Barbados has designed another initiative to transform our educational system. Our educational system takes over 30% of the public service salaries, but fails most of our students; therefore, it needs improvement.
The current initiative is analogous to building a Space Shuttle to take passengers from Oistins to Bridgetown. That is not a problem. A first draft tends to be aspirational and is a normal first step in designing a workable solution to a problem, especially where diverse stakeholders get to say what they want included. The next step is a critical review where deficiencies are identified and addressed.
If a critical review is not allowed, then a small-scale pilot should be done before implementing a national program. A pilot would expose the same deficiencies as a critical review, but they will be corrected at a higher cost and disruption. A national rollout of an initial draft plan is never, under any circumstances, recommended.
NO TURNING BACK.
We intend to implement this initial draft. We were told the University of Columbia (US) has already trained several of our teachers, and funding was already secured from the Government of Qatar and XQ Institute (US).
There is to be a misplaced focus on technology at primary school. A 15-year-old student is ready to use a tool at the start of her career and can master its use in 2 hours. A 6-year-old student may spend four weeks trying to master a tool that he does not yet need and which will likely be obsolete when he needs it. Teaching 6-year-olds to become proficient in what they do not yet need is Space Shuttle Education.
Our Common Entrance (11-plus) Examination is deemed not to be the fairest way to select persons for secondary school because students may have a ‘bad day’. A simple solution to address that valid concern is to allow such students to write a different exam one week later and be awarded the higher mark. However, the plan is to remove the full independence of the 11-plus by introducing the teachers’ biases. Pursuing an unnecessarily complex and expensive solution is Space Shuttle Education.
AN ECONOMICAL SOLUTION.
Primary school education should provide our students with a strong foundation of intelligence and curiosity on which they may master any subjects they choose to build on it. We can meaningfully improve our educational system and exam scores at no additional cost, based on the observation that all people are either careful or careless in their approach to different subjects. The solution’s steps follow.
STEP 1.
The teacher should: (i) teach simple concepts in a manner that all students may understand, (ii) test the students on that material and (iii) grade only careless mistakes – not mistakes of comprehension.
That simple test provides the teacher with critical feedback on: (i) which students approached the test carelessly and (ii) the material that was not understood. The teacher should use the comprehension errors to teach more carefully.
STEP 2.
The teacher should: (i) return the marked test papers, (ii) explain the answer to each test question and (iii) ask the students to make corrections to their own papers. The teacher should then explain that: (i) all students can excel, (ii) students may excel in subjects they approach carefully and (iii) school is a place where all students can choose to be careful so that they may excel in everything they are taught.
The teacher should reinforce that no one is perfect, but each of us is responsible for hunting for our own careless mistakes after our first draft effort. Therefore, students should critically read-over their answers to each assignment at least three times.
STEP 3.
The teacher should have three check boxes at the top of every test, namely: Review 1, Review 2 and Review 3. The student is to check each box after they have finished a review. Therefore, the questions on each test paper should allow students sufficient time to complete the paper and three reviews.
On every test, the teacher should identify the comprehension and careless mistakes, but only grade careless mistakes for students. The comprehension errors are actually the teacher’s grade of careful or careless teaching, which should allow the teacher to teach that class better – in a manner that all students may understand.
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