You Won't Believe How Chedet Will Revive PPSMI In The Era Of PAK21
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| Adapted from freemalaysiatoday.com |
At 2:36, "Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia sedang mengkaji secara terperinci pelaksanaan semula dasar ini. Dengan menyediakan sistem baru yang menggunakan pengajaran melalui IT. Iaitu pengajaran yang direkod oleh guru yang terbaik yang akan diguna di semua sekolah. Supaya kecekapan guru yang terbaik dapat dinikmati oleh semua murid dan penuntut. Dengan cara ini semua penuntut akan mencapai hasil yang hampir sama."
(1) With all due respect, sir, NO NO NO! If you want to do education videos, do it right! Don't use teachers! That's not what they're good at. For crying out loud, use the professionals! I'm sure actors like Aaron Aziz (from Oh My English!) or... wait for it... Neelofa (from my male students' weight dreams) will be more than happy to contribute to a good cause (🤑). Celebrities will clamor for the chance to actually earn the title of "Ikon PAK21". 🌶
Seriously though, if you want to make good videos that'll actually engage students instead of bore them half to death like most of the videos on the now defunct eduwebtv, you need professionals. (Btw, PADU does a better job with it's videos & whatever happened to the awesome TV Pendidikan videos I watched growing up?) Professional actors know how to inflect their voices & apply micro-expressions for effect. Let's not forget a sophisticated production team to spice up the video with sound effects & graphics which will assist in illustrating challenging concepts.
If you are serious about wanting public school students to benefit from the videos, JANGAN ALANG-ALANG! Learn from the best! TED-Ed has high-quality content we can emulate. Honestly, I would be so proud & super-excited to see eduwebtv produce such high-quality content in BAHASA MALAYSIA! If you're looking at videos as part of an LMS, why not use Khan Academy? It's FREE & extremely high-quality!
(2) Also, I have my concerns about expecting students throughout Malaysia, who are of varying backgrounds with varying school infrastructure, to achieve roughly the same outcome as the students actually experiencing the lesson from said teacher. It's kind of like asking a class of 30-40 golfers to sit still for 30 minutes to fully concentrate on a video of Butch Harmon coaching Tiger Woods & then expect them to produce roughly the same result. (Used a golf analogy because Chedet likes golf.)
Our education system is moving away from teachers being the sage on a stage to PAK21 practices which involve students more actively & productively. I hope that you're not proposing we have live-teachers click so that a tele-teacher can talk! What an effective teacher does in one classroom setting doesn't necessarily become immediately effective in another classroom setting. A joke in Kelantan may become confusing when played in Sabah. Similarly, an approach for a motivated classroom may not work for a less-motivated classroom. That's why we still need live-teachers in charge, rather than tele-teachers.
Here's what a live-teacher does that tele-teachers can't. They know all 50 of you by name & hold you accountable for your work. They know if you like magic, mystery, or romance. They anticipate issues & address them the best they can. They know who's paying attention & the best way to deal with those drifting off. They make inside jokes & relate abstract concepts to concrete examples their students know. They shut you up with one look. They make you feel like a champion for struggling & they tear you a new one when you're slacking.
Live-teachers are the key to an excellent education. That's probably why we haven't heard of any of the most expensive private schools in the world using tele-teachers. Do Singapore? China? Finland? You know why an education system would consider using tele-teachers? Simple, because it doesn't trust it's live-teachers.
(3) I think the major reasons for this mistrust are (a) the lack of English language proficiency among science & math teachers, (b) the lack of English language efficacy among said teachers, & (c) resistance to change.
However, alienating us is NEVER the solution. Teachers have been alienated & mistrusted by those up above since I can remember. We have plenty of teachers with masters & PhDs, & you pay us lip service by calling us "professionals" but, at the end of the day, you talk down to us & treat us like lembu. Hey, look! That's exactly what we have become, lembus, unable to function without (written) instruction! Such is the vicious cycle within our massive bureaucracy. Time to look at us as SOLUTIONS, rather than part of the problem. Water what you want to grow.
Here are some suggestions for your consideration. (Readers feel free to chime in).
(a) produce high-quality English language videos as RESOURCES for teachers, rather than as a replacement for teachers. With these videos, teachers can design their lessons to rely on the video for the language-heavy parts of the lesson, & spend the rest of the lesson digesting the content with their students. Note, that the video needs to be engaging ala TED-Ed videos, not a recording of another teacher teaching another class. Make use of the numerous media university students in Malaysia, so the content is more budget-friendly. Offer the best ones jobs at TV Pendidikan.
(b) produce recordings of MODEL LESSONS where another teacher demonstrates how they would approach a lesson in their classroom. Teachers can watch these model lessons when lesson planning so they have a better idea of how to realize the objectives of their syllabus. This is where effective teachers can be recruited to draft modules & have their execution of the modules recorded as model lessons. If possible, avoid recording in goody two-shoes classes in spick & span Putrajaya classrooms. Teachers appreciate models which work in real-world situations, i.e., rural areas, gangster students, sardine can classrooms, & all.
