AuthorI’ve dropped the homeschooling co-op ball years ago when the main members realized that we were too diverse and have nothing in common (religion, location, shared interests) that could really bind us misfits together. My daughter is now 19 and I have lost my own enthusiasm for homeschooling.
But I am still on this mission of making education great for the community in Penang. And in this post I will address two topics : HOTS (KBat) and the Dual Language Program.
Question : What is HOTS?
HOTs is simply NOT LOST. (Lower Order Skills in Thinking). Just think about it like this : Lost is where our nation has been in the last decade or two when it comes to education which created a mushrooming of homeschools and private schools.
HOTs is the opposite of LOST. HOTs (higher order thinking skills) is us finding our way back into the 21st Century and becoming world class citizens. Makes sense?
As a nation we are doing that through the Economic Transformation Program.
In terms of education we are doing that through the Malaysian Education Blueprint.
And the Malaysian Education Blueprint encompasses education, social, emotional and psychological well-being from 0 to 18. After that, if you are a lost cause, you just are.
Among the initiatives is to have children grow up in safe, secure environments and have access to quality and nurturing early childhood education. First, do no harm. Don’t damage our children before they enter school. Don’t screw them up before schooling does.
Children with learning disabilities (like my 3 year old son) are detected ASAP and given access to intervention programs and an opportunity to attend special-ed classes alongside mainstream school.
The LINUS initiative (Literacy and Numeracy Skills) is a “no child left behind” policy. It slices achievement like a business environment, every quarterly, and intends to nip the problem in the bud. For those my age (1976) under KBSR you might remember friends who had to split off to Kelas Pemulihan during the Maths, Science and English or Bahasa language classes. The mean students used to call them “Kelas Lembap”.
You might also remember a time when you actually needed to think for yourself because the answers weren’t coming from a workbook or the back of any book. Yes, we are going back to the days of glory where schools produced smarty pants like me!
As the owner of this blog, after sitting down with the academic supervisor of Penang’s Department of Education, I feel confident that as a nation we are heading in the right direction when it comes to 21st Century learning.
I AM VALIDATED!!!
The infrastructure and operating systems and chain of commands are all in place. And now…………….for the applications to work. For the programs to animate and energize our teachers.
What Does the Malaysian Education Blueprint, DLP, LINUS and Kbat *HOTs* Mean For Our Teachers?
It means our teachers have to stop doing the following :
1. Read off the textbook / copy off a textbook.
2. Ask students to answer a question that is already inside the textbook.
3. Give fixed homework – an entire form or class doing the exact same homework that they can copy off one another.
Those are just a few top “fave” practices of a lot of local teachers I’m picking at.
So, how can our teachers conduct their classes instead?
OK, seriously, there are videos and training and stuff on all that provided by the Malaysian government. And we need a study to identify resistance and the beliefs around them.
Here’s why I think teachers behave LOST in class and waste their students’ learning potential.
1. They didn’t have great models as teachers. They had teachers who read off a textbook, told them to copy off a textbook and that got legitimized.
2. They didn’t have a chance to attend an exclusive private college or worked in a corporate environment and thus did not have a chance to be exposed to a different way of getting things done better, faster and more effectively.
3. Their fear of being seen as incompetent, weak, not an authority makes them hide behind a book.
But I could be wrong. I actually NEED to do a field study on this.
If you are a teacher and you came across this blog looking for answers, here is my advice for you :
1. Reach out to your SISC or district officer and ASK FOR HELP. Whether you are facing a career issue (ie you hate being a teacher) or an instructional issue (you don’t know where to start), speak up and get help.
2. Learn WITH your students instead of TEACHing to your students. You are not being paid to be a teacher. You are being paid for students to find meaning in their learning. You are NOT a pengajar or even a pendidik. You are a pembolehcara. Or however the Malay vocabulary goes. You simply facilitate learning.
3. The reality is that a Teacher Training Program by itself can never prepare you for real life classroom teaching. And I understand the sense of feeling like you are working as a solitary unit within your department, having no like-minded and intellectual peers and faced with a culture that may not always be supportive.
GET COACHING AND HELP from your SISC and others. At the moment of writing I have not yet set up a non-profit to support our teachers and parents but unless you have reached out for help you will not get it. In the meantime, you can email me at
englishforasians@gmail.com (all correspondences will be private and confidential.)
21st Century Penang Learning Community 