A little under a decade ago, former chairman of the Kenya National Examinations Council, Prof Kabiru Kinyanjui, made two troubling conclusions about the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education exam results.
The first conclusion was that teachers seemed to overly rely on the course books in their teaching and not on the curriculum designs. In educational jargon, curriculum design is the systematic sequence of courses or subjects that forms a school’s instructional programme. It is what is commonly known as the syllabus.
The second conclusion was that out of the then about 600,000 KCSE candidates, only about 30 per cent obtained C+ – the qualifying mark for university education.
Prof Kinyanjui said 30 per cent was unacceptable. An industrial and knowledge-based economy, he argued, required men and women with the literacy and numeracy skills and reasoning skills to manage it.
He, however, particularly expressed his concern with the seeming reliance on textbooks by teachers in their instructional habits, as an analysis of the way KCSE candidates handled the exam revealed.
In the world of education, textbooks are not the beginning and the end of the instructional behaviour of teachers. On the contrary, it is the syllabus or curriculum design. Curriculum design guides teachers in their planning activities, readings, lessons and assessments—these are critical to achieving educational goals.
The curriculum and the respective designs for each taught subject are the centre of gravity of schooling.
Policymakers formulate the curriculum and syllabus while textbooks are created by academic authors and publishers in the context of or faithful interpretation of the curriculum and syllabus.
In sum, textbooks or course books serve the overriding purposes of the curriculum and the syllabus. It is the syllabus that provides the breadth and depth of content and skills to be covered and what is important, and how the skills and content are ordered and presented to learners over time. Not textbooks.
It follows that the syllabus should be the starting point for teachers in preparing what they teach and how they teach it. The syllabus guides the teacher as to the ideas and concepts that he should cover.
Ideally, the syllabus triggers the fund of knowledge, imagination and creativity of the teacher to explore all conceivable sources to improve, refresh and contextualise the ideas, concepts and knowledge learners are expected to learn in a given subject. The textbook is one of the reference materials available to the teacher, not the only source
Exclusive reliance on the textbook can very easily narrow the broad vision or insight he is expected to bring to the ideas, concepts or topics learners ought to know with the appropriate mastery and understanding—for the long term and not necessarily for examination.
Textbooks are important. However, they are principally written with the students in mind. The textbook follows all the essentials mentioned in both curriculum and syllabus for a school calendar. They are a one-stop shop for the ideas, concepts and topics the curriculum designs prescribe for ease of access by students and not necessarily the teacher.
The teacher is at liberty to use his knowledge, skills, judgment, experience and wisdom to undertake research on the topics the students ought to learn. Done properly and widely, the teacher is likely to unpack the knowledge, the interpretation and application of the knowledge in all possible situations and to detonate the skills, attitudes and values associated with the topics, ideas or concepts.
Former Quality Assurance and Standards Officer Alex Majani argued that the textbook is actually written for the students and should be used by the teacher to direct the students on specific areas. The teacher should however have a background knowledge or understanding of the subject or topic over and above what the textbook has.
Deputy Director in charge of the Curriculum at the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development Jacqueline Onyango similarly argues against exclusive reliance of teachers on textbooks for their instructional practices.
“Textbooks publishers are not curriculum experts,” Onyango observed, saying they heavily rely on the curriculum designs or syllabus to develop the books. She said it is the reason why every school is given a syllabus and the Head teacher provides instructional leadership where the syllabus and not the textbooks is the centre of instructional behaviour.
Onyango argues the syllabus guides the teacher on how to prepare schemes of work, lesson plans and other important issues relevant to good teaching, saying textbooks cannot replace the syllabus.
Deputy director, Quality Assurance and Standards, Joseph Wambua says exclusive reliance on textbooks without referring to the syllabus might mislead a teacher to teach topics outside the syllabus, or skip certain critical nuances of a topic that the syllabus requires that students learn.
The students may have been taught but in ways that don’t yield certain ways of understanding that a KCSE examination requires, making students fail not because they don’t know, not because they were not taught, but because the objectives the syllabus demanded of the teacher were not achieved, Wambua noted.
Prof Kinyanjui made these observations in 2014 and they still ring a bell in my ears. They have continued to ring loudly since 2016.
I was gratified when Education Cabinet Secretary Ezekiel Machogu expressed similar concerns, saying the percentage of students qualifying for university education is below international benchmarks.
Although the government could not admit all the students who attained C+ in the years running up to 2016, they had the option to go for parallel degree programmes or to look for university education abroad.
Teachers in secondary education institutions have the capability to ensure that over 30 per cent of KCSE students qualify for university education. The government has provided critical resources for them to effectively and efficiently steer the education of children.
Although not all students who qualify for university education want to join university, they nevertheless have the entry behaviour: firstly, to join technical and vocation institutions with the pedigree intellectual and other capabilities to successfully pursue whatever STEM course they desire in TVET institutions; secondly, they can enrol in parallel degree programmes, and thirdly can join foreign universities.
We can attain all these if our schools make the syllabus the Bible of their instructional behaviour and not the textbook.
