IT IS common knowledge that public school teachers in the country have their hands full.
In a policy paper by the Philippine Institute of Development Studies (PIDS), authors Clarissa C. David, Jose Ramon G. Albert, and Jana Flor V. Vizmanos said the workload of public school teachers is not only limited to teaching but also to other nonteaching tasks.
According to the study, teachers have a regular full-time teaching load. However, on top of this, some of them are assigned to do “paperwork on seminars and trainings they are tasked to attend and additional designations in line with student guidance, budget, disaster response, and health.”
The study added, “teachers are likewise expected to participate in the implementation of various government programs, such as mass immunizations, community mapping, conditional cash transfer, deworming, feeding, population census, antidrug, election, among others.”
“Given this workload, actual teaching is increasingly being sidelined by the multitude of other responsibilities and roles that teachers play,” the study states.
While we see the hard work of our teachers, we also worry for how their workload is affecting the quality of education.
The Department of Education (DepEd) has earlier vowed to reduce the teachers’ workload but it is not clear if by how much they will reduce this.
Filipinos have been calling for the improvement of the education system and the government has implemented a variety of initiatives to improve this. However, with our teachers’ hands full of also non-teaching jobs, how are they able to utilize new techniques in teaching to its full extent?
“If teachers are to be followed, they want to focus on teaching and have more time to speak with students, give guidance, and apply what they learned about differentiated teaching,” the study said.
It added, “Teachers fully realize what is needed, that is, to spend more time with students and innovate on classroom instruction, and to provide more focused individualized attention to students.”
One of the primary recommendations of the study to improve the well-being of the teachers is the need to address the human resource distribution of the DepEd.
“The department needs to study their human resources shortages and the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) should provide Deped requisite support to hire administrative staff and deload teachers of administrative and other duties unrelated to teaching,” the study states.
By removing these non-teaching functions, we will give our teachers a creative space that will allow them deliver the educational needs of the students. We know many of our teachers want to implement various teaching techniques that could improve our students.
Probably one of the best ways to improve our education system is to let the teachers do what they do best, teach.