The Current Malaise ...

... within Indonesia’s education system.

The Ujian Nasional (UN – National Exam) was introduced following Act Number 20 of 2003 on National Education System (download). This was brought into law with two major objectives: to make schooling compulsory until the age of 15 (i.e. the end of junior high, SMP), and to allocate 20% of the nation’s annual budget to education.

Since then, with the philosophy of producing citizens who are compliant with the tenets of Pancasila which was used by the dictator Suharto to stifle dissent, ‘teaching to the test’ has been the norm.

The multi-choice format, for standardised ease of marking, only emphasises competitiveness. Private schools, dependent on fees paid by parents, are encouraged to initiate regular, often weekly, tests so that ‘progress’ could be monitored. The schools which accrued the most ‘passes’ and trophies for their cabinets would attract more applications, which in turn has encouraged these schools to sift out the less academically inclined students.

Public schools came under similar scrutiny from the Ministry and/or local education authorities and were judged to be a success or a failure based on the pass or fail rates. That the pass benchmark was raised or lowered by politicians had more to do with their egos than for any educational reason.

Teachers have been caught in the crossfire of politicians, the education bureaucratic hierarchy, and parents with expectations raised by the first two. Such has been the drive for ‘results’ within the school system that little effort has been made towards the serving the needs of students once they leave the system.

The much maligned UN has been dropped as of this school year (2014/15) for graduation purposes, yet will remain for “mapping” regional results. Schools are now been tasked with graduating students based on a continuous assessment process.

This is problematic in that schools have been using weekly and/or monthly multi-choice tests for assessment since current students first entered the school system. As reported in the Kompass newspaper on January 8th, “it is normal if schools still practice drilling because there is still no clear new evaluation method from the government.”

It can be argued that this methodology runs counter to sections of Act Number 20/2003 mentioned above. Chapter V, Learners, Article 12 (1 f.) states: Every learner in an educational unit is entitled to receive an education programme based on an individual's rate of learning.

Except for those few schools who had successfully introduced Curriculum 2013, the vast majority of schools have been instructed to revert to the 2006 curriculum, which has/had course material geared to rote learning.

Here it must be emphasised that teacher training in Indonesia is inadequate. There are more than three million teachers working in 208,000 schools “giving instruction” to some 50 million students. Yet it is estimated that as many as a million teachers are unqualified, lacking a bachelor’s degree and/or not having passed the certification test.  The new Culture and Elementary and Secondary Education Minister Anies Baswedan recognises this and is setting up a directorate general dedicated to the teaching profession focussing on training and improving teachers welfare.

The new President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo has called for a change in the nation’s mindset. A start could be made by considering the core concept outlined Chapter IV, Part One, Rights and Obligations of Citizens, Article 5 (5) of the Act states: Every citizen shall have the right to enhance his/her educational ability in the process of life-long education.

Drilling to pass an inadequate ‘final’ school test in a rapidly changing world does not do that.

Teachers, students and their parents are naturally confused. Some clarity in this evolving situation could be achieved by an emphasis on Chapter VI, Streams, Levels and Types of Education, Part 6, Informal Education, Article 27 (1) which states: Informal education can be in the form of self-learning, provided by families and surroundings.

To “provide” self-learning is a non sequitur. However, if students are encouraged from an early age to explore and experiment, and if guidance rather than regulated systems and strictures is provided, and the “families and surroundings” were to provide the necessary ‘tools’ and opportunities ("surroundings"?), then Jokowi’s main prime objective may yet be realised.

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It’s not what we teach ...

... but how we teach it.

This article by Andrew Vivian, an educational consultant and former principal of two national plus schools, was first published in the Jakarta Post

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Too often, I meet teachers who say that they want to be more innovative in their classrooms but are restricted by their curriculum. If asked why they feel restricted, the answer is invariably along the lines of “This is the way it has always been done” or “My principal makes me do it the way it has always been done”.

In an old Teachers TV video, Tony Buzan, the inventor of mind maps, asked his British audience which option would they choose first: teaching young people how to learn or teaching them the “basics” of all subjects. He, along with almost every other educational researcher, proposed that if we first teach children how to learn, they will not only learn the “basics” but more, in much greater depth.

Buzan, Sir Ken Robinson and others are telling us that traditional approaches to schooling are unnatural in terms of how our brains work and are teaching most young people to be not creative. To educators such as Buzan and Robinson, thinking and learning are easy.

If they are correct, why do so many teachers not teach their students how to actually learn and think? What are the restrictions?

First, there is not unanimous agreement about the purpose of schools. Some sections of society want schools to prepare students for work, others want them to be “successful” in the 21st century, without detailing what this means, and still others want them to make a “difference”, again, without a lot of detail.

Many schools have a vision and mission, but, too many of them often have no clear understanding of the educational needs of their young people and how to turn their vision into programs that meet these needs effectively.

 In excellent schools, everyone in the school community is clear about the school’s purpose, and the strategies that will lead to the successful fulfillment of it.

Second, most teachers teach the ways they were taught. This means that unless a teacher was influenced by someone who was innovative, students will receive exactly the same pedagogy that has existed in most school systems since public schooling was invented. In times of rapid change, this approach is very unlikely to be helpful to students.

Finally, particularly in schools in which student face external exams, teachers and principals lack courage. They know there is a better way, but they will not risk doing something different to other teachers and schools in case their students’ exam scores suffer.

However, there are enough schools out there that both educate their students and get good external exam results by planning student-centered classes.

 It is actually quite simple. The teacher or school needs to look at the material being taught and ask “What are the big ideas that underpin this?” They need to identify the concepts, the knowledge that students should have for life.

For example, rather than being able to simply memorize the presidents of the US from a unit of work, students should walk away from it with a strong concept of leadership. They can Google the presidents or the teacher can teach them quickly using games or flashcards. Teachers can develop questions that facilitate high-level thinking and lead to an understanding of the concepts. The material from the curriculum can be used as a vehicle for this.

There are a number of excellent thinking strategies around. For example, we could use Bloom’s taxonomy of thinking: A big idea is about national leadership, could be examined through questions such as “Which presidents made the most impact on their society at the time?” (analysis), “What things would the perfect president do?” (synthesis) and “Can you think of ways to improve the political system to ensure that every president is highly effective?” (evaluation/creative).

Once good questions are developed, they can be used to plan engaging activities for students do, so that as well as remembering the basic facts, they understand the underlying concepts and principles of the topic. Students can critically analyze the topic and come up a much better understanding of the topic than an external exam requires. Activities could include Internet research, surveys, practical work, library research, etc.

Students can even work from textbooks as long as they are answering the high-level questions and not wading through the textbook questions, all students at the same time.

An advantage of this type of approach is that students can work at their own pace, and the teacher, instead of standing at the front of the classroom, can move around and work with individual students or small groups of students.

When schools and teachers step outside the box a little, and demonstrate energy and imagination, regardless of the curriculum, students can be educated about the course material and write correct exam answers about it.

Give Kids A Break

Four students have been expelled from a senior high school in Riau, South Sumatra, for 'defaming' their teacher on Facebook. The comments were reportedly of a personal nature and offensive to women.

The school's deputy principal, Yose Rizal, said the students' failure to complete and submit homework assignments to the teacher contributed to the decision to dismiss them. Yose said he hoped the decision would send a strong message to other students that such behavior was not acceptable.

That says a lot about what is wrong with the Indonesia's schooling system, especially as the subject that the teacher was supposedly charged with teaching is 'Life Skills'.

Come to think of it, that is what all teachers (and parents) are responsible for inculcating. As a teacher and parent I do know that adults make 'mistakes', but then there is little guidance for us either.

Competition is praised above co-operation so that societal prerogatives are determined by online social networks rather than leadership for the common good.

Public transport is privately owned, as is the water supply, and garbage isn't properly managed so residents, of all classes, dispose of it willy-nilly.

The current national census cannot be completed as scheduled because rich folks in their enclaves deny access to officials because they have something, their ill-gotten wealth, to hide.

And kids get blamed for not following the rules!

The results of the remedial tests following the senior high school ujian monyet have been announced. Teachers in Yogya are angry because of the "premature announcement", but they are missing the point.

Out of 150,410 students who had to sit the repeat national exams, how come only 11,814 'failed'? How is it possible to master the 'facts' tested in such a short while since the original exams were sat in March? Are these remedial tests easier? If so, why weren't the set of March exams?

One contributing factor is that the educators and bureaucrats responsible for the whole debacle are lacking in any semblance of awareness of how teenagers think. I'm not suggesting that they should be neuro-scientists, but applying the academic skill of research - a skill which their positions of power indicate they should have - would give them a modicum of insight into how teenagers think.

For a start, Dr. Paul Kelley, headteacher of a high school in northern England and author of Making Minds: What's Wrong With Education?, says that creating long-term memories is at the core of education.

In 2005, a key discovery was published in Scientific American explaining how long-term memories are formed in the brain. Douglas Fields, of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and his team in the US not only revealed exactly how long-term memories are formed but also, more significantly for teachers, how they can be created. The biological basis of a memory is a pathway of cells linked within the brain. His team looked at how these pathways were formed and how each cell was "switched on" and became linked to other cells.

Surprisingly, constant stimulation of the cell did not make it switch on. Stimulation had to be separated by gaps when the cell was not stimulated. The breakthrough came when the team began to realise the length of stimulation was not vital, but the gap between stimulations

So Dr. Kelly and his teaching staff established 'spaced learning' which works no matter what subject you are teaching. In spaced learning, you have 10-minute breaks between three intensive sessions of 15-20 minutes teaching. In each of the sessions, you repeat material but present it differently, deepening and extending it.

In the breaks students might juggle, play basketball or model animals out of Play-Doh. These distracter activities leave the cells to carry out chemical processes.

Or access their Facebook accounts?

An English expression has it that 'procrastination is the thief of time', but I prefer to think of an Indonesian cup of coffee in which the grounds take time to settle at the bottom of the cup. That is an apt description of the process of leaning; one must allow time for the absorption of new information, and breaks are certainly one key to successful learning.

A different approach to the 'chalk and talk' methodology is also required. Rather than 'preaching' or lecturing ('hectoring' may be a better word) with theoretical 'knowledge' to be copied from the classroom white/blackboard, teachers need to offer students more opportunities for experiment and for inductive learning.

Allowing socialised discussions between students in the lessons would be a good start!

Further reinforcement for Dr. Kelley's pedagogical approach is offered by more recent research.

According to Dr. Iroise Dumontheil of University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, one of the authors of the research to be published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, "It's not the fault of teenagers that they can't concentrate and are easily distracted. It's to do with the structure of their brains. Adolescents simply don't have the same mental capacities as an adult because teenagers are still children."

I think that's similar to my problem too; although I think like an adult, I remain a kid at heart.

Teachers call for a change in curriculum

Schools should return to an earlier style of liberal education with more time for play and less rigid methods of teaching children to read, according to the largest teachers' union.

Citing mounting evidence of a crisis in children's happiness and mental health, the National Union of Teachers will today debate calls to scrap the most restrictive elements of the national curriculum and reverse a government order that literacy be taught through phonics.

"Teachers want a return to a system which is liberal and flexible and not top-down [and] imposed by government. We want a return to a time when there was a potential for magic moments in the classroom," said the general secretary of the NUT.

Which teachers? And where?

The full article is here, and largely refers to the not very popular methodology in English pre-schools of teaching reading through phonics rather than word recognition, but the central message has relevance here in Indonesia.

There is too much rigid testing in schools, generally multi-choice, with too little assessment. This reduces creativity and renders students torpid and unimaginative - robotic if you will. This is the pre-season of national exams which all students in grades 6, 9 and 12 have to pass in order to move on up to the next level. There are sets of exams called 'try outs' which are set by the education departments of local authorities.

I've seen the Grade 9 English paper set by the Jakarta Education board: it's a shame that it wasn't proofread by a qualified language expert (such as myself - but I'm not volunteering) before issuance.

Most graduates from senior high schools (SMA) here want to go on to tertiary education. It is unfortunate that the previous twelve years have been spent filling in dots on computer mark sheets rather than being assessed by those competent to look beyond the boundaries of A,B,C and D.

I say this because the common complaint in universities here is that plagiarism is rife. Students are ill-equipped to experiment and enquire. They remain empty vessels awaiting to be filled with so-called facts. So the mob rules and academic successes are generally in the sciences, which are 'disciplines'.

It is often stated that Indonesia is a country in waiting, one full of potential. But does it have "a potential for magic moments in the classroom."?