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Monday, January 5, 2015

Activist-teacher not backing down, vows to keep fighting for teachers, students

Teacher Mohd Nor Izzat Mohd Johari believes in the School-Based Assessment system but feels it is not realistic to the needs of schools in Malaysia. – The Malaysian Insider pic by Seth Akmal, January 5, 2015.Teacher Mohd Nor Izzat Mohd Johari believes in the School-Based Assessment system but feels it is not realistic to the needs of schools in Malaysia. – The Malaysian Insider pic by Seth Akmal, January 5, 2015.Even after he was “punished” for leading a teacher’s pressure group to change the School-Based Assessment (SBA) system, Arts teacher Mohd Nor Izzat Mohd Johari is not backing down.
The 29-year old and fellow teachers are setting up a new group to continue bringing up issues in the school system which they believe will crop up this year under the SBA system.
Nor Izzat expects the next few years will see the group becoming busier given the problems that still plague the SBA system.
Nor Izzat made headlines last year for being that rare, active civil servant who came out to criticise a system that had put been in place by his superiors.
He was the face of a national teacher’s movement critical of weaknesses in the SBA system which was harming the education of thousands of secondary school students.
The Education Ministry’s haphazard implementation of the system is evident in the wide dissatisfaction with last year’s Form Three Assessment tests (PT3).
Through relentless pressure, Nor Izzat and his colleagues in the Suara Guru-Masyarakat Malaysia (SGMM) group eventually managed to get the Education Ministry to repair weaknesses in the SBA.
Nor Izzat paid a price for his leadership of the campaign. He believes it was the reason why he had been transferred to another school some 100km away from his family.
He feels that the backlash from the ministry also prevented him from registering the SGMM as an association.
So, Nor Izzat and his fellow activists are setting up a new group, called the Education and Intellect Club, known by its Bahasa Malaysia acronym as KIPM.
The group also comprises members who are non-teaching professionals.
“It won’t just be about education issues but also about the welfare of teachers and educators.”
These issues include teacher placement and distance from their families. Another point of contention is the gulf between administrators of education policy, such as ministry officials, and its implementers, who are mainly the teachers.
This gulf, Nor Izzat said, was why there is a lack of awareness at the ministry level about the problems in the SBA system.
First sign of trouble
The first time he knew there was something really wrong with the new school-based assessment (SBA) system was in July 2012.
That month, orders came down for all Form One teachers to start “inventing” grades for their students.
These orders came from the ministry and were relayed to all secondary school principals, said Nor Izzat.
Recounting his year-long campaign to change the SBA system and what prompted him to act knowing that it carried serious consequences for his career, he said the first sign of the problem was when he started in his posting as an arts teacher in Jerantut in July 2012.
The SBA and its new grading system, which uses six “bands”, had only been implemented in June that year.
From January to May, Form One students had been graded differently. But things changed drastically in June.
“All teachers were told to invent SBA grades for Form One. I had to do it for my Arts students as well,” claimed Nor Izzat, saying this involved about 100,000 teachers nationwide.
It was this order and several other processes in the SBA system which would eventually spark anger throughout the public school teaching fraternity nationwide towards it.
This anger would eventually be directed towards the Education Ministry and threaten to derail its efforts at fixing an education system that was criticised for producing robots instead of thinkers.
Surprise! Teachers actually like the SBA
The SBA system itself, Nor Izzat said, was not the problem.
In fact, he and a majority of teachers like the SBA. It allows teachers to achieve their number one aim – to impart knowledge to a student and see that student use that knowledge in everyday life.
“It allows you to ensure that no student gets left behind. If a student can’t pick something up, it gives them chances to improve. It also brings teachers and students closer together.”
The SBA also nurtures critical thinking through its higher order thinking skills.
This was a welcome change to a learning process that was becoming obsessed with rote memorisation and developing exam-taking skills.
The problem was the system used to implement the SBA among Form One students in 2012 without taking into account the reality of Malaysian schools.
For the SBA to really work such as in Finland, the teacher-student ratio has to be one teacher to a maximum of 15 students, Nor Izzat explained.
The average Malaysian teacher has three classes of 40 students each.
Teachers then had to fill sheaves of paper, because under the SBA system, student performance was assessed every day as there are very few exams which the students have to take.
Teachers were also told to key in grades online into a central database on a daily basis. But because the lines were frequently jammed during the day, many were waking up at 3am when network traffic was low.
These frustrations snowballed after more than 15 months. So that when SGMM started its Facebook campaign to abolish the SBA in October 2013, they managed to get 20,000 Likes in three months.
The deep anger at the SBA system led 100 teachers to join a SGMM rally against the SBA in February 22 last year, one of the rarest public shows of discontent by active civil servants towards the government.
The rally finally jolted the government into actually listening to the teachers.
On March 18, 2014, the Education Ministry announced a new and improved SBA system that cut down on paper work and allowed teachers to store grades offline.
A “weakness” called sympathy
Nor Izzat never really set out to be an activist or even a teacher.
“But I have this weakness, I sympathise with people. When I see other people have a problem, I want to help them solve it.”
This sense of sympathy turned into compassion and drove him to be a student activist at the Sultan Idris Teacher Training College (UPSI), where he helped bring up problems to the college’s administrators. It was also there that he and some other graduates started a group called the Malaysian Teaching Graduates Coalition or GGIM.
The group mounted a campaign to get the government to help about 5,000 teacher training graduates who were having trouble getting posted to public schools.
“We managed to meet with the Education Department and the Higher Education Minister at the time to resolve it,” said Nor Izzat.
The leaders of the GGIM eventually became teachers and the prime movers behind SGMM.
As to why teaching became the platform for his “sympathy for the problems of others”, Nor Izzat said it was probably because of his own experiences in secondary school.
“I had this teacher who told his students, 'Whoever cannot catch up, go sit at the back of the class. Whoever wants to learn, come and sit in front.'
“When you do that, kids who are slow learners, who come from difficult backgrounds, will be even more disheartened. They move to the back of class and eventually cut class altogether.”
The experience carved itself into his mind. Nor Izzat was also not a straight As student eventhough he wanted to learn.
“This is why I want to help these kids. Kids who get left behind. I have been there. I’ve seen how teachers can discriminate between kids and I don’t want kids today to go through what I did.”
Nor Izzat has taken his punishment in stride. He drives more than 100km every day from Jerantut, where his old posting was, to Bera.
“In any struggle, there has to always be some sacrifice. But I know that they (administrators in the ministry) know what I said is true. They know it but are afraid to admit it.”
- TMI

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