, not just those students who will continue on a college track. I suspect as they continue to invest in education, class sizes will decrease. This is already happening in schools and/or programs around the country. At the school where I observed, the STEM students had smaller class sizes. In the next city over, there was a newly built high school focusing on science. They keep their class sizes small, so students can maximize their opportunities in education. The Philippines are certainly moving forward in the educational arena. Chicago needs to make sure that we do not move backwards. The opinions stated above are my own and do not reflect the thoughts and opinions of the US State Department or IREX.
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AuthorJenn Henderson is a Teachers for Global Classrooms fellow. She will be traveling to the Philippines in June 2017. Archives
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