The much-hyped new curriculum has been implemented at the primary and secondary levels, and the higher secondary level will fall under the griping scanner by 2026. The authorities are on a vibe of success for bringing all the teachers under training about the nature, aims, and ambitions chalked out through the curriculum, and the mode of evaluation of the performancesdisplayed by the learners andrecorded by the institutions. In between, this shift has sparked unanticipated debate and despair among the guardians and teachers as well. The guardians are in doubt about the progress of their siblings due to little emphasis on the written exams, and conventional grading systems, which, according to them, could enable them to press their siblings to cling to the study tables arranged for their future success-story creators. Additionally, the teachers are between Scylla and Charybdis as to the evaluation system.
Simply put, more dissatisfaction emerges out of the evaluation system, more than the contents. Conventionally, our education system is summative assessment oriented, where a teacher justifies a learner at the end of the course, and the teacher uses written scripts, for most of cases, of the learners for grading. Here, the learners have ample privileges to score a handsome grade by practicing the problems all year round, and the guardians get the chance to verify progress through the marks provided to the learners, and thirdly, the teachers do not have to be engaged in intensive observation of the learners as they authenticate the learners at the end of the course through written exams. The teachers are comfortable enough with this system as written documents are the concrete display of performances, and the teachers have flexible ways of marking and grading without any abstract consideration. Thus, an institution requires a maximum level of transformation to implement this education aspiration considering the existing phenomenon.
Alternatively, a teacher, as they speculate, has to invest a large portion of the academic time in reporting the learners progress regularly leaving all other academic and non-academic activities unfinished. Then, the institution suspects that a teachers biases may interpolate in reporting the regular performances of the learners. Moreover, our institutions have not been capable of storing regular performance reports due to the lack of an institutional online database management system. Thus, setting rubrics for evaluation is the easiest one, the most difficult part of this formative assessment is to maintain continuity for reporting, storing, compiling, tabulating, and publishing as necessary. In addition, the teacher-learner ratio in our institutions is unsatisfactorily sound. The newly introduced evaluation system ignites the flames of unaddressed academic stress among them.
Again, the teaching staff is a considerable variable in the process of an effective teaching-learning paradigm. Hence, an urgency to equip the staff with updated pedagogy, technical expertise, and psychological incentives is an undeniable fact before equipping the learners. However, the fact is that the socio-economic value of the teachers is comparatively insignificant to at least rising SAARC countries. In addition, there are considerablenon-MPO schools and teachers in Bangladesh in reality. Hence, these staff are likely to be involved in other earning activities, apart from serving in those institutions, to keep their heads up the water. The bottom line, the implementation of global standard education aligns with the competency of the teaching staff, on a large scale. It is also true that structural readjustment takes time and gradual reshaping. However, the lack of significant progress from the authorities creates a sense of self-resistance among the staff, who seem to have been victimized through years of deprivation.
The new curriculum introduces multi-tiered evaluation. However, it omits mid-term exams, which the guardian term has little scope for inferentiality about the achievement their children will gain at the final exams. As a result, they doubt the diagnostic and curative measures expected to be taken for their children. Nevertheless, the conventional evaluation process is flexibly done by the teachers and predicted by the guardian as both of the parties do not have to track the learners all semester round. However, the gap remains regarding the extent of the continuity of the progress by the learners, and the lack of proper knowledge of a teacher about a learners full potentialities.Because a learners class attendance does not pose any concrete impact on their result sheets, and the prevailing practice of the learners is to rely much on outsourcing tutoring services, which offer them exam-oriented classes, and practices that inevitably create a chasm between teacher and students, and institutions and learners.
Memorization is a process and writing is a skill thatseems to be uncompromised apparently as the introduction of new modes of educational display requires massive transformation both by the institution teachers, and guardians. Firstly, our psyche develops a disguised barrier against a new mode of thinking and activities, which the public is already habituated to. Again, the access to information freely by the blessing of social media nonetheless is empowered enough to have a quick impact on the public. It becomes impossible, in most cases, to identify information, misinformation, and disinformation. As a result, the public develops a sentiment based on hyper-reality.
Furthermore, the measurement of performance in a language course must be integrated with justifying the four basic language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Again, the lack of conferring of learning to fellow mates is the same as the self-deception that a learner is indulging as he does not have the scope to rectify his wrong conception from discussions. Francis Bacon, a leading philosopher in the realm of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), could evaluate the necessity of discussion, and conferring of the study to use that knowledge as necessary, as he writes, "Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man; and, therefore, if a man writes little, he had need have a great memory; if he confers little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not".
In the end, the adaptation of a model never ensures the same impact for the different contexts when the dependent, independent, and controlled variables show diversified properties. In our case, the evaluation system puts undue strain on the teachers due to their psycho-socioeconomic dynamics. The guardian again may not have actual data regarding the high scores and low-ability learners that the conventional evaluation system is producing. Yet, the upside down of a system may not hold good due to the lack of habit formation among the targeted parties. Then, the success of a system like this can never be counted in a month or year. We, in this respect, must have a master plan of at least a decade though no one can predict what type of changes arewaiting for us in the next five years. Hence, the creation of adaptable staff, convincible guardians, performing institutions, and pragmatic assessment methods must be the first and foremost task before reshuffling the evaluation process as we hope for the system to develop on the actual situations, and we can never reject that our children will learn through hands-on activities.
The writer is a BCS Cadre (General Education) & Publons Academy Graduate (Research, Review, and Mentorship)
