PERSPECTIVE | CVIF-Dynamic Learning Program Can Help Address Education Crisis

The opening of our new academic year faces the same old challenges that have been plaguing schools for decades. And this time, because of the changing educational landscape, it has become worse.

An interview with theoretical physicist Dr. Christopher Bernido, president of the Central Visayan Institute Foundation (CVIF) in Jagna, Bohol, confirms that problems such as the lack of qualified teachers, lack of classrooms, lack of textbooks, lack of equipment still persist.

Earlier this year, Dr. Bernido, who is an Academician-member of the National Academy of Science and Technology, presented CVIF-Dynamic Learning Program (CVIF-DLP) in the Academy of Science in Lisbon, Portugal. He shared that Australia, Canada and the USA are continuously implementing a massive recruitment of teachers from developing countries like the Philippines. Another first world nation, Germany, lacks 30,000 teachers and this need is projected to reach 80,000 by 2030, which is compounded by the migration of Ukrainians with their children.
While others recommend resource intensive interventions to address the education crisis in our country, Dr. Bernido and his late wife, Dr. Maria Victoria Carpio-Bernido, offer CVIF-DLP whose hallmark is its ability to quickly, almost instantaneously, and cost-efficiently bypass these problems.

The couple who are Filipino physicist-educators were among the recipients of the 2010 Ramon Magsaysay Awards, for their commitment to both science and nation, ensuring innovative, low-cost, and effective basic education even under the Philippine conditions of poverty.

Developing fertile learner disposition

The CVIF-DLP learning pedagogy is anchored on four non-negotiable components:

1. Parallel Learning Classes, which require only one expert teacher and teacher-facilitators to handle multiple classes per period, allow students to explore on their own. It automatically limits teacher intervention to only zero percent to 20 percent of the period.

Dr. Christpher Bernido, who is also founding director of the Jagna Research Center for Theoretical Physics, explained the paradigm shift from the traditional way where teachers have to lecture to impart a new topic, to the CVIF-DLP way, where students write to acquire new knowledge, by copying from the Learning Activity Sheets (LAS) that contain the learning target, concept digest, illustrations and questions.

“In fact, we say that an ideal LAS is an activity where zero teacher intervention is needed. No more teacher intervention,” highlighted Dr. Bernido while quoting the philosophy of Maria Montessori which addresses very young children, “if only I could tie down the hands of my teachers because they keep on intervening while learning is ongoing.”

He further explained the analogy in other areas of endeavour like Medicine where patients confined in a hospital, who are still healing, do not require the presence of doctors 24/7. In the same manner, students who are still learning do not require teacher intervention.

2. Activity-Based Learning by Doing advocates writing and partially solves our educational system’s big problem of non-readers. The CVIF school starts from Grade 7 with readers and non-readers alike. By the time they reach Grade 9 and take the National Career Assessment Exam (NCAE) given by the government, none of the examinees score below average.

Dr. Bernido’s hypothesis is that CVIF-DLP’s rigorous writing practice helped non-readers and challenged learners gradually understand the meaning of the symbols they write and slowly learn how to read.

“The teacher is not dominant, it’s independent learning, but the peer tutoring is very, very strong inside the classroom. They could actually consult each other while learning is ongoing during the writing of the LAS. And then later on they will have the quizzes and the exams wherein they have to do things independently,” added Dr. Bernido, who was former director and professor of the National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines Diliman.

The writing component of CVIF-DLP was implemented in 2002 and more than a decade later scientific evidence from studies by Harvard University, University of California, Los Angeles and Princeton University revealed copying by handwriting is more superior than typing via laptop, sort of validating the writing component of the said pedagogy.

As bonus, students do not need textbooks. In effect, they are making their own textbooks through the hourly and daily accumulation of the Learning Activity Sheets that they copy.

Significant learning gains

With In-School Comprehensive Portfolio and Strategic Rest completing the non-negotiable components, the CVIF-Dynamic Learning Program showcases remarkable performance indicators.

From Dr. Bernido’s presentation, it can be seen that across the spectrum since 2006, majority of CVIF students in the municipality of Jagna, located some 63 kilometers to the nearest city, lean toward “excellent” as reflected by their scores in standardized tests such as the government’s NCAE and National Secondary Assessment Test. Since 2010 until today, no CVIF student is rated “poor.”

Tracking the impact of CVIF-DLP to the whole Province of Bohol with162 public high schools, from 2011 to 2014 there was a steady increase of National Achievement Test scores from 57.58 percent, 58.62 percent to 64.35 percent while the opposite could be observed in the failure rate from 5.70 percent, 3.73 percent to 2.13 percent.

For Davao Christian High School located in the third largest city in the Philippines, Davao City, a CVIF-DLP implementer since 2005, their School Year 2016-2017 NCAE Test scores in Mathematical Ability showed that more than half of their examinees belong to the top one percent in the country. Likewise, 77 percent of their students belongs to the top two percent in the country.

Another long-time CVIF-DLP implementer, Stella Maris College in a highly dense commercial area of Quezon City, shared 65.2 percent of their NCAE 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 examinees belong to the top 10 percent in the country based on data from a two-year Comparative General Scholastic Aptitude Chart.

Only after one year of implementation from School Year 2012 to 2013, the basic education department of the University of the East in Manila experienced the same positive trend where most of their students were leaning toward “excellent” rate in English, Science and Math.

More information at https://www.facebook.com/DynamicLearningProgram and https://www.youtube.com/@CVIFDynamicLearningProgram.

“It has been proven to be effective even during disasters, typhoons, war in Zamboanga and so on,” said Dr. Bernido while sharing that CVIF-DLP implementing schools are spread across a wide spectrum, with small schools with only one section per year level and are located in a remote area, and big schools located in cities.

“It is applicable regardless the setting and economic income of the school,” said Dr. Bernido, who is known in the international scientific community as conference convenor, speaker, journal referee, reviewer, and editorial board member.

Coalition of the willing

At the beginning of the pandemic, PLDT, Smart Communications and PLDT-Smart Foundation, which is the main private sector group supporter and advocate of CVIF-DLP, announced that the Department of Education adopted the learning pedagogy. The LAS, which its network of certified program ambassadors and trainers helped create, can be accessed in the government agency’s online learning portal.

“All our Learning Activity Sheets are available online. You can download it for free. These are LAS from Grade 7 to 12 for all subjects. Our website is cvifbohol.com, and click the E-Learning tab and you can download all the LAS if you are interested,” Dr. Bernido said.

For those who want to implement CVIF-DLP, school administrators are advised to

understand the philosophy and to understand deeply the program.

“Why,” Dr. Bernido pointed out “the teachers will complain, the students will complain, and maybe the parents will complain. But all these complaints will die down simply because of performance indicators. If you’re coming from traditional, it’s difficult to go to CVIF-DLP, but once you’re in CVIF-DLP, it’s also difficult to go back. But the administrator especially in the beginning has to understand the philosophy.”

The essence of education

CVIF-DLP is proof that a lack in resources is no longer an excuse to not be able to provide quality education for learners.

More importantly, this learning pedagogy teaches us that to be able to achieve something, there has to be a certain amount of sacrifice, and that character is a foundation and an enabler of any sustainable transformation in our society.

In one of her lectures, Dr. Maria Victoria Carpio-Bernido shared this wisdom to the future of our nation: "Kahit magaling kayo pero kung ang inyong mga ugali at pakikitungo sa kapwa at sa ating bayan ay hindi maganda, balewala lahat iyan."