The teacher as a traffic light

 Under the SBE system, the teacher sets the scene and direction for the flow of the teaching and learning activities prepared and planned.  

That direction could be best described as ‘uni-directional’ or ‘mono directional’.  

The teacher’s teaching objective is important. The teacher follows his objectives based on the standards set by the SBE system for delivery because that’s what he considers relevant for students learning.  

There is less chance for teacher ‘burn-outs’ and a teacher can manage to deliver his learning objectives within the resource constraints and employ the most appropriate teaching styles where both the students and the teacher can enjoy.

Teacher as a traffic light

However, in the OBE system the scenario is different. It is no longer the teacher’s objectives but every single student is given the opportunity to utilise their individual potential to decide or plan what he/she intends to achieve or learn in the course of the lesson over a period of time on a given theme.  

For convenience, some educators use the term ‘Student-centred learning’. Student-centred learning is resource driven. 

You must have sufficient resources to satisfy every student’s needs.  We know that there are more than 40 or 50 students (in some cases 70) in a class.  

That’s the beginning of a disaster on our hand. Each of the 40 or more students have varying degrees of academic abilities, their mental capacities vary, the rate and speed which they learn vary, their learning requirement differ, and therefore it literally means some 40 or more different expectations (80 if each child had planned to achieve two objectives each) from the students have to be catered for.  

The student’s resource requirements to facilitate their specific lear­ning outcomes place a huge burden on both consumables and other static or dynamic educational resources. It’s a nightmare for the teacher every single lesson.

It’s as if there were 40 different lesson plans with even 100 different outcomes or objectives.  

So in  any one lesson, the direction of learning is no longer ‘uni-directional’ but ‘multi-directional’ and this forces the teacher to facilitate for every child’s unique requirements.  The teacher is no longer responsible for filtering the curriculum for the students to meet their diverse learning needs or outcomes. 

The teacher  merely  acts as a ‘traffic light’ to direct the flow of learning episodes of 40 or more students’ learning outcomes to ensure the students safely arrive at their desired and expected learning outcomes.  

The desired outcomes are many and varied. The teacher must be able to locate relevant teaching and learning resources (e.g. textbooks) required by the student.  

Teachers would assist the students to access resources in a timely manner within a reasonable time frame and ensure that the other students are not disadvantaged.  

The teacher must attend to all the 40-odd or more students to achieve their many objectives either in one lesson or carry over to the next lesson. The teacher must maintain ‘low-and order’ in the class as shortage of teachers, competing for limited teaching and learning resources, and overcrowding in the class can be a daunting task for the teacher.

Since the multi-directional manner in which students design their learning objectives, with limited resources on hand, the poor teacher spends most time playing the role of a ‘policeman’ maintaining ‘law and order’, or as a ‘librarian’ locating learning resources, and as a ‘doctor’ diagnosing student learning deficiencies and prescribing appropriate resources (is available) to the students.  

Under the OBE system the teacher plays more than one role during one learning episode. He could be a ‘disciplinarian’ to a student with discipline problem in the class and simultaneously be a ‘counsellor’ providing counselling to another student.  

Now you know the reason for the ‘teacher burn-outs’ mentioned earlier. 

Teachers are only humans and expecting them to do more than what is necessary does not guarantee quality teaching and learning opportunities in a class.  

The quality of teaching and learning suffers because of the OBE system providing little learning resources and expecting the teacher to perform multiple roles that they are not even prepared for.  

This problem has been allowed to go on for a long time – only to allow an innocent generation of students disadvantage and disillusioned for life.

Neither the OBE nor SBE is an inferior method nor is one superior to the other. SBE is a modification from ‘Objectives-Based Education’ particularly to avoid the confusion with ‘Outcomes-Based Education’ system as the acronym ‘OBE’ is to be used in the situation where the latter has attracted negative criticisms, hence the acronym SBE.

The OBE system is being used by many private schools quite successfully and where many well-to-do parents quite happily invest their children’s education.  

The OBE system is used successfully by the private education providers because they have made huge investments in the provision of a wide range of teaching and learning resources, ranging from a well-stocked library (all manner of books, prescribed textbooks and e-learning resources such as (internet) that those students have easy access to.  

Where there is easy access to learning resources either in print or electronic where static (compact disk) or dynamic real time access (online journals or online databases) enable the students to access the relevant information to achieve their learning outcomes.  

Remember that in an OBE system the student designs or decides his learning outcomes guided or facilitated by the teacher as highlighted by the ‘traffic lights’ analogy.  

The student decides what to learn and the teacher directs or guides the students to sources of relevant resources that might enable the student to achieve his learning outcomes.  

There is sufficient supply of resource materials to keep every child profitably occupied to pursue their individual learning outcomes. 

You can’t expect the poor teacher in a classroom where the textbook per student ratio is 1 to 7 or a classroom with a teacher per student ratio of 1 to 40 or more students to provide individual guidance to the student to achieve their learning outcomes.  

A typical high school teacher is teaching up to 35 or 38 periods a week. In a typical class even a newspaper is rare and e-learning resources in the majority of classrooms remain a dream for many schools.  

Added to the scarcity of learning resource materials is the heavy teaching load that many teachers have to carry in a week.  

When I started my teaching career I taught 21 periods a week with a teacher per pupil ratio of 1 to 30.   I enjoyed my teaching very much and my students were always looking forward to my teaching show every lesson. Only a teacher will understand these scenarios. Teachers quite often dread directing students’ learning in this type of environment and as more burdens are added to their routines they force the teachers to ‘burn-out’ faster.  

The teacher ‘burn-out’ issue is not just a fancy terminology but a real issue which contributes significantly to poor academic performance by the students as a result of overcrowding in the classroom, scarce supply of teaching and learning resources and overworking on the teachers’ part.

Many parents blame the OBE system for the poor performance of students.  

If there were sufficient provision of teaching and learning resources available in every school and class sizes were reasonable or manageable and textbooks per student ratio was acceptable then the teachers could assist in directing the students multiple and wide ranging learning outcomes.  

The private schools have no problem using the OBE system because there is abundant teaching and learning resources that students are guided to utilise, explore, and employ in order to optimise their learning outcomes.  

The teachers have been prepared to accommodate the varying degrees of student interests and abilities with appropriate learning resources because the class sizes were manageable.  

In such environment multi-grade teaching is possible and student-centred learning will make teaching and learning enjoyable because every student is likely to achieve his or her objectives.

The public education system could not adequately address the different student abilities and interest simply because of the scarcity of teaching and learning resources.  

• To be continued tomorrow