A spectre has been haunting primary and secondary schools in this country—the spectre of hasty delivery of the prescribed curriculum8-4-4. The ghost has deranged the teaching and learning environment that defined educational experience Kenyans aged over 50 years had.
The spectre has irremediably weakened the development of God-given potential of young people since it took root in basic education institutions.
The nation has not acknowledged its presence in schools and the spillover it has even in households. It undermines, unabated, the in-depth teaching and learning of the admittedly prescribed content.
The curriculum under 8-4-4 system had rigour. It was designed, like all other curricula in other educational jurisdictions, to cultivate critical thinking in students and enable them to connect academic knowledge to real-world problems and scenarios. That is the basic purpose of any education endeavour.
Policymakers have simply articulated the ultimate goal of any education in the Competency Based Education (CBE). The difference between the two systems of education, lies in the means to the goals.
Curriculum—what is taught—is the reason why schools exist. How it is taught and implemented matter. It’s a serious and sustained effort shared within and between grades to implement curriculum rigorously and with fidelity.
The government has prescribed a curriculum: a combination of what is taught (subjects, topics and skills) that your child will learn in a specific grade or throughout their education. It has also prescribed what it calls Sequence. Sequence is the order in which the subjects, topics and skills are taught within the curriculum. It determines the progression of learning, ensuring students build upon their knowledge and skills in a logical and systematic way.
Appropriate curriculum delivery enables the teachers to impart knowledge and skills to students at a pace the government has prescribed.
Under the waning 8-4-4 system, secondary school has four grades. Each grade has a combination of subjects, topics and skills, which students ought to learn and complete in the third term. The knowledge and skills gained assists them to understand corresponding subjects, topics and skills in the next grade until they reach third term in fourth form. It is ideally in the third term in Form 4 that the entire secondary education curriculum or syllabus ought to be completed.
This is but in policy and other documents. There is a general stampede, a headlong rush to cover the syllabus. They rush through the syllabus the way wildebeest cross Mara River. The coverage is hurried and predictably incoherent or glossed over. Therefore, announcing the completion of a high school curriculum in the second term is madness.
Curriculums are mental abstracts. Concepts. Call them ideas or thoughts about the environment and ourselves as human beings. Rushing through the conceptual modules and pronouncing them finished means a very shallow level of functional understanding has been reached.
“Concepts build on one another. Algebra requires arithmetic. Trigonometry flows from geometry. Calculus and physics call for all of the above. A shaky understanding early on will lead to complete bewilderment later,” an American educator and the founder of Khan Academy, Salman Khan observed in his book The One World Schoolhouse, Education Reimagined.
What does hurried completion of the prescribed syllabus mean? It means the topics are not covered thoroughly. Students never grasp the concept properly.
The curriculum is designed in such a way that topics or concepts in a subject are sequenced, step-by-step and in a logical order. Curriculum planners start from the simple, concrete to the complex topics or from the shallow to the deeper.
In other words, the curriculum involves revisiting and building upon previously learned topics, subjects or themes throughout a student's academic journey. The next topic or ideas assumed an increasingly complex dimension. Those who make the syllabus in this way are guided by the ideas of an American cognitive psychologist called Jerome Bruner in his Spiral Curriculum theory.
So, to understand the next idea or combination of ideas, students must thoroughly interact with it, through different methods, at a leisurely pace. If they didn't understand the idea, it means they will not understand the next but more complex, abstract or deeper topic or concept. If a struggling reader cannot understand a simple sentence, which is made of less than five or fewer words and possibly one idea, he cannot understand a complex or compound complex sentence which is made of more than 15 words and possibly four or more ideas.
Experts in curriculum planning say that a good scope and sequence ensures children learn all the important things they need to know without missing any key concepts. It means appropriate curriculum instruction—curriculum content and the methods and strategies to teach that material—leads to optimal attainment of the goals and objectives of the educational policy, standards and curricular.
It means the school system shall have a much more relaxed learning environment than we see today. Rushed syllabus coverage has meant that students have little time to take charge of their own education.
In a speech on Appointment and Appreciation Ceremony for Principals in December 2017, then Minister of Education (Schools), Ng Chee Meng noted, “I believe that many of you have committed yourselves to education because of your innate passion and motivation for a lifetime of learning. Amidst your busyness, keep this passion alive. Remain open and curious; expand your horizons and explore the world of knowledge and skills with your students; and seek not to ‘cover the syllabus’, but to ‘uncover’ the world together with your students.”
This is a call that head teachers of primary schools as well principals of secondary schools can heed: “Remain open and curious; expand your horizons and explore the world of knowledge and skills with your students; and seek not to ‘cover the syllabus’, but to ‘uncover’ the world together with your students.”
Let them uncover the world to their students and not mechanically cover the syllabus.
Communication Specialist
