Teachers’ understanding of SCA

Since SCA has been adopted for more than 15 years, it is apparent that teachers are well familiar with this pedagogical approach and to a great extent can identify the teaching principles recommended by this approach. To see if this is the case, teachers were presented with 12 key concepts about teaching and learning which were consistent either with reform or conventional ideas and instructed, “Check concepts which you think are identified with student-centered approach.” The concepts were mainly extracted from various documents such as teacher training materials and curriculum materials like curriculum framework, textbooks, and teachers’ manuals.

As Table 12 shows, there is a clear indication that teachers were well familiar with SCA reform as most of them could identify the seven concepts associated with SCA correctly. Group work topped the list in terms of teachers’ familiarity, followed by pupils’ activities with 98 percent and 97 percent of correct responses, respectively. This result is expected since group work and pupils’ activities have been emphasized since the outset of reform as countervailing forms of instruction for frontal teaching and lecturing, which were common practices in traditional classrooms. It should be noticed that the percentages of correct responses for high level of sound and higher-order questions, the reform ideas which were least correctly identified by teachers, were as high as 79% and 82% respectively. Another point of attention is the ‘5-step lesson’.

Five-step lesson was included in reform ideas because an examination of teacher training materials showed that teachers were advised to plan and conduct their lessons according to this 5-step framework of lesson planning. It is probably for this same reason that the majority of teachers (95%) in the survey associated the 5-step lesson with SCA. As the matter of fact, the 5-step lesson in Cambodian classroom has been in existence well before SCA reform, at least since the early 1980s during the post-civil war rebuilding period. Some researchers on Cambodian education even called this

5-step lesson ‘classic’. However, it should be argued that the 5-step lesson is more in line with the traditional teacher-centered approach, where everything is predetermined by teachers for the pupils. SCA lessons should be conducted in a more flexible way to cater for pupils’ interest and feelings so it is doubtful that the 5-step lesson will work best in SCA classrooms.

Table 12 Percentage of teachers identifying SCA concepts correctly

SCA concepts N Percent

1. Group work 391 98

2. Pupils’ activities 391 97

3. 5-step lesson 391 95

4. Research 391 91

5. Various teaching materials 390 85

6. Higher-order question 391 82

7. High level of sound 391 79

Average Percentage 90%

Table 13Percentage of teachers identifying conventional concepts as SCA concepts

Conventional concepts N Percent

1. Orderliness 391 84

2. Copying text from blackboard/textbook 391 50

3. Strict discipline 391 46

4. Memorization 389 42

5. Teachers talking more than pupils 391 5

Average Percentage 46%

While a large majority of teachers could identify SCA concepts correctly, not a few teachers misidentified conventional ideas with SCA (Table 13). Eighty-four percent of the teachers associated ‘orderliness’ with SCA. Orderliness is used here to mean good organization of classroom space, learning materials, and seating. Although SCA reform does not disapprove orderliness, it is thought to be more a characteristic of conventional classrooms than that of SCA classrooms, where pupils’ activities and mobility are encouraged and are likely to result in a less-organized classroom. It is noteworthy from Table 13 that the percentages of teachers who misidentified the conventional ideas which reformers tried to discourage were considerably high. These misidentified concepts include copying text from textbook/blackboard (50%), strict discipline (46%), and lesson memorization (42%). A few teachers associated ‘teachers talking more than pupils’ with SCA. In short, the results of questionnaire survey on teachers’ knowledge of SCA show that a large majority of teachers were aware of the core ideas proposed by SCA reform; yet a sizable number still associated more conventional ideas with SCA.

Based on the interviews with teachers conducted by the author, teachers tended to denote student-centered approach with the followings: the 5-step lesson, group activities, and teaching materials. When asked what SCA was, teachers often said that SCA was a teaching approach that “requires us to follow the five steps”, namely warming up, reviewing previous lessons, presenting new lesson, strengthening knowledge, and homework. Teacher also associated group activities with SCA. As one of the teachers stated, “in SCA, there are a lot of pupil activities, learning games, and pupil studying in groups.” Usually the activities which the teachers referred to were questions or exercises in the textbook. So group work consisted mainly of pupils working together to find answers to some questions of a reading text or some computational exercises and present the answers to the class. However, teachers

recognized that there was little discussion going on and only one or two pupils in the group did the task, while the rest just sat or played. A typical response from teachers related to group work was, “in group work, only the smart pupils will do the task and the less able just sit and watch.” Lack of cooperation between group members was often raised by teachers as a reason that discouraged them from using group work. This lack of cooperation among pupils may be linked to the types of the tasks the pupils did.

Teachers allowed pupils to do more activities in groups but the nature of the tasks remained essentially the same. Normally, teachers took the questions or exercises straight from the textbook and assigned them to pupil groups, who were supposed to work together to find the answers. However, most of the tasks in the textbooks demanded little or no discussion. Only skills in reading in the case of Khmer language and calculating in the case of mathematics are needed. No personal opinion is needed.

So, the smart pupils in the group will do everything and the weak pupils will just sit and get bored. From the interviews, it was clear that teachers tended to equate pupils’

activities with answering questions or solving exercises by themselves. To them, this is an important difference from TCA lesson, where teachers would give all the answers to the pupils without getting them to try first.

Another aspect of instruction which teachers tended to associate with SCA was the use of teaching materials such as pictures or real objects. They claimed that materials helped pupils to understand the lesson more easily and to retain their memory longer: “With pictures, pupils can understand and remember easily. When we ask the same question later, the picture will help them to recall the answer. The ability to recall is better than when we use nothing at all.” However, they acknowledged that they rarely brought in or made teaching materials themselves simply because they did not have time to produce those materials. “Pupils will learn a lot if we follow SCA; but if we don’t have enough to eat, we don’t have time for developing materials,” said one of the

teachers. It was well-known that because of their low pay, Cambodian teachers were often engaged in a second job or other productive work, which badly affected their time for teaching. Being unable to produce materials by themselves, teachers just used pictures or drawings available in the textbooks. Another type of materials which was often used in classes was word cards. The word cards were mainly used in Khmer language lessons, in which difficult words extracted from reading texts and written on a piece of paper were shown to the pupils so that they would read the words out loud. It should also be noted that producing word cards was also a popular agenda for materials development during the monthly meetings.

Teaching materials, if any, were very simple and were used mainly by the teachers to illustrate concepts or to make teachers’ explanation easy to understand.

Rarely were materials used by teachers to pose problems or by pupils to solve problems.

Though the materials were sometimes introduced to the classrooms, pupils were hardly exposed to those materials, except seeing them manipulated by the teachers. In this respect, It seems fair to say that the main purpose for using materials in classes is to help teachers’ explanation rather than to improve pupils’ participation and thinking.

While teachers made frequent references to the 5-step lesson, materials, and group activities, they talked less about pupils’ thinking levels or cognitive demand of the tasks they give to pupils even though the policies on teaching and learning emphasized the development of higher order cognitive skills such as analyzing, problem solving, and critical thinking as shown earlier in this chapter. In the questionnaire survey, where options were given, teachers tended to rate concepts denoting deep thinking like

‘research’ or ‘higher-order questions’ lower than concepts representing behavioral aspects of the lesson such as ‘group work’ or ‘5-step lesson’. When left to talk on their own as in the interviews, teachers barely mentioned how SCA activities would help improve pupils’ thinking. Teachers allowed pupils to do more activities and introduced

more materials into classroom, but hardly did these activities and materials challenge pupils to think harder. This shows that teachers have taken up the forms of SCA but not the substance, that is, they have changed their behaviors in some ways without adopting the underlying principles (Brodie et al., 2002). This is an important gap between the policy message on SCA and teachers’ understanding thereof.