The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior.
A distinguishing feature of the education system anywhere in the world, is that it takes great care of the learning needs and expectations of all categories of students.
We have high ability students, moderate and slow learners.
The care is found in the rigour and diversity of the curriculum. It is also found in the ideas and concepts that students ought to learn or cover—step by step in a subject and also from grade to grade—within a curriculum.
In adherence to this principle, the Ministry of Education has prescribed a curriculum appreciative of the differences in students’ ability and motivation to learn. More importantly, it has also specified what it calls learning or class hours.
In educational jargon learning hours refers to the hours of teaching and supervised assessment learners need to receive in order to pass the qualification.
This care for all students—the high ability, moderate and slow learner—is found in Section 84 of the Basic Education Regulations, 2015 subtitled, official school hours. The section specifies the activities learners should actually be engaged in between 7.15 am and 4.45 pm at the close of the school business from Monday to Friday for all schools except boarding schools.
The section has stipulated for what it terms as Class Hours—between 8am and 3.30 pm. This is the period the Ministry of Education stipulates as official instructional or teaching time—the period of classroom time spent teaching students a particular body of knowledge, concepts, and skills pertaining to school subjects in the curriculum.
Discounting the time for breaks before and during lunchtime, authorities in the education sector have mutually agreed that the total hours spent teaching students is actually four hours in secondary schools, daily and a maximum of 20 hours weekly. Teaching hours in primary schools are less.
The consequence is that there should be no active teaching of students whatsoever before 8am and after 3.30 pm. Instead, the period from 3.30 pm to 4.45 pm has been designated for co-curriculum activities Monday to Friday; while 5pm to 7.30 pm for self-directed activities Monday to Friday; 7.30 pm to 9.30 pm preps Monday to Friday; 9.30 pm to 6am bedtime Monday to Friday; and 6am to 8am supervised routine activities.
There is a logic behind this requirement. Firstly, students have varied intellectual abilities. They also join primary or secondary schools with varying depth and breadth of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and motivations and readiness to learn.
The net effect of these differences in learners is that the school has the moral and professional responsibilities to create equal opportunities for learning for all students.
The moral and professional responsibility to the learning needs and complexities to all categories of students begins with strict adherence to the stipulated school hours as provided for in Section 84 of the Basic Education Regulations, 2015.
A maximum of four hours of teaching is of immense help to students of high ability as well as those of moderate and slow learners alike.
Teaching outside the stipulated time means that schools teach more materials in the curriculum than it is prescribed by the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development and as approved by the Ministry of Education.
What happens is that the curriculum units or materials that ought to be taught to students for four years—in the case of secondary education curriculum—is ‘finished’ six or so months before the stipulated time.
This amounts, for lack of a better word, to a headlong rush through the syllabus. The students who ostensibly gain from this unusual coverage of the curriculum are high ability students. Fast-paced syllabus coverage grossly disadvantages moderate and slow learners.
Incredibly, however, even the high ability learner doesn’t benefit either. The slow learners are for all practical purposes, doomed. Questions in a national examination include topics that students learned in Form I for KCSE or in Std 4 for KCPE.
Headlong coverage of the curriculum units means that students—regardless of ability and readiness—spend less time on nearly all units than stipulated by KICD and quality assurance and standards requirements. They cannot remember curriculum units they learned much earlier to be able to use them to answer questions in national examinations. It is a nightmare for the students particularly when the questions need application of the knowledge imperfectly understood not because it was difficult, but because they were rushed through the content.
All students moving through the course materials more slowly and as envisioned by the Ministry acquire or develop deep knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that are inherently embedded in the content covered.
Students grasp key concepts, ideas, and thoughts. The concepts are understood or processed and they are retained or stored in long-term memory for retrieval for application, interpretation and for solving a problem if and when required.
That doesn’t happen when syllabus coverage is hurried. Hurried syllabus coverage means students have little time internalizing the material and therefore a lot of very crucial information and concepts are forgotten. Information that is not moved along from short-term memory to long-term memory will be forgotten.
The worst aspect of teaching outside the stipulated hours is that it denies students the time they need to study on their own. The two hours before breakfast and after supper in boarding schools were for students who attended school in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, time for students to undertake their own studies. Students in boarding schools also spent time on Saturdays between 10am and noon studying on their own.
This doesn’t happen anymore in most secondary schools. Teaching takes place well before breakfast and also after supper each day of the week and also over the weekend and in some schools. The students are actually taught new materials—actually covering the syllabus. They have no quality time to relax or study on their own.
Teaching exposes students to new information and ideas. Students must process; actually digest the information. Streaming too much information into the minds of students or human beings actually disables the ability of the mind to process it for storage purposes.
Underlying the prescribed maximum of four hours of teaching is of a lot of knowledge about how human beings learn and learn optimally. KICD and the ministry take this into account in determining the content and pace of teaching and learning.
The slow-paced coverage of the syllabus actually gives the high ability students time to enrich their learning experiences. They do this through taking up more challenging programs like reading or indulging in more challenging books, writing, art, drama or other creative skills.
These students learn things very fast. They might not even need the teacher once properly introduced to a subject area. They not only study with topics not yet taught, but understand them with little support from the teachers. A good teacher gives challenging projects to these kinds of students as they chaperon the moderate and slow learners.
Truth be stated. The students who need the teacher most are the moderate and slow learners. Caring administrators organise school programmes with the needs of moderate and slow learners. These categories of learners actually require the support of teachers to learn optimally.
High ability students, sometimes called gifted students are able, with little guidance, to educate themselves.
Adherence to stipulated school hours ensures the educational needs of all learners are met at the school levels.
Communications officer, Ministry of Education. [email protected]
